Prinsepia utilisRoyle

WFO wfo-0000985975 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Prinsepia utilis, photographed by Name
fig. a Name, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-29 / obs. 192315930

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
4776604
Filed as
Prinsepia utilis Royle
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
Y. Tsiang 1930-10-18
Origin
CN
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. We link to the digitised sheet rather than rehosting it, because the holding institutions do not serve their images to third parties reliably and we are not going to show you a picture we cannot actually deliver. 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 sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 9 botanical countries

Regions where Prinsepia utilis is native: China South-Central, Tibet, Assam, East Himalaya, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, West Himalaya China South-CentralTibetAssamEast HimalayaIndiaMyanmarNepalPakistanWest Himalaya
Native distribution of Prinsepia utilis, 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
Assam ASS ASIA-TROPICAL
East Himalaya EHM
India IND
Myanmar MYA
Nepal NEP
Pakistan PAK
West Himalaya WHM
China South-Central CHC ASIA-TEMPERATE
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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 97 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -9.8 °C -2.8 °C 3.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 16.1 °C 21.4 °C 27.8 °C
Annual rainfall 955 mm 2,037 mm 3,258 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 25 mm 81 mm 175 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 97 research-grade observations of Prinsepia utilis 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 1 synonym

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.

  • Cycnia spinosa Griff.

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. 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.