Laburnum alpinum (Alpine Laburnum)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Laburnum alpinum, photographed by Marco Mussita — fig. a Marco Mussita, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-10 / obs. 205786678

Laburnum alpinum, photographed by Jens-Christian Svenning — fig. c Jens-Christian Svenning, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201509894

Laburnum alpinum, photographed by Tommy Andriollo — fig. f Tommy Andriollo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 80065793

Laburnum alpinum, photographed by Fabien Piednoir — fig. h Fabien Piednoir, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 4123836

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 8 botanical countries

Native distribution of Laburnum alpinum, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Austria	AUT
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
France	FRA
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Switzerland	SWI

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 320 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-14.0 °C	-7.9 °C	-2.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	16.3 °C	19.9 °C	24.4 °C
Annual rainfall	881 mm	1,541 mm	2,511 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	123 mm	221 mm	403 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 320 research-grade observations of Laburnum alpinum 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 14 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.

Cytisus alpinus Loudon
Cytisus alpinus Mill.
Cytisus alpinus var. pendulus Loudon
Cytisus alpinus var. pilosus Wettst.
Cytisus angustifolius Moench
Cytisus laburnum subsp. alpinus (Mill.) Bonnier & Layens
Genista alpina (Mill.) Scheele
Laburnum alpinum f. autumnale (Bean) Rehder
Laburnum alpinum f. pendulum (Loudon) Zabel
Laburnum alpinum var. autumnale Bean
Laburnum alpinum var. pendulum (Loudon) G.Kirchn.
Laburnum alpinum var. pilosum (Wettst.) Koehne
Laburnum biflorum G.Nicholson
Spartium alpinum Host ex Steud.

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.