Rhamnus davurica (Dahurian buckthorn)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Rhamnus davurica, photographed by Sandra Keller — fig. a Sandra Keller, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-11-11 / obs. 170378168

Rhamnus davurica, photographed by Andrew Conboy — fig. b Andrew Conboy, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 124272037

Rhamnus davurica, photographed by Repina Tatyana — fig. c Repina Tatyana, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 40691867

Rhamnus davurica, photographed by sblumen — fig. e sblumen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171998034

Rhamnus davurica, photographed by Rose Zappa — fig. f Rose Zappa, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 136661455

Rhamnus davurica, photographed by Alan Weakley — fig. g Alan Weakley, CC0 1.0 / obs. 128480187

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 11 botanical countries

Native distribution of Rhamnus davurica, 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
Amur	AMU	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Buryatiya	BRY
China North-Central	CHN
Chita	CTA
Inner Mongolia	CHI
Japan	JAP
Khabarovsk	KHA
Korea	KOR
Manchuria	CHM
Mongolia	MON
Primorye	PRM

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 176 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-22.2 °C	-11.8 °C	0.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.8 °C	27.8 °C	31.7 °C
Annual rainfall	627 mm	906 mm	1,235 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	21 mm	69 mm	263 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 176 research-grade observations of Rhamnus davurica 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 7 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.

Cornus citrifolia Weston
Rhamnus cathartica var. dahurica Maxim.
Rhamnus citrifolia var. nipponica (Makino) W.J.Hess & Stearn
Rhamnus davurica subsp. nipponica (Makino) Kartesz & Gandhi
Rhamnus davurica var. davurica
Rhamnus nipponica (Makino) Grubov
Rhamnus sinensis Ser. ex Rondot

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.