Hydrangea serrata (mountain hydrangea, tea of heaven)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 7 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 7 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Hydrangea serrata, photographed by Marco Mussita — fig. a Marco Mussita, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-06-16 / obs. 79086018

Hydrangea serrata, photographed by harum.koh — fig. b harum.koh, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 20836999

Hydrangea serrata, photographed by Kim, Hyun-tae — fig. d Kim, Hyun-tae, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 4331133

Hydrangea serrata, photographed by Yoshimasa Uchiyama — fig. g Yoshimasa Uchiyama, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 59556380

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 2 botanical countries

Native distribution of Hydrangea serrata, 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

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 167 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-10.2 °C	-4.2 °C	3.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.2 °C	26.3 °C	29.6 °C
Annual rainfall	1,296 mm	1,809 mm	2,955 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	64 mm	190 mm	536 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 167 research-grade observations of Hydrangea serrata 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.

Also published as 89 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.

Hortensia cuspidata (Thunb.) H.Ohba & S.Akiyama
Hortensia cuspidata f. yesoensis (Koidz.) H.Ohba & S.Akiyama
Hortensia japonica (Siebold) H.Ohba & S.Akiyama
Hortensia serrata (Thunb.) H.Ohba & S.Akiyama
Hortensia serrata f. belladonna (Kitam.) H.Ohba & S.Akiyama
Hortensia serrata f. plenidecuris H.Ohba & S.Akiyama
Hortensia serrata f. prolifera (Regel) H.Ohba & S.Akiyama
Hortensia serrata var. angustata (Franch. & Sav.) H.Ohba & S.Akiyama
Hortensia serrata var. thunbergii H.Ohba & S.Akiyama
Hydrangea acuminata var. buergeri Siebold & Zucc.
Hydrangea belzonii Siebold & Zucc.
Hydrangea buergeri Siebold & Zucc.
Hydrangea coreana Nakai
Hydrangea cuspidata (Thunb.) Makino
Hydrangea cuspidata Miq.
Hydrangea cyanea G.W.Johnson & R.Hogg
Hydrangea hortensia var. belzonii (Siebold & Zucc.) Maxim.
Hydrangea hortensia var. caerulea (Hook.) K.Koch
Hydrangea hortensia var. japonica (Siebold) Maxim.
Hydrangea hortensia var. stellata Maxim.
Hydrangea hortensis var. angustata Franch. & Sav.
Hydrangea hortensis var. lindleyana G.Nicholson
Hydrangea hortensis var. pubescens Franch. & Sav.
Hydrangea hortensis var. rosalba (Van Houtte) Rehder

and 65 more.

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.