Lyonia lucida(Lam.) K.Koch

fetterbush lyonia

WFO wfo-0001047112 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lyonia lucida, photographed by Leila Dasher
fig. a Leila Dasher, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-15 / obs. 198247529
Lyonia lucida, photographed by Josiah Londerée
fig. b Josiah Londerée, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190488889
Lyonia lucida, photographed by Josiah Londerée
fig. c Josiah Londerée, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190519925
Lyonia lucida, photographed by Josiah Londerée
fig. d Josiah Londerée, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190520052
Lyonia lucida, photographed by Josiah Londerée
fig. e Josiah Londerée, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190520372
Lyonia lucida, photographed by Anthony A Simmons
fig. f Anthony A Simmons, CC0 1.0 / obs. 186922473
Lyonia lucida, photographed by Kim
fig. g Kim, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 186918804
Lyonia lucida, photographed by Athena Philips
fig. h Athena Philips, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 182768547

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 Lyonia lucida is native: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Cuba AlabamaFloridaGeorgiaLouisianaMississippiNorth CarolinaSouth CarolinaVirginiaCuba
Native distribution of Lyonia lucida, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
Florida FLA
Georgia GEO
Louisiana LOU
Mississippi MSI
North Carolina NCA
South Carolina SCA
Virginia VRG
Cuba CUB SOUTHERN AMERICA

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 454 in flower of 664 examined

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Lyonia lucida 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. 454 of 664 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,969 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 3.9 °C 11.1 °C 15.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 29.1 °C 31.6 °C 32.4 °C
Annual rainfall 1,256 mm 1,374 mm 1,624 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 155 mm 198 mm 338 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,969 research-grade observations of Lyonia lucida 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 21 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.

  • Andromeda coriacea Aiton
  • Andromeda coriacea var. rubra G.Lodd.
  • Andromeda lacustris C.Wright
  • Andromeda lucida Lam.
  • Andromeda marginata Duhamel
  • Andromeda myrtifolia Salisb.
  • Andromeda nitida J.Bartram & W.Bartram ex Marshall
  • Desmothamnus lucidus (Lam.) Small
  • Desmothamnus nitidus (J.Bartram & W.Bartram ex Marshall) Small
  • Leucothoe coriacea (Aiton) DC.
  • Leucothoe marginata (Veill.) Spach
  • Lyonia lucida f. lucida
  • Lyonia lucida f. rubra (G.Lodd.) Rehder
  • Lyonia marginata (Veill.) D.Don
  • Lyonia marginata var. rubra (Lodd.) Loudon
  • Lyonia nitida (W.Bartram ex Marshall) Fernald
  • Neopieris nitida (J.Bartram & W.Bartram ex Marshall) Britton
  • Pieris nitida (W.Bartram ex Marshall) Benth. & Hook.f.
  • Pieris nitida var. rubra (Lodd.) Rehder
  • Xolisma lucida (Lam.) Rehder
  • Xolisma lucida var. rubra (Lodd.) Rehder

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.