Rosa laevigataMichx.

Camelia roseCherokee roseMardan rose

WFO wfo-0001014407 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Rosa laevigata, photographed by Lauren McLaurin
fig. a Lauren McLaurin, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-03-22 / obs. 184109239

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
42545
Filed as
Rosa laevigata Michx.
Det. by
J. B. Walker 1994-01-01
Collected
J. B. Walker 1994-11-28
Origin
US
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. We link to the digitised sheet rather than rehosting it, because the holding institutions do not serve their images to third parties reliably and we are not going to show you a picture we cannot actually deliver. 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 sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 6 botanical countries

Regions where Rosa laevigata is native: China North-Central, China South-Central, China Southeast, Hainan, Taiwan, Vietnam China North-CentralChina South-CentralChina SoutheastHainanTaiwanVietnam
Native distribution of Rosa laevigata, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
China North-Central CHN ASIA-TEMPERATE
China South-Central CHC
China Southeast CHS
Hainan CHH
Taiwan TAI
Vietnam VIE ASIA-TROPICAL

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 512 in flower of 739 examined

Proportion of examined Rosa laevigata in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 3 25 12% 4% to 30%
Feb 22 32 69% 51% to 82%
Mar 322 342 94% 91% to 96%
Apr 131 144 91% 85% to 95%
May 13 33 39% 25% to 56%
Jun 3 14 21% 8% to 48%
Jul 1 13 8% 1% to 33%
Aug 3 20 15% 5% to 36%
Sep 5 36 14% 6% to 29%
Oct 6 38 16% 7% to 30%
Nov 1 24 4% 1% to 20%
Dec 2 18 11% 3% to 33%

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Rosa laevigata 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. 512 of 739 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 1,099 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 0.0 °C 6.5 °C 11.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 27.8 °C 31.7 °C 33.1 °C
Annual rainfall 1,202 mm 1,581 mm 2,356 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 99 mm 250 mm 379 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 1,099 research-grade observations of Rosa laevigata 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 24 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.

  • Rosa amygdalifolia Ser.
  • Rosa argyi H.Lév.
  • Rosa argyi H.Lév.
  • Rosa camellia hort.
  • Rosa camellia Siebold
  • Rosa camelliifolia hort.
  • Rosa cherokeensis Donn ex Small
  • Rosa cucumerina Tratt.
  • Rosa hystrix Lindl.
  • Rosa laevigata f. laevigata
  • Rosa laevigata f. semiplena T.T.Yu & T.C.Ku
  • Rosa laevigata var. alborosea Makino
  • Rosa laevigata var. kaiscianensis Pamp.
  • Rosa laevigata var. leiocarpa Y.Q.Wang & P.Y.Chen
  • Rosa laevigata var. rosea Makino
  • Rosa nivea DC.
  • Rosa nivea var. setifera Ser.
  • Rosa sinica W.T.Aiton
  • Rosa sinica var. fortuneana Regel
  • Rosa sinica var. typica Regel
  • Rosa ternata Poir.
  • Rosa trifoliata Bosc
  • Rosa triphylla Roxb.
  • Rosa triphylla Roxb.

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.