Prunus mume(Siebold) Siebold & Zucc.

Chinese plumJapanese apricotUme

WFO wfo-0001017317 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Prunus mume, photographed by Marco Mussita
fig. a Marco Mussita, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-02-08 / obs. 112388639

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
2850137
Filed as
Prunus mume (Siebold) Siebold & Zucc.
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
G. V. Nash 1900-05-10
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 3 botanical countries

Regions where Prunus mume is native: China South-Central, Laos, Vietnam China South-CentralLaosVietnam
Native distribution of Prunus mume, 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
Laos LAO ASIA-TROPICAL
Vietnam VIE
China South-Central CHC 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 181 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -7.2 °C 0.5 °C 10.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 27.1 °C 29.8 °C 32.9 °C
Annual rainfall 1,099 mm 1,498 mm 2,524 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 71 mm 160 mm 278 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 181 research-grade observations of Prunus mume 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 46 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.

  • Armeniaca anomala (Koehne) Kovalev & Kostina
  • Armeniaca mume de Vriese
  • Armeniaca mume Siebold
  • Armeniaca mume f. pendula (Siebold) H.Ohba & S.Akiyama
  • Armeniaca mume var. alba Carrière
  • Armeniaca mume var. alphandii Carrière
  • Armeniaca mume var. cernua (Franch.) T.T.Yu & L.T.Lu
  • Armeniaca mume var. pallescens (Franch.) T.T.Yu & L.T.Lu
  • Armeniaca mume var. pubicaulina C.Z.Qiao & H.M.Shen
  • Prunopsis mume (Siebold) Andr‚
  • Prunopsis mume (Siebold) André
  • Prunus anomala Koehne
  • Prunus cerasifera unranked flore-roseo-pleno Baltet ex Späth
  • Prunus cerasifera unranked roseoplena Späth
  • Prunus makinoensis H.Lév.
  • Prunus mume f. alba (Carrière) Rehder
  • Prunus mume f. alboplena (L.H.Bailey) Rehder
  • Prunus mume f. alphandii (Carrière) Rehder
  • Prunus mume f. laciniata Maxim.
  • Prunus mume f. pendula (Siebold) Rehder
  • Prunus mume f. pleiocarpa (Maxim.) Zabel
  • Prunus mume f. roseaplena Zabel
  • Prunus mume f. splendens (Sprenger) Rehder
  • Prunus mume unranked purpureaplena Sprenger

and 22 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. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. 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.