Pothos chinensis

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Pothos chinensis, photographed by 謝麗霦 — fig. b 謝麗霦, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 179235162

Pothos chinensis, photographed by Mori Chen — fig. c Mori Chen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172245764

Pothos chinensis, photographed by Agnes Trekker — fig. d Agnes Trekker, CC0 1.0 / obs. 169465286

Pothos chinensis, photographed by 葉子 — fig. e 葉子, CC0 1.0 / obs. 140349476

Pothos chinensis, photographed by Toby Y — fig. h Toby Y, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 115397144

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 17 botanical countries

Native distribution of Pothos chinensis, 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
Assam	ASS	ASIA-TROPICAL
Bangladesh	BAN
Cambodia	CBD
East Himalaya	EHM
India	IND
Laos	LAO
Myanmar	MYA
Nepal	NEP
Thailand	THA
Vietnam	VIE
West Himalaya	WHM
China South-Central	CHC	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China Southeast	CHS
Hainan	CHH
Nansei-shoto	NNS
Taiwan	TAI
Tibet	CHT

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 59 in flower of 160 examined

43%

53%

86%

59%

18%

14%

Proportion of examined Pothos chinensis in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	3	7	43%	16% to 75%
Feb	9	17	53%	31% to 74%
Mar	25	29	86%	69% to 95%
Apr	16	27	59%	41% to 75%
May	3	17	18%	6% to 41%
Jun	1	33	3%	1% to 15%
Jul	0	11	0%	0% to 26%
Aug	0	2	too few examined
Sep	0	1	too few examined
Oct	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Nov	1	7	14%	3% to 51%
Dec	1	4	too few examined

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Pothos chinensis 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. 59 of 160 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 3 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.

Also published as 8 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.

Pothos balansae Engl.
Pothos cathcartii Schott
Pothos chinensis var. chinensis
Pothos chinensis var. lotienensis C.Y.Wu & H.Li
Pothos seemannii Schott
Pothos warburgii Engl.
Pothos yunnanensis Engl.
Tapanava chinensis Raf.

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.