Orixa japonica | BotanAI

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Orixa japonica, photographed by Timur Kalininsky — fig. a Timur Kalininsky, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-16 / obs. 191423417

Orixa japonica, photographed by WATANABE Hitoshi 渡辺仁 — fig. b WATANABE Hitoshi 渡辺仁, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 107057134

Orixa japonica, photographed by Yoshihiro Tokue — fig. c Yoshihiro Tokue, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 37635300

Orixa japonica, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. d Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 17512351

Orixa japonica, photographed by harum.koh — fig. e harum.koh, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 11031958

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 Orixa japonica, 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 North-Central	CHN	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China South-Central	CHC
China Southeast	CHS
Japan	JAP
Korea	KOR

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 67 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-5.6 °C	-1.0 °C	5.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.4 °C	27.8 °C	30.3 °C
Annual rainfall	1,294 mm	1,589 mm	2,558 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	125 mm	165 mm	315 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 67 research-grade observations of Orixa japonica 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 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.

Celastrus dilatatus Thunb.
Celastrus japonicus (Thunb.) K.Koch
Celastrus orixa (Lam.) Siebold & Zucc.
Euodia ramiflora A.Gray
Ilex orixa (Lam.) Spreng.
Orixa racemosa Z.M.Tan
Orixa subcoriacea Z.M.Tan
Othera orixa Lam.
Sabia cavaleriei H.Lév.
Sabia feddei H.Lév.

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.