Prunus spinulosa

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Prunus spinulosa, photographed by Tatsutomo Chin — fig. b Tatsutomo Chin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 93540318

Prunus spinulosa, photographed by 呂一起(Lyu yi-chi) — fig. c 呂一起(Lyu yi-chi), CC BY 4.0 / obs. 32207200

Prunus spinulosa, photographed by laneser kuo — fig. d laneser kuo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 14823842

Prunus spinulosa, photographed by 古淑玲 — fig. f 古淑玲, CC0 1.0 / obs. 175339645

Prunus spinulosa, photographed by Cheng-Te Hsu — fig. h Cheng-Te Hsu, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 191244545

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 4 botanical countries

Native distribution of Prunus spinulosa, 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
China South-Central	CHC	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China Southeast	CHS
Japan	JAP
Nansei-shoto	NNS

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 400 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.7 °C	12.3 °C	12.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.3 °C	30.2 °C	30.9 °C
Annual rainfall	2,116 mm	3,129 mm	3,675 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	181 mm	529 mm	602 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 400 research-grade observations of Prunus spinulosa 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 10 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.

Lauro-cerasus marginata (Dunn) Yü & L.T.Lu
Lauro-cerasus spinulosa (Siebold & Zucc.) C.K.Schneid.
Laurocerasus marginata (Dunn) T.T.Yu & L.T.Lu
Laurocerasus spinulosa (Siebold & Zucc.) C.K.Schneid.
Prunus balfourii Cardot
Prunus limbata Cardot
Prunus marginata Dunn
Prunus nitidissima Hassk.
Prunus spinulosa var. pubiflora Koehne
Prunus sundaica Miq.

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.