Quercus pubescens (Downy oak)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Quercus pubescens, photographed by Louis Aureglia — fig. a Louis Aureglia, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-06 / obs. 203907668

Quercus pubescens, photographed by Pavel Kacl — fig. b Pavel Kacl, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201352440

Quercus pubescens, photographed by Christian Berg — fig. d Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198320170

Quercus pubescens, photographed by rainerburkard — fig. g rainerburkard, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 196246574

Quercus pubescens, photographed by Marco Mussita — fig. h Marco Mussita, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190344001

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 24 botanical countries

Native distribution of Quercus pubescens, 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
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Austria	AUT
Belgium	BGM
Bulgaria	BUL
Corse	COR
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Greece	GRC
Hungary	HUN
Italy	ITA
Kriti	KRI
Krym	KRY
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Romania	ROM
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Switzerland	SWI
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
Ukraine	UKR
East Aegean Is.	EAI	ASIA-TEMPERATE
North Caucasus	NCS
Türkiye	TUR

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 30 in flower of 306 examined

20%

44%

16%

Proportion of examined Quercus pubescens in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	12	0%	0% to 24%
Feb	0	12	0%	0% to 24%
Mar	1	5	20%	4% to 62%
Apr	22	50	44%	31% to 58%
May	5	31	16%	7% to 33%
Jun	0	19	0%	0% to 17%
Jul	1	35	3%	1% to 15%
Aug	1	38	3%	0% to 14%
Sep	0	38	0%	0% to 9%
Oct	0	39	0%	0% to 9%
Nov	0	20	0%	0% to 16%
Dec	0	7	0%	0% to 35%

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Quercus pubescens 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. 30 of 306 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 1,937 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-4.5 °C	0.3 °C	6.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.5 °C	26.4 °C	29.7 °C
Annual rainfall	566 mm	843 mm	1,563 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	60 mm	137 mm	244 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 1,937 research-grade observations of Quercus pubescens 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 295 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.

Eriodrys lanata Raf.
Quercus adjecta Gand.
Quercus admixta Gand.
Quercus aegilops Mill.
Quercus aegilops var. pendula Neill
Quercus alba var. pubescens (Willd.) Willd.
Quercus ambigua Kit. ex Rochel
Quercus amblyodes Gand.
Quercus amplifolia Guss.
Quercus amplissima Gand.
Quercus ampulleana Gand.
Quercus anatolica O.Schwarz
Quercus annexa Gand.
Quercus anxiosa Gand.
Quercus apennina Lam.
Quercus appenina Lam.
Quercus appenina subsp. amplifolia (Guss.) Nyman
Quercus aspera Bosc
Quercus asperata Pers.
Quercus authemanii Gand.
Quercus bacunensis Vuk.
Quercus banja Endl.
Quercus bellojocensis Gand.
Quercus bertolonii Gand.

and 271 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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.