Olgaea leucophylla

Plate 1 figs. a–c · 1 observation

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 1 time, 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.

Olgaea leucophylla, photographed by Yves Bas — fig. a Yves Bas, CC BY 4.0 / 2009-07-27 / obs. 58998967

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: Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession: US 1425082
Filed as: Olgaea leucophylla (Turcz.) Iljin
Det. by: not recorded on this sheet
Collected: R. Chaney 1925
Origin: MN
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

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

Native distribution of Olgaea leucophylla, 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
China North-Central	CHN	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China Southeast	CHS
Inner Mongolia	CHI
Manchuria	CHM
Mongolia	MON

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 41 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-22.9 °C	-18.8 °C	-17.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.1 °C	30.4 °C	31.5 °C
Annual rainfall	99 mm	111 mm	266 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	4 mm	5 mm	9 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 41 research-grade observations of Olgaea leucophylla 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.

Also published as 6 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.

Carduus leucophyllus Turcz.
Olgaea conglobata Ilijn
Olgaea leucophylla var. aggregata Ling
Olgaea leucophylla var. albiflora Y.B.Chang
Olgaea leucophylla var. jucunda Iljin
Olgaea leucophylla var. leucophylla

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.