Prunus prostrataLabill.

Mountain cherryProstrate cherry

WFO wfo-0000985802 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 5 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 5 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Prunus prostrata, photographed by William Stephens
fig. a William Stephens, CC BY 4.0 / 2012-05-31 / obs. 66148940

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 15 botanical countries

Regions where Prunus prostrata is native: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, East Aegean Is., Iraq, Lebanon-Syria, Türkiye, Albania, Corse, France, Greece, Kriti, NW. Balkan Pen., Sardegna, Spain AlgeriaMoroccoTunisiaEast Aegean Is.IraqLebanon-SyriaTürkiyeAlbaniaCorseFranceGreeceKritiNW. Balkan Pen.Spain Sardegna
Native distribution of Prunus prostrata, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Albania ALB EUROPE
Corse COR
France FRA
Greece GRC
Kriti KRI
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Sardegna SAR
Spain SPA
East Aegean Is. EAI ASIA-TEMPERATE
Iraq IRQ
Lebanon-Syria LBS
Türkiye TUR
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Morocco MOR
Tunisia TUN

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 32 in flower of 49 examined

Proportion of examined Prunus prostrata in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 1 2 too few examined
Apr 17 19 89% 69% to 97%
May 10 10 100% 72% to 100%
Jun 4 6 67% 30% to 90%
Jul 0 9 0% 0% to 30%
Aug 0 0 too few examined
Sep 0 0 too few examined
Oct 0 2 too few examined
Nov 0 1 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Prunus prostrata 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. 32 of 49 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 255 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -10.4 °C -5.3 °C 3.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 19.8 °C 24.3 °C 32.3 °C
Annual rainfall 432 mm 935 mm 1,284 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 5 mm 14 mm 124 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 255 research-grade observations of Prunus prostrata 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 26 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 prostrata (Labill.) Sweet
  • Cerasus griseola Pachom.
  • Cerasus humilis Moris
  • Cerasus prostrata (Labill.) Loisel.
  • Cerasus prostrata var. angustifolia Spach
  • Cerasus prostrata var. concolor Buhse & Boiss.
  • Cerasus prostrata var. discolor Raulin
  • Cerasus prostrata var. glabrifolia (Moris) Browicz
  • Cerasus prostrata var. latifolia Spach
  • Hagidryas prostrata (Labill.) Griseb.
  • Microcerasus prostrata (Labill.) M.Roem.
  • Microcerasus prostrata f. griseola (Pachom.) Eremin & Juschev
  • Prunus humilis (Moris) Colla
  • Prunus prostrata f. concolor (Buhse & Boiss.) Rothm.
  • Prunus prostrata f. discolor (Raulin) Rothm.
  • Prunus prostrata f. erecta Molero
  • Prunus prostrata prol. typica Asch. & Graebn.
  • Prunus prostrata subsp. discolor (Raulin) O.Schwarz
  • Prunus prostrata var. concolor (Buhse & Boiss.) Lipsky
  • Prunus prostrata var. discolor (Raulin) Tocl & Rohlena
  • Prunus prostrata var. glabra Hohen.
  • Prunus prostrata var. glabrifolia Moris
  • Prunus prostrata var. humilis (Moris) Nyman
  • Prunus prostrata var. incana Litard. & Maire

and 2 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.