Phyllostachys aurea (golden bamboo)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Phyllostachys aurea, photographed by Josep Gesti — fig. a Josep Gesti, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-03-13 / obs. 182703958

Phyllostachys aurea, photographed by Margaret Burger — fig. b Margaret Burger, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 129336157

Phyllostachys aurea, photographed by Megan Kossa — fig. c Megan Kossa, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 28143515

Phyllostachys aurea, photographed by Alan Weakley — fig. d Alan Weakley, CC0 1.0 / obs. 6467408

Phyllostachys aurea, photographed by Laura Clark — fig. e Laura Clark, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 5413173

Phyllostachys aurea, photographed by botanygirl — fig. f botanygirl, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 1508745

Phyllostachys aurea, photographed by Curtis Hansen — fig. g Curtis Hansen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 53141427

Phyllostachys aurea, photographed by Ken Kneidel — fig. h Ken Kneidel, CC0 1.0 / obs. 60739358

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: 00896305
Filed as: Phyllostachys aurea (André) Rivière & C.Rivière
Det. by: T. R. Soderstrom 1978-01-01
Collected: G. Davidse 1976-02-26
Origin: BR
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 2 botanical countries

Native distribution of Phyllostachys aurea, 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 Southeast	CHS	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Vietnam	VIE	ASIA-TROPICAL

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 1,237 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-2.5 °C	5.6 °C	10.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.5 °C	32.0 °C	35.2 °C
Annual rainfall	711 mm	998 mm	1,797 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	67 mm	180 mm	311 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 1,237 research-grade observations of Phyllostachys aurea 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 21 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.

Bambos koteisik Siebold
Bambusa aurea Carrière
Bambusa aurea André
Bambusa koteisik Zoll.
Phyllostachys aurea f. albovariegata (Makino) Nakai
Phyllostachys aurea f. alternatolutescens (I.Tsuboi) K.Ueda
Phyllostachys aurea f. flavescensinversa (J.Houz.) Muroi
Phyllostachys aurea var. flavescensinversa (J.Houz.) Nakai
Phyllostachys bambusoides f. albovariegata Makino
Phyllostachys bambusoides f. alternatolutescens I.Tsuboi
Phyllostachys bambusoides var. aurea (Carrière ex Rivière & C.Rivière) Makino
Phyllostachys breviligula W.T.Lin & Z.M.Wu
Phyllostachys formosana Hayata
Phyllostachys meyeri var. aurea (Rivière & C.Rivière) Pilip.
Phyllostachys puberula var. flavescensinversa J.Houz.
Phyllostachys reticulata f. albovariegata (Makino) Makino & Nemoto
Phyllostachys reticulata f. alternatolutescens (I.Tsuboi) Makino & Nemoto
Phyllostachys reticulata var. aurea (Rivière & C.Rivière) Makino
Phyllostachys takemurae Muroi
Sinarundinaria reticulata var. aurea (Rivière & C.Rivière) Ohwi
Sinoarundinaria formosa (Hayata) Ohwi ex Mayeb.

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.