Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations
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
- 1365196
- Filed as
- Platycladus orientalis (L.) Franco
- Det. by
- M. H. Nee 2011-01-01
- Collected
- M. H. Nee 2011-06-30
- Origin
- US
- 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 5 botanical countries
| Region | TDWG code | Continent |
|---|---|---|
| Amur | AMU | ASIA-TEMPERATE |
| China North-Central | CHN | |
| China Southeast | CHS | |
| Khabarovsk | KHA | |
| 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 584 observations
| Condition | 5th percentile | Median | 95th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coldest month, mean daily low | -12.1 °C | -4.1 °C | 9.8 °C |
| Warmest month, mean daily high | 22.9 °C | 28.2 °C | 35.1 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 400 mm | 716 mm | 1,688 mm |
| Rainfall in the driest quarter | 10 mm | 84 mm | 247 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 584 research-grade observations of Platycladus orientalis 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.
Named cultivars 3 recorded
Selections of Platycladus orientalis that somebody named and propagated. A cultivar is not a botanical taxon: it is governed by the cultivated-plant code rather than the botanical one, so it appears in no taxonomic backbone, and it has no native range and no wild population of its own. These get no page here, because a cultivar has no photographs, no range and no flowering data of its own, and a page with none of those is not a page.
- ‘Semperaurescens’ Q15234458
- ‘ʽGolden Ball’’ Q110767351
- ‘ʽTetragona’’ Q110767352
From Wikidata (CC0), joined to this species on its World Flora Online identifier, so the link to the parent is exact rather than a name match. This list is what is recorded in an openly licensed register; it is not every cultivar that exists, and for many genera it is not close. Why, and how far short it falls.
Also published as 117 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.
- Biota chengii (Bordères & Gaussen) Bordères & Gaussen
- Biota coraeana Siebold ex Gordon & Glend.
- Biota dumosa Carrière
- Biota elegantissima Beissn.
- Biota ericoides Carrière
- Biota excelsa Gordon
- Biota falcata Carrière
- Biota fortunei Carrière
- Biota freneloides hort. ex Gordon
- Biota funiculata Gordon
- Biota glauca Carrière
- Biota gracilifolia Knight
- Biota intermedia Gordon
- Biota japonica Siebold ex Gordon
- Biota macrocarpa Gordon
- Biota meldensis P.Lawson ex Gordon
- Biota nepalensis Endl. ex Gordon
- Biota orientalis (L.) Endl.
- Biota orientalis f. sieboldii W.C.Cheng & W.T.Wang
- Biota orientalis var. aurea Carrière
- Biota orientalis var. beverleyensis Hu
- Biota orientalis var. cristata Carrière
- Biota orientalis var. cupressoides Carrière
- Biota orientalis var. elegantissima Rollison ex Gordon
and 93 more.
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.