Linnaea chinensis

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.

Linnaea chinensis, photographed by Aaron Liston — fig. a Aaron Liston, CC BY 4.0 / 2017-08-03 / obs. 9699999

Linnaea chinensis, photographed by Cheng-Tao Lin — fig. b Cheng-Tao Lin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 23916131

Linnaea chinensis, photographed by Cheng-Te Hsu — fig. h Cheng-Te Hsu, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185668632

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 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Linnaea chinensis, 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
China South-Central	CHC	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China Southeast	CHS
Nansei-shoto	NNS
Taiwan	TAI
Vietnam	VIE	ASIA-TROPICAL

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 125 in flower of 144 examined

100%

97%

92%

77%

67%

Proportion of examined Linnaea chinensis in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	1	too few examined
Feb	1	2	too few examined
Mar	0	3	too few examined
Apr	1	1	too few examined
May	1	2	too few examined
Jun	8	8	100%	68% to 100%
Jul	20	20	100%	84% to 100%
Aug	32	33	97%	85% to 99%
Sep	34	37	92%	79% to 97%
Oct	23	30	77%	59% to 88%
Nov	4	6	67%	30% to 90%
Dec	0	1	too few examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Linnaea chinensis 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. 125 of 144 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.

Also published as 10 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.

Abelia aschersoniana Rehder
Abelia cavaleriei H.Lév.
Abelia chinensis R.Br.
Abelia chinensis var. ionandra (Hayata) Masam.
Abelia hanceana Mart. ex Hance
Abelia ionandra Hayata
Abelia lipoensis M.T.An & G.Q.Gou
Abelia rupestris Lindl.
Linnaea aschersoniana Graebn.
Linnaea rupestris A.Braun & Vatke

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.
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.