Ligustrum obtusifoliumSiebold & Zucc.

border privet

WFO wfo-0000816339 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ligustrum obtusifolium, photographed by Ryan Sorrells
fig. a Ryan Sorrells, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205835551

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
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
02377807
Filed as
Ligustrum obtusifolium Siebold & Zucc.
Det. by
D. E. Atha 2015-01-01
Collected
M. H. Nee 2011-06-30
Origin
US
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

Regions where Ligustrum obtusifolium is native: China North-Central, China Southeast, Japan, Korea, Manchuria China North-CentralChina SoutheastJapanManchuria Korea
Native distribution of Ligustrum obtusifolium, 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
China Southeast CHS
Japan JAP
Korea KOR
Manchuria CHM

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 1,230 in flower of 5,461 examined

Proportion of examined Ligustrum obtusifolium in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 178 0% 0% to 2%
Feb 1 145 1% 0% to 4%
Mar 1 232 0% 0% to 2%
Apr 4 504 1% 0% to 2%
May 294 880 33% 30% to 37%
Jun 901 1302 69% 67% to 72%
Jul 28 262 11% 8% to 15%
Aug 0 344 0% 0% to 1%
Sep 1 547 0% 0% to 1%
Oct 0 534 0% 0% to 1%
Nov 0 347 0% 0% to 1%
Dec 0 186 0% 0% to 2%

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Ligustrum obtusifolium 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. 1,230 of 5,461 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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.

When it blooms, where you are 7 states

StatePeaksObservations in flower
Maryland Jun 111
Massachusetts Jun 68
New Jersey Jun 108
New York Jun 182
Ohio Jun 138
Pennsylvania Jun 253
Virginia Jun 61

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,977 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -8.3 °C -5.0 °C -2.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.3 °C 28.3 °C 30.5 °C
Annual rainfall 935 mm 1,179 mm 1,414 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 158 mm 246 mm 302 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 1,977 research-grade observations of Ligustrum obtusifolium 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 30 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.

  • Ligustrum amurense Carrière
  • Ligustrum ciliatum var. microphyllum (Nakai) Nakai
  • Ligustrum ciliatum var. spathulatum Blume
  • Ligustrum ibota Siebold ex Blume
  • Ligustrum ibota f. angustifolium (Blume) Nakai
  • Ligustrum ibota f. microphyllum (Nakai) Nakai
  • Ligustrum ibota f. obtusifolium (Siebold & Zucc.) Koidz.
  • Ligustrum ibota f. tschonoskii (Nakai) Nakai
  • Ligustrum ibota subvar. spathulatum (Blume) Koidz.
  • Ligustrum ibota var. amurense (Carrière) Mansf.
  • Ligustrum ibota var. angustifolium Blume
  • Ligustrum ibota var. diabolicum Koidz.
  • Ligustrum ibota var. microphyllum Nakai
  • Ligustrum ibota var. obovatum Blume
  • Ligustrum ibota var. obtusifolium (Siebold & Zucc.) Koidz.
  • Ligustrum ibota var. regelianum (Koehne) Siebold ex Beissn., Schelle & Zabel
  • Ligustrum ibota var. suave Kitag.
  • Ligustrum ibota var. tschonoskii Nakai
  • Ligustrum ibota var. velutinum Blume
  • Ligustrum obtusifolium f. leiocalyx (Nakai) Murata
  • Ligustrum obtusifolium f. velutinum (Blume) Murata
  • Ligustrum obtusifolium subsp. suave (Kitag.) Kitag.
  • Ligustrum obtusifolium var. amurense (Carrière) Mansf.
  • Ligustrum obtusifolium var. leiocalyx (Nakai) H.Hara

and 6 more.

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.