Halesia carolinaL.

Carolina silverbell

WFO wfo-0000714617 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Halesia carolina, photographed by Lisa Wiencek Gerbec
fig. a Lisa Wiencek Gerbec, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-08 / obs. 196140315

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

Regions where Halesia carolina is native: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia AlabamaArkansasFloridaGeorgiaIllinoisIndianaKentuckyLouisianaMississippiNorth CarolinaOklahomaSouth CarolinaTennesseeVirginiaWest Virginia
Native distribution of Halesia carolina, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
Arkansas ARK
Florida FLA
Georgia GEO
Illinois ILL
Indiana INI
Kentucky KTY
Louisiana LOU
Mississippi MSI
North Carolina NCA
Oklahoma OKL
South Carolina SCA
Tennessee TEN
Virginia VRG
West Virginia WVA

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 83 in flower of 109 examined

Proportion of examined Halesia carolina in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 3 5 60% 23% to 88%
Mar 15 16 94% 72% to 99%
Apr 50 52 96% 87% to 99%
May 15 16 94% 72% to 99%
Jun 0 9 0% 0% to 30%
Jul 0 4 too few examined
Aug 0 3 too few examined
Sep 0 2 too few examined
Oct 0 1 too few examined
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 0 1 too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Halesia carolina 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. 83 of 109 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 367 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -6.6 °C 0.2 °C 7.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.9 °C 30.8 °C 32.3 °C
Annual rainfall 1,026 mm 1,304 mm 1,609 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 202 mm 274 mm 341 mm

It is found where winters bring hard 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 367 research-grade observations of Halesia carolina 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 37 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.

  • Carlomohria carolina (L.) Greene
  • Carlomohria parviflora (Michx.) Greene
  • Halesia carolina f. dialypetala (Rehder) C.K.Schneid.
  • Halesia carolina subsp. monticola (Rehder) A.E.Murray
  • Halesia carolina subsp. parviflora (Michx.) A.E.Murray
  • Halesia carolina var. glabrescens (Lange) Perkins
  • Halesia carolina var. laevigata (Schelle) Perkins
  • Halesia carolina var. meehanii Perkins
  • Halesia carolina var. mollis (Lange) Perkins
  • Halesia carolina var. monticola Rehder
  • Halesia carolina var. parviflora (Michx.) A.E.Murray
  • Halesia meehanii (Sarg.) Meehan ex Prain
  • Halesia monticola (Rehder) Sarg.
  • Halesia monticola f. rosea Sarg.
  • Halesia monticola var. rosea (Sarg.) Gall.
  • Halesia monticola var. vestita Sarg.
  • Halesia parviflora Michx.
  • Halesia stenocarpa K.Koch
  • Halesia tetraptera J.Ellis
  • Halesia tetraptera f. dialypetala Rehder
  • Halesia tetraptera f. stenocarpa (K.Koch) Voss
  • Halesia tetraptera var. carnea Mouill.
  • Halesia tetraptera var. glabrescens Lange
  • Halesia tetraptera var. grandifolia Lavallée

and 13 more.

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.