Hamamelis vernalisSarg.

Ozark witchhazel

WFO wfo-0000715295 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Hamamelis vernalis, photographed by Evelyn Davis
fig. a Evelyn Davis, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-01-14 / obs. 110130076

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 3 botanical countries

Regions where Hamamelis vernalis is native: Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma ArkansasMissouriOklahoma
Native distribution of Hamamelis vernalis, 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
Arkansas ARK NORTHERN AMERICA
Missouri MSO
Oklahoma OKL

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 234 examined

Proportion of examined Hamamelis vernalis in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 75 76 99% 93% to 100%
Feb 89 90 99% 94% to 100%
Mar 38 38 100% 91% to 100%
Apr 3 4 too few examined
May 0 3 too few examined
Jun 0 3 too few examined
Jul 0 2 too few examined
Aug 0 1 too few examined
Sep 0 1 too few examined
Oct 0 3 too few examined
Nov 1 2 too few examined
Dec 10 11 91% 62% to 98%

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Hamamelis vernalis 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 234 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 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 444 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -6.1 °C -1.6 °C 1.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 27.9 °C 31.2 °C 32.9 °C
Annual rainfall 1,033 mm 1,276 mm 1,489 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 184 mm 255 mm 308 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 444 research-grade observations of Hamamelis vernalis 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 3 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.

  • Hamamelis vernalis f. carnea Rehder
  • Hamamelis vernalis f. tomentella Rehder
  • Hamamelis vernalis var. tomentella (Rehder) E.J.Palmer

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.