Juniperus rigidaSiebold & Zucc.

Needle JuniperTemple Junipertemple juniper

WFO wfo-0000354956 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 6 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 6 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.

Juniperus rigida, photographed by harum.koh
fig. a harum.koh, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2015-10-24 / obs. 2587687

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 9 botanical countries

Regions where Juniperus rigida is native: China North-Central, Inner Mongolia, Japan, Korea, Manchuria, Nansei-shoto, Primorye, Qinghai, Sakhalin China North-CentralInner MongoliaJapanManchuriaPrimoryeQinghaiSakhalin KoreaNansei-shoto
Native distribution of Juniperus rigida, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
China North-Central CHN ASIA-TEMPERATE
Inner Mongolia CHI
Japan JAP
Korea KOR
Manchuria CHM
Nansei-shoto NNS
Primorye PRM
Qinghai CHQ
Sakhalin SAK

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 98 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -22.5 °C -9.2 °C 2.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 21.6 °C 25.9 °C 30.0 °C
Annual rainfall 531 mm 1,217 mm 2,019 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 13 mm 77 mm 235 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 98 research-grade observations of Juniperus rigida 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 20 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.

  • Juniperus arborea Budischtschew ex Trautv.
  • Juniperus communis Thunb.
  • Juniperus conferta Parl.
  • Juniperus conferta var. pseudorigida Makino
  • Juniperus coreana Nakai
  • Juniperus juniperus subsp. litoralis (Maxim.) Urussov
  • Juniperus litoralis Maxim.
  • Juniperus rigida f. modesta (Nakai) Y.C.Zhu
  • Juniperus rigida subsp. litoralis Urussov
  • Juniperus rigida subsp. pseudorigida (Makino) Kitam.
  • Juniperus rigida var. cispidatus Pshenn.
  • Juniperus rigida var. conferta (Parl.) Patschke
  • Juniperus rigida var. coreana (Nakai) M.Kim
  • Juniperus rigida var. hibernica Pshenn.
  • Juniperus rigida var. litoralis (Urussov) Kozhevnikova
  • Juniperus rigida var. pendula Pshenn.
  • Juniperus rigida var. piramidalis Pshenn.
  • Juniperus seoulensis Nakai
  • Juniperus utilis Koidz.
  • Juniperus utilis var. modesta Nakai

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.