Prunus zippeliana

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 6 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 6 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 zippeliana, photographed by Jacy Chen — fig. a Jacy Chen, CC BY 4.0 / 2019-12-09 / obs. 57747258

Prunus zippeliana, photographed by 呂一起(Lyu yi-chi) — fig. b 呂一起(Lyu yi-chi), CC BY 4.0 / obs. 32475539

Prunus zippeliana, photographed by Cheng-Te Hsu — fig. g Cheng-Te Hsu, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 53278676

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: 04777365
Filed as: Prunus zippeliana Miq.
Det. by: not recorded on this sheet
Collected: D. D. Soejarto 1999-03-18
Origin: VN
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 8 botanical countries

Native distribution of Prunus zippeliana, 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 North-Central	CHN	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China South-Central	CHC
China Southeast	CHS
Japan	JAP
Nansei-shoto	NNS
Taiwan	TAI
Myanmar	MYA	ASIA-TROPICAL
Vietnam	VIE

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 132 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	1.8 °C	8.4 °C	15.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.3 °C	27.9 °C	31.0 °C
Annual rainfall	1,535 mm	3,261 mm	4,785 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	130 mm	350 mm	734 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 132 research-grade observations of Prunus zippeliana 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 30 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 macrophylla C.K.Schneid.
Lauro-cerasus macrophylla var. oxycarpa (Hance) C.K.Schneid.
Lauro-cerasus macrophylla var. sphaerocarpa (Nakai) Masam.
Lauro-cerasus zippeliana (Miq.) Browicz
Lauro-cerasus zippeliana f. angustifolia T.T.Yu & L.T.Lu
Lauro-cerasus zippeliana var. crassistyla (Cardot) T.T.Yu & L.T.Lu
Laurocerasus adenopoda (Koord. & Valeton) Browicz
Laurocerasus macrophylla (Siebold & Zucc.) C.K.Schneid.
Laurocerasus macrophylla var. oxycarpa (Hance) C.K.Schneid.
Laurocerasus zippeliana (Miq.) Browicz
Laurocerasus zippeliana (Miq.) T.T.Yu & L.T.Lu
Laurocerasus zippeliana var. crassistyla (Cardot) T.T.Yu & L.T.Lu
Prunus adenopoda Koord. & Valeton
Prunus bakti Hisauti
Prunus dippeliana Miq.
Prunus dippeliana Miq. ex Makino
Prunus kanehirae Hayata ex Hisauti
Prunus macrophylla Siebold & Zucc.
Prunus macrophylla var. adenopoda (Koord. & Valeton) J.E.Vidal
Prunus macrophylla var. crassistyla Cardot
Prunus macrophylla var. puberifolia Koehne
Prunus macrophylla var. sphaerocarpa Nakai
Prunus nicotianifolia Loisel. ex Steud.
Prunus oxycarpa (Hance) Maxim.

and 6 more.

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.