Geranium erianthum (woolly geranium)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Geranium erianthum, photographed by Alexandria 'Alex' Wenninger — fig. a Alexandria 'Alex' Wenninger, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205650572

Geranium erianthum, photographed by 66dodge — fig. d 66dodge, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 159125511

Geranium erianthum, photographed by Syd Cannings — fig. e Syd Cannings, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 152837621

Geranium erianthum, photographed by Jason Grant — fig. g Jason Grant, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 143570375

Geranium erianthum, photographed by Roger Rittmaster — fig. h Roger Rittmaster, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 142541922

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.

Native range 15 botanical countries

Native distribution of Geranium erianthum, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Amur	AMU	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Chita	CTA
Japan	JAP
Kamchatka	KAM
Khabarovsk	KHA
Kuril Is.	KUR
Magadan	MAG
Manchuria	CHM
Primorye	PRM
Sakhalin	SAK
Yakutiya	YAK
Alaska	ASK	NORTHERN AMERICA
Aleutian Is.	ALU
British Columbia	BRC
Yukon	YUK

Not drawn on the map: Kuril Is., Aleutian Is.. We hold no public-domain boundary for these regions, so they are 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 200 in flower of 229 examined

15%

90%

97%

81%

92%

Proportion of examined Geranium erianthum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	1	1	too few examined
Mar	1	1	too few examined
Apr	0	1	too few examined
May	2	13	15%	4% to 42%
Jun	79	88	90%	82% to 95%
Jul	92	95	97%	91% to 99%
Aug	13	16	81%	57% to 93%
Sep	11	12	92%	65% to 99%
Oct	1	1	too few examined
Nov	0	1	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Geranium erianthum 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. 200 of 229 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 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 2,020 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-21.5 °C	-11.8 °C	-2.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	11.8 °C	15.8 °C	20.5 °C
Annual rainfall	612 mm	1,222 mm	3,632 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	68 mm	168 mm	526 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 2,020 research-grade observations of Geranium erianthum 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 18 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.

Geranium elatum (Maxim.) R.Knuth
Geranium erianthum f. albiflora Kom.
Geranium erianthum f. alpestre Kom.
Geranium erianthum f. alpestris Kom.
Geranium erianthum f. commune Kom.
Geranium erianthum f. communis Kom.
Geranium erianthum f. leucanthum Takeda
Geranium erianthum f. pallescens Nakai
Geranium erianthum var. angustifolium Miyabe & Tatew.
Geranium erianthum var. elatum Maxim.
Geranium eriostemon var. orientale Maxim.
Geranium gorbizense Aedo & Muñoz Garm.
Geranium maculatum Ledeb. ex R.Knuth
Geranium orientale (Maxim.) Freyn
Geranium pratense f. leucanthum B.Boivin
Geranium pratense var. erianthum (DC.) B.Boivin
Geranium subumbelliforme R.Knuth
Geranium subumbelliforrme R.Knuth

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.