Sambucus javanica

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Sambucus javanica, photographed by Yung-Lun Lin — fig. b Yung-Lun Lin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 207933272

Sambucus javanica, photographed by 胡正恆(Jackson Hu) — fig. c 胡正恆(Jackson Hu), CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198757287

Sambucus javanica, photographed by 葉子 — fig. d 葉子, CC0 1.0 / obs. 179901599

Sambucus javanica, photographed by Chen Jia Hong — fig. f Chen Jia Hong, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 168150502

Sambucus javanica, photographed by poyin — fig. g poyin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 163054097

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 29 botanical countries

Native distribution of Sambucus javanica, 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
Assam	ASS	ASIA-TROPICAL
Bangladesh	BAN
Borneo	BOR
Cambodia	CBD
East Himalaya	EHM
Jawa	JAW
Laos	LAO
Lesser Sunda Is.	LSI
Myanmar	MYA
Nepal	NEP
New Guinea	NWG
Pakistan	PAK
Philippines	PHI
Sulawesi	SUL
Sumatera	SUM
Thailand	THA
Vietnam	VIE
Afghanistan	AFG	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China North-Central	CHN
China South-Central	CHC
China Southeast	CHS
Hainan	CHH
Japan	JAP
Kazan-retto	KZN
Korea	KOR
Nansei-shoto	NNS
Ogasawara-shoto	OGA
Taiwan	TAI
Tibet	CHT

Not drawn on the map: Kazan-retto, Ogasawara-shoto. We hold no public-domain boundary for these regions, so they are listed rather than guessed at.

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 220 in flower of 319 examined

43%

14%

20%

67%

78%

83%

88%

82%

70%

46%

79%

21%

Proportion of examined Sambucus javanica in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	6	14	43%	21% to 67%
Feb	1	7	14%	3% to 51%
Mar	1	5	20%	4% to 62%
Apr	8	12	67%	39% to 86%
May	18	23	78%	58% to 90%
Jun	40	48	83%	70% to 91%
Jul	51	58	88%	77% to 94%
Aug	36	44	82%	68% to 90%
Sep	19	27	70%	52% to 84%
Oct	22	48	46%	33% to 60%
Nov	15	19	79%	57% to 91%
Dec	3	14	21%	8% to 48%

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Sambucus javanica 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. 220 of 319 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 2,007 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.0 °C	11.3 °C	14.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.1 °C	28.7 °C	31.2 °C
Annual rainfall	1,879 mm	3,261 mm	4,653 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	94 mm	235 mm	799 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 2,007 research-grade observations of Sambucus javanica 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 19 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.

Ebulum chinense (Lindl.) Nakai
Ebulum chinensis (Lindl.) Nakai
Ebulum formosanum (Nakai) Nakai
Ebulum javanicum (Reinw.) Hosok.
Phyteuma bipinnata Lour.
Phyteuma cochinchinensis Lour.
Sambucus argyi H.Lév.
Sambucus chinensis Lindl.
Sambucus chinensis var. formosana (Nakai) H.Hara
Sambucus chinensis var. pinnatilobata G.W.Hu
Sambucus ebuloides Desv. ex DC.
Sambucus formosana Nakai
Sambucus formosana var. arborescens Kaneh. & Sasaki
Sambucus henriana Samutina
Sambucus hookeri Rehder
Sambucus javanica var. argyi (H.Lév.) Rehder
Sambucus phyteumoides DC.
Sambucus thunbergiana Blume ex Miq.
Sambucus thunbergii G.Don

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.