Fatsia japonica (Fatsia)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Fatsia japonica, photographed by Luka S. (someplant) — fig. a Luka S. (someplant), CC0 1.0 / 2022-06-05 / obs. 203478256

Fatsia japonica, photographed by Jon Sullivan — fig. b Jon Sullivan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195822568

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: 42294
Filed as: Fatsia japonica (Thunb.) Decne. & Planch.
Det. by: J. B. Nelson 1994-01-01
Collected: J. B. Nelson 1994-11-26
Origin: US
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 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Fatsia japonica, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Japan	JAP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Korea	KOR
Nansei-shoto	NNS

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 216 in flower of 445 examined

67%

32%

21%

62%

65%

34%

11%

65%

63%

Proportion of examined Fatsia japonica in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	16	24	67%	47% to 82%
Feb	6	19	32%	15% to 54%
Mar	6	28	21%	10% to 40%
Apr	60	97	62%	52% to 71%
May	28	43	65%	50% to 78%
Jun	12	35	34%	21% to 51%
Jul	1	17	6%	1% to 27%
Aug	1	15	7%	1% to 30%
Sep	0	17	0%	0% to 18%
Oct	2	19	11%	3% to 31%
Nov	44	68	65%	53% to 75%
Dec	40	63	63%	51% to 74%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Fatsia japonica 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. 216 of 445 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 1,999 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-1.5 °C	2.7 °C	9.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	17.6 °C	27.1 °C	31.3 °C
Annual rainfall	658 mm	1,444 mm	2,555 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	129 mm	179 mm	394 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 1,999 research-grade observations of Fatsia japonica 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 9 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.

Aralia brownii André
Aralia japonica Thunb.
Aralia sieboldii K.Koch
Aralia sieboldii unranked moseri J.R.Duncan & V.C.Davies
Aralia sieboldii var. variegata J.Dix
Dimorphanthus japonicus (Thunb.) Endl.
Echinopanax japonicus (Thunb.) Kuntze
Fatsia japonica var. liukiuensis Hatus. ex H.Ohba
Fatsia japonica var. lobulata Makino

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.