Farfugium japonicum(L.) Kitam.

Leopard plant

WFO wfo-0000134933 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Farfugium japonicum, photographed by Luka S. (someplant)
fig. a Luka S. (someplant), CC0 1.0 / 2022-06-13 / obs. 205756610

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
39682
Filed as
Farfugium japonicum (L.) Kitam.
Det. by
T. M. Koyama 1995-01-01
Collected
C. Wright
Origin
JP
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 7 botanical countries

Regions where Farfugium japonicum is native: China South-Central, China Southeast, Japan, Korea, Nansei-shoto, Ogasawara-shoto, Taiwan China South-CentralChina SoutheastJapanTaiwan KoreaNansei-shoto
Native distribution of Farfugium japonicum, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
China South-Central CHC ASIA-TEMPERATE
China Southeast CHS
Japan JAP
Korea KOR
Nansei-shoto NNS
Ogasawara-shoto OGA
Taiwan TAI

Not drawn on the map: Ogasawara-shoto. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 358 in flower of 425 examined

Proportion of examined Farfugium japonicum in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 32 38 84% 70% to 93%
Feb 7 12 58% 32% to 81%
Mar 6 10 60% 31% to 83%
Apr 2 13 15% 4% to 42%
May 4 9 44% 19% to 73%
Jun 2 4 too few examined
Jul 4 10 40% 17% to 69%
Aug 1 4 too few examined
Sep 12 15 80% 55% to 93%
Oct 41 48 85% 73% to 93%
Nov 160 166 96% 92% to 98%
Dec 87 96 91% 83% to 95%

Peak flowering in Nov. Each bar is the share of Farfugium japonicum observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 358 of 425 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 2 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,399 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -1.2 °C 3.8 °C 16.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 23.5 °C 28.9 °C 31.7 °C
Annual rainfall 1,231 mm 1,535 mm 3,999 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 113 mm 187 mm 755 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,399 research-grade observations of Farfugium japonicum that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 19 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Arnica tussilaginea Burm.f.
  • Farfugium grande Lindl.
  • Farfugium japonicum f. japonicum
  • Farfugium japonicum f. luteofuscus Tawada
  • Farfugium japonicum var. japonicum
  • Farfugium kaempferi Benth.
  • Farfugium luchuense (Masam.) Kitam.
  • Farfugium tussilagineum (Burm.) Kitam.
  • Farfugium tussilagineum var. formosanum (Hayata) Kitam.
  • Ligularia gigantea Siebold & Zucc.
  • Ligularia kaempferi Siebold & Zucc.
  • Ligularia nokozanensis Yamam.
  • Ligularia tussilaginea (Burm.f.) Makino
  • Ligularia tussilaginea var. formosana Hayata
  • Ligularia tussilaginea var. luchuensis Masam.
  • Ligularia tussilaginea var. tussilaginea
  • Senecio japonicus Less.
  • Senecio kaempferi DC.
  • Tussilago japonica L.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.