Ficus pumila (Creeping Fig)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ficus pumila, photographed by Luka S. (someplant) — fig. a Luka S. (someplant), CC0 1.0 / 2022-06-13 / obs. 205758812

Ficus pumila, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. b Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 204665097

Ficus pumila, photographed by Sawyer Baran — fig. c Sawyer Baran, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199480068

Ficus pumila, photographed by 葉子 — fig. d 葉子, CC0 1.0 / obs. 189387144

Ficus pumila, photographed by 四角銅鑼 — fig. g 四角銅鑼, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 178516602

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: 88348
Filed as: Ficus pumila L.
Det. by: E. Gibney 1997-01-01
Collected: G. J. Ray 1997-09-01
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 11 botanical countries

Native distribution of Ficus pumila, 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
China North-Central	CHN	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China South-Central	CHC
China Southeast	CHS
Japan	JAP
Korea	KOR
Nansei-shoto	NNS
Ogasawara-shoto	OGA
Taiwan	TAI
Laos	LAO	ASIA-TROPICAL
Myanmar	MYA
Vietnam	VIE

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 2,031 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	3.6 °C	12.3 °C	21.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.1 °C	29.9 °C	33.6 °C
Annual rainfall	906 mm	2,107 mm	4,073 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	61 mm	172 mm	629 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 2,031 research-grade observations of Ficus pumila 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.

Named cultivars 1 recorded

Selections of Ficus pumila that somebody named and propagated. A cultivar is not a botanical taxon: it is governed by the cultivated-plant code rather than the botanical one, so it appears in no taxonomic backbone, and it has no native range and no wild population of its own. These get no page here, because a cultivar has no photographs, no range and no flowering data of its own, and a page with none of those is not a page.

‘ʽVariegata’’ Q110766710

From Wikidata (CC0), joined to this species on its World Flora Online identifier, so the link to the parent is exact rather than a name match. This list is what is recorded in an openly licensed register; it is not every cultivar that exists, and for many genera it is not close. Why, and how far short it falls.

Also published as 14 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.

Ficus awkeotsang Makino
Ficus hanceana Maxim.
Ficus longipedicellata H.Perrier
Ficus nagayamai Yamam.
Ficus pumila var. lutchuensis Koidz.
Ficus pumila var. pumila
Ficus repens var. lutchuensis Koidz.
Ficus scandens Lam.
Ficus stipulata Thunb.
Ficus stipulata Lem.
Ficus vestita Desf.
Plagiostigma pumila (L.) Zucc.
Urostigma scandens Liebm.
Varinga repens Raf.

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.