Sorbaria sorbifolia(L.) A.Braun

false spiraea

WFO wfo-0001013016 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Sorbaria sorbifolia, photographed by Pavel Kacl
fig. a Pavel Kacl, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-21 / obs. 199268943

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
01158613
Filed as
Sorbaria sorbifolia (L.) A.Braun
Det. by
J. Rietsema 2010-01-01
Collected
J. Rietsema 2008-07-15
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. 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 16 botanical countries

Regions where Sorbaria sorbifolia is native: Amur, Chita, Inner Mongolia, Irkutsk, Japan, Kamchatka, Khabarovsk, Korea, Krasnoyarsk, Magadan, Manchuria, Mongolia, Primorye, Sakhalin, West Siberia, Yakutiya AmurChitaInner MongoliaIrkutskJapanKamchatkaKhabarovskKrasnoyarskMagadanManchuriaMongoliaPrimoryeSakhalinWest SiberiaYakutiya Korea
Native distribution of Sorbaria sorbifolia, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Amur AMU ASIA-TEMPERATE
Chita CTA
Inner Mongolia CHI
Irkutsk IRK
Japan JAP
Kamchatka KAM
Khabarovsk KHA
Korea KOR
Krasnoyarsk KRA
Magadan MAG
Manchuria CHM
Mongolia MON
Primorye PRM
Sakhalin SAK
West Siberia WSB
Yakutiya YAK

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 246 in flower of 418 examined

Proportion of examined Sorbaria sorbifolia in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 0 7 0% 0% to 35%
Apr 2 27 7% 2% to 23%
May 1 31 3% 1% to 16%
Jun 46 69 67% 55% to 77%
Jul 164 191 86% 80% to 90%
Aug 24 52 46% 33% to 60%
Sep 6 30 20% 10% to 37%
Oct 3 9 33% 12% to 65%
Nov 0 2 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Sorbaria sorbifolia 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. 246 of 418 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 4 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. 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 2,041 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -23.6 °C -10.8 °C -1.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 19.4 °C 22.9 °C 27.2 °C
Annual rainfall 475 mm 711 mm 1,290 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 41 mm 112 mm 269 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 2,041 research-grade observations of Sorbaria sorbifolia 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 22 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.

  • Aria nivea var. quercoides (Anon.) Lavallée
  • Basilima sorbifolia (L.) Raf.
  • Basilima sorbifolia (L.) Raf.
  • Schizonotus sorbifolius (L.) Lindl. ex Steud.
  • Sorbaria assurgens M.Vilm. & Bois
  • Sorbaria assurgens M.Vilm. & Bois ex Rehder
  • Sorbaria sorbifolia f. glabra (Maxim.) H.S.Kim
  • Sorbaria sorbifolia f. glandulosa (Nakai ex T.Kawamoto) T.B.Lee
  • Sorbaria sorbifolia f. incerta (C.K.Schneid.) Kitag.
  • Sorbaria sorbifolia subsp. stellipila (Maxim.) Nedol.
  • Sorbaria sorbifolia var. glabra Maxim.
  • Sorbaria sorbifolia var. glandulosa Nakai ex T.Kawamoto
  • Sorbaria sorbifolia var. typica C.K.Schneid.
  • Sorbaria stellipila (Maxim.) C.K.Schneid.
  • Sorbaria stellipila var. incerta C.K.Schneid.
  • Sorbaria stellipila var. typica C.K.Schneid.
  • Sorbus quercoides Dippel
  • Spiraea assurgens (M.Vilm. & Bois) Bean
  • Spiraea floribunda K.Koch
  • Spiraea pinnata Moench
  • Spiraea sorbifolia L.
  • Spiraea sorbifolia var. vulgaris Cambess.

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.