Lyonia ovalifolia

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lyonia ovalifolia, photographed by Jacy Chen — fig. c Jacy Chen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 130907401

Lyonia ovalifolia, photographed by 葉子 — fig. h 葉子, CC0 1.0 / obs. 48151190

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 19 botanical countries

Native distribution of Lyonia ovalifolia, 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
Assam	ASS	ASIA-TROPICAL
Bangladesh	BAN
Cambodia	CBD
East Himalaya	EHM
Laos	LAO
Malaya	MLY
Myanmar	MYA
Nepal	NEP
Pakistan	PAK
Thailand	THA
Vietnam	VIE
West Himalaya	WHM
China North-Central	CHN	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China South-Central	CHC
China Southeast	CHS
Hainan	CHH
Japan	JAP
Taiwan	TAI
Tibet	CHT

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 33 in flower of 60 examined

50%

83%

77%

100%

Proportion of examined Lyonia ovalifolia in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	1	too few examined
Mar	0	3	too few examined
Apr	3	6	50%	19% to 81%
May	10	12	83%	55% to 95%
Jun	10	13	77%	50% to 92%
Jul	10	10	100%	72% to 100%
Aug	0	3	too few examined
Sep	0	3	too few examined
Oct	0	4	too few examined
Nov	0	3	too few examined
Dec	0	2	too few examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Lyonia ovalifolia 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. 33 of 60 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 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 614 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-2.7 °C	2.1 °C	12.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	16.1 °C	20.3 °C	29.9 °C
Annual rainfall	2,237 mm	3,661 mm	4,945 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	83 mm	324 mm	780 mm

It is found where winters bring light 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 614 research-grade observations of Lyonia ovalifolia 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 37 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 capricida Buch.-Ham. ex D.Don
Andromeda cordata Royle
Andromeda elliptica Siebold & Zucc.
Andromeda lanceolata Wall.
Andromeda ovalifolia Wall.
Andromeda squamulosa D.Don
Arbutus herpetica Colebr. ex Roxb.
Lyonia annamensis (Dop) Merr.
Lyonia compta var. stenantha Hand.-Mazz.
Lyonia foliosa (H.R.Fletcher) Sleumer
Lyonia obliquinervis (Merr. & Chun) Chun ex P.C.Tam
Lyonia ovalifolia var. formosana (Komatsu) T.Yamaz.
Lyonia rubrovenia (Merr.) Chun
Pieris annamensis Dop
Pieris elliptica (Siebold & Zucc.) Nakai
Pieris henryi H.Lév.
Pieris kouyangensis H.Lév.
Pieris lanceolata (Wall.) D.Don
Pieris mairei H.Lév.
Pieris mairei var. parvifolia H.Lév.
Pieris obliquinervis Merr. & Chun
Pieris ovalifolia (Wall.) D.Don
Pieris ovalifolia var. elliptica (Siebold & Zucc.) Rehder & E.H.Wilson
Pieris ovalifolia var. hebecarpa Franch. ex F.B.Forbes & Hemsl.

and 13 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.
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.