Juniperus phoenicea (Phoenician Juniper)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Juniperus phoenicea, photographed by Marc Riera — fig. a Marc Riera, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-11 / obs. 187546266

Juniperus phoenicea, photographed by Olivier Argagnon — fig. b Olivier Argagnon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 180949748

Juniperus phoenicea, photographed by Santiago Martín-Bravo — fig. c Santiago Martín-Bravo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172052501

Juniperus phoenicea, photographed by David Delon — fig. d David Delon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171305057

Juniperus phoenicea, photographed by Quentin Groom — fig. e Quentin Groom, CC0 1.0 / obs. 167608207

Juniperus phoenicea, photographed by Yves Bas — fig. g Yves Bas, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 112126214

Juniperus phoenicea, photographed by Thibaud Godon — fig. h Thibaud Godon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 105300603

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: K000089462
Filed as: Juniperus phoenicea L.
Det. by: Farjon, A.
Collected: Pampanini, R.; Pichi-Sermolli, R.E.G. 1934-05-02
Origin: LY
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 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Juniperus phoenicea, 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
Baleares	BAL	EUROPE
France	FRA
Italy	ITA
Sardegna	SAR
Spain	SPA

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 1,566 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-2.4 °C	0.7 °C	5.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.8 °C	27.8 °C	30.9 °C
Annual rainfall	394 mm	720 mm	1,162 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	40 mm	103 mm	182 mm

It is found where winters bring light 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 1,566 research-grade observations of Juniperus phoenicea 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 22 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.

Cupressus devoniana Beissn.
Cupressus tetragona Humb. & Bonpl. ex Carrière
Juniperus bacciformis Carrière
Juniperus divaricata Carrière
Juniperus formosa Carrière
Juniperus langoldiana Gordon
Juniperus malacocarpa Carrière
Juniperus myosuros Sénécl.
Juniperus myurus Beissn.
Juniperus phoenicea f. megalocarpa Maire
Juniperus phoenicea var. lobelii Guss.
Juniperus phoenicea var. lycia (L.) St.-Lag.
Juniperus phoenicea var. malacocarpa Endl.
Juniperus phoenicea var. prostrata Willk.
Juniperus phoenicea var. pyramidalis Carrière
Juniperus phoenicea var. sclerocarpa Endl.
Juniperus terminalis Salisb.
Juniperus tetragona Moench
Sabina bacciformis (Carrière) Antoine
Sabina lycia (L.) Antoine
Sabina phoenicea (L.) Antoine
Sabinella phoenicea (L.) Nakai

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.