Prunus amygdalusBatsch

sweet almond

WFO wfo-0001015846 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Prunus amygdalus, photographed by Edmundas Greimas
fig. a Edmundas Greimas, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-22 / obs. 200805161

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
02609456
Filed as
Prunus amygdalus Batsch
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. 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 1 botanical country

Regions where Prunus amygdalus is native: Transcaucasus Transcaucasus
Native distribution of Prunus amygdalus, 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
Transcaucasus TCS ASIA-TEMPERATE

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 549 in flower of 949 examined

Proportion of examined Prunus amygdalus in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 88 110 80% 72% to 86%
Feb 269 292 92% 88% to 95%
Mar 157 207 76% 70% to 81%
Apr 18 113 16% 10% to 24%
May 1 55 2% 0% to 10%
Jun 0 22 0% 0% to 15%
Jul 0 31 0% 0% to 11%
Aug 2 26 8% 2% to 24%
Sep 0 26 0% 0% to 13%
Oct 1 16 6% 1% to 28%
Nov 2 22 9% 3% to 28%
Dec 11 29 38% 23% to 56%

Peak flowering in Feb. Each bar is the share of Prunus amygdalus 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. 549 of 949 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 2,084 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -0.8 °C 2.4 °C 10.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.0 °C 28.6 °C 33.1 °C
Annual rainfall 378 mm 578 mm 896 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 5 mm 66 mm 129 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 2,084 research-grade observations of Prunus amygdalus 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. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

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.

  • Amygdalus amara Duhamel
  • Amygdalus amara var. pendula Lavallée
  • Amygdalus amara var. pyramidata Lavallée
  • Amygdalus amygdalina Oken ex M.Roem.
  • Amygdalus amygdalus (Batsch) Frye & Rigg
  • Amygdalus cochinchinensis Lour.
  • Amygdalus communis L.
  • Amygdalus communis f. acuta Magyar
  • Amygdalus communis f. albaplena Zabel
  • Amygdalus communis f. angustifolia (H.Jaeger) Zabel
  • Amygdalus communis f. compacta Zabel
  • Amygdalus communis f. cristata Magyar
  • Amygdalus communis f. elongata Magyar
  • Amygdalus communis f. lanceolata Magyar
  • Amygdalus communis f. marginata Zabel
  • Amygdalus communis f. microcarpa Magyar
  • Amygdalus communis f. ostraeiformis Magyar
  • Amygdalus communis f. ovata Magyar
  • Amygdalus communis f. pendula (H.Jaeger) Zabel
  • Amygdalus communis f. platycarpa Magyar
  • Amygdalus communis f. purpurea Zabel
  • Amygdalus communis f. roseaplena Zabel
  • Amygdalus communis f. rotundata Magyar
  • Amygdalus communis f. salicifolia K.Koch

and 93 more.

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. USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol PRDU. public domain. 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.