Philadelphus pubescensLoisel.

hoary mock orange

WFO wfo-0000465290 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 3 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 3 times, 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.

Philadelphus pubescens, photographed by Brian Finzel
fig. a Brian Finzel, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2019-05-13 / obs. 343362376

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
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
04383360
Filed as
Philadelphus pubescens var. verrucosus (Schrad.) S.Y.Hu
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
not recorded
Origin
not recorded
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

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 10 botanical countries

Regions where Philadelphus pubescens is native: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas AlabamaArkansasGeorgiaKentuckyLouisianaMississippiMissouriOklahomaTennesseeTexas
Native distribution of Philadelphus pubescens, 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
Arkansas ARK
Georgia GEO
Kentucky KTY
Louisiana LOU
Mississippi MSI
Missouri MSO
Oklahoma OKL
Tennessee TEN
Texas TEX

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 31 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -10.7 °C -0.6 °C 2.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.5 °C 31.5 °C 33.5 °C
Annual rainfall 758 mm 1,234 mm 1,386 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 112 mm 244 mm 283 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 31 research-grade observations of Philadelphus pubescens 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 14 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.

  • Philadelphus discolor Raf.
  • Philadelphus gattingeri S.Y.Hu
  • Philadelphus intectus Beadle
  • Philadelphus intectus var. pubigerus S.Y.Hu
  • Philadelphus latifolius Schrad.
  • Philadelphus latifolius var. pendulifolius Schelle
  • Philadelphus latifolius var. pubescens (Loisel.) Dippel
  • Philadelphus niveus K.Koch
  • Philadelphus pubescens var. intectus (Beadle) A.H.Moore
  • Philadelphus pubescens var. pubescens
  • Philadelphus pubescens var. verrucosus (Schrad.) S.Y.Hu
  • Philadelphus rhombifolius Rehder
  • Philadelphus stenopetala Carrière
  • Philadelphus verrucosus Schrad.

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.