Phanera championii

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Phanera championii, photographed by 潘立傑 LICHIEH_PAN — fig. b 潘立傑 LICHIEH_PAN, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190232564

Phanera championii, photographed by Agnes Trekker — fig. f Agnes Trekker, CC0 1.0 / obs. 171869047

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 3039823
Filed as: Phanera championii Benth.
Det. by: U.S. National Herbarium
Collected: Y. W. Taam 1938-05-28
Origin: CN
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 8 botanical countries

Native distribution of Phanera championii, 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 South-Central	CHC	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China Southeast	CHS
Hainan	CHH
Taiwan	TAI
Assam	ASS	ASIA-TROPICAL
Cambodia	CBD
East Himalaya	EHM
Vietnam	VIE

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 46 in flower of 93 examined

33%

92%

78%

47%

Proportion of examined Phanera championii in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	4	too few examined
Feb	0	3	too few examined
Mar	0	2	too few examined
Apr	0	2	too few examined
May	0	2	too few examined
Jun	0	4	too few examined
Jul	2	6	33%	10% to 70%
Aug	1	2	too few examined
Sep	11	12	92%	65% to 99%
Oct	25	32	78%	61% to 89%
Nov	7	15	47%	25% to 70%
Dec	0	9	0%	0% to 30%

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Phanera championii 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. 46 of 93 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 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 1,988 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	6.6 °C	12.4 °C	15.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	26.2 °C	29.4 °C	30.7 °C
Annual rainfall	1,844 mm	2,672 mm	4,607 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	60 mm	148 mm	790 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,988 research-grade observations of Phanera championii 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 11 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.

Bauhinia bonii Gagnep.
Bauhinia championii (Benth.) Benth.
Bauhinia championii var. acutifolia H.Y.Chen
Bauhinia championii var. rubiginosa K.Larsen & S.S.Larsen
Bauhinia championii var. yingtakensis (Merr. & F.P.Metcalf) T.C.Chen
Bauhinia gnomon Gagnep.
Bauhinia hunanensis Hand.-Mazz.
Bauhinia lecomtei Gagnep.
Bauhinia yingtakensis Merr. & F.P.Metcalf
Lasiobema championii (Benth.) de Wit
Lasiobema hunanense (Hand.-Mazz.) de Wit

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.