Staphylea colchicaSteven

WFO wfo-0000493093 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Staphylea colchica, photographed by Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky)
fig. a Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky), CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-29 / obs. 204683181
Staphylea colchica, photographed by Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky)
fig. b Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky), CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204702467
Staphylea colchica, photographed by Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky)
fig. c Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky), CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202190405
Staphylea colchica, photographed by Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky)
fig. d Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky), CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203449969
Staphylea colchica, photographed by Марина Садыкова
fig. e Марина Садыкова, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 193815709
Staphylea colchica, photographed by Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky)
fig. f Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky), CC BY 4.0 / obs. 169581611
Staphylea colchica, photographed by Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky)
fig. g Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky), CC BY 4.0 / obs. 128663231
Staphylea colchica, photographed by Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky)
fig. h Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky), CC BY 4.0 / obs. 99041955

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 2 botanical countries

Regions where Staphylea colchica is native: North Caucasus, Transcaucasus North CaucasusTranscaucasus
Native distribution of Staphylea colchica, 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
North Caucasus NCS ASIA-TEMPERATE
Transcaucasus TCS

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 189 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -4.7 °C 1.5 °C 3.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 23.5 °C 25.7 °C 26.9 °C
Annual rainfall 1,325 mm 2,217 mm 2,459 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 267 mm 415 mm 469 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 189 research-grade observations of Staphylea colchica 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.

  • Staphylea colchica f. grandiflora Zabel
  • Staphylea colchica var. coulombieri (André) Zabel
  • Staphylea colchica var. hooibrenckii Zabel
  • Staphylea colchica var. kochiana Medw.
  • Staphylea colchica var. laxiflora Valck.Sur.
  • Staphylea coulomberi André
  • Staphylea pyramidalis Lemoine

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. 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.