Lespedeza bicolor (bicolor lespedeza)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lespedeza bicolor, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. a Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-27 / obs. 191202053

Lespedeza bicolor, photographed by Daniel Washburn — fig. b Daniel Washburn, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 164071697

Lespedeza bicolor, photographed by mami_t_t — fig. c mami_t_t, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 158713232

Lespedeza bicolor, photographed by Nina Filippova — fig. e Nina Filippova, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 157754232

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 13 botanical countries

Native distribution of Lespedeza bicolor, 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
Amur	AMU	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China North-Central	CHN
China Southeast	CHS
Chita	CTA
Inner Mongolia	CHI
Japan	JAP
Khabarovsk	KHA
Korea	KOR
Kuril Is.	KUR
Manchuria	CHM
Mongolia	MON
Primorye	PRM
Sakhalin	SAK

Not drawn on the map: Kuril Is.. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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.

Flowering 183 in flower of 231 examined

71%

94%

100%

86%

40%

Proportion of examined Lespedeza bicolor in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	0	0	too few examined
May	0	12	0%	0% to 24%
Jun	17	24	71%	51% to 85%
Jul	29	31	94%	79% to 98%
Aug	73	73	100%	95% to 100%
Sep	51	59	86%	75% to 93%
Oct	12	30	40%	25% to 58%
Nov	1	2	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Lespedeza bicolor observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 183 of 231 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 6 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 2,053 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-21.0 °C	-1.4 °C	4.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.6 °C	29.2 °C	32.3 °C
Annual rainfall	664 mm	1,203 mm	1,740 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	29 mm	249 mm	353 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 2,053 research-grade observations of Lespedeza bicolor 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. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 29 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.

Desmodium penduliflorum Oudem.
Lespedeza bicolor f. acutifolia Matsum.
Lespedeza bicolor f. alba (Bean) Ohwi
Lespedeza bicolor f. albiflora Tatew.
Lespedeza bicolor f. grandifolia Matsum.
Lespedeza bicolor f. nakaiana Murata
Lespedeza bicolor f. niveoflora S.Akiyama & H.Ohba
Lespedeza bicolor f. parvifolia Matsum.
Lespedeza bicolor f. patens Nakai ex Hatus.
Lespedeza bicolor f. pendula S.L.Tung & Z.Lu
Lespedeza bicolor f. rosea (Nakai) S.Akiyama & H.Ohba
Lespedeza bicolor f. tomentella Hatus.
Lespedeza bicolor var. alba Bean
Lespedeza bicolor var. bicolor
Lespedeza bicolor var. japonica Nakai
Lespedeza bicolor var. nana Nakai
Lespedeza bicolor var. sericea Nakai
Lespedeza homoloba f. rosea Nakai
Lespedeza ionocalyx Nakai
Lespedeza melanantha f. rosea Nakai
Lespedeza melanantha var. longifolia Uyeki
Lespedeza patentibicolor T.B.Lee
Lespedeza penduliflora (Oudem.) Nakai
Lespedeza penduliflora subsp. cathayana P.S.Hsu

and 5 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.