Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations
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
- Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
- Accession
- K002930672
- Filed as
- Iris ensata Thunb.
- Det. by
- W.R.D.
- Collected
- James, H.E.M. 1886-05-01
- Origin
- CN
- 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 12 botanical countries
| Region | TDWG code | Continent |
|---|---|---|
| Amur | AMU | ASIA-TEMPERATE |
| China North-Central | CHN | |
| China Southeast | CHS | |
| Inner Mongolia | CHI | |
| Japan | JAP | |
| Kazakhstan | KAZ | |
| Khabarovsk | KHA | |
| Korea | KOR | |
| Manchuria | CHM | |
| Primorye | PRM | |
| Yakutiya | YAK | |
| Assam | ASS | ASIA-TROPICAL |
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 342 observations
| Condition | 5th percentile | Median | 95th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coldest month, mean daily low | -28.3 °C | -11.4 °C | 0.7 °C |
| Warmest month, mean daily high | 18.6 °C | 24.4 °C | 29.5 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 592 mm | 1,104 mm | 2,494 mm |
| Rainfall in the driest quarter | 29 mm | 121 mm | 281 mm |
It is found where winters are arctic. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 342 research-grade observations of Iris ensata 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 6 recorded
Selections of Iris ensata 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.
- ‘Fancy’’ Q110767421
- ‘ʽAzumakagami’’ Q110767422
- ‘ʽBlue Beauty’’ Q110767423
- ‘ʽGreywoods Gypsy Plumes’’ Q110767424
- ‘ʽGreywoods Mulberry Cascade’’ Q110767425
- ‘ʽVariegata’’ Q110767426
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 16 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.
- Iris ensata f. alba Y.N.Lee
- Iris ensata var. hortensis (Maxim.) Makino & Nemoto
- Iris ensata var. spontanea (Makino) Nakai ex Makino & Nemoto
- Iris graminea Thunb.
- Iris kaempferi Siebold ex Lem.
- Iris kaempferi unranked blumei Siebold ex Mater
- Iris kaempferi var. hortensis (Maxim.) Makino
- Iris kaempferi var. lemoinei Siebold ex Mater
- Iris kaempferi var. miquelii Siebold ex Mater
- Iris kaempferi var. oudemansii Siebold ex Mater
- Iris kaempferi var. seraph W.Bull ex Mast.
- Iris kaempferi var. spontanea Makino
- Iris laevigata var. hortensis Maxim.
- Iris laevigata var. kaempferi (Siebold ex Lem.) Maxim.
- Iris smithii Lynch
- Limniris ensata (Thunb.) Rodion.
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.