Styrax officinalis (Friar's balsam)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Styrax officinalis, photographed by Quentin Groom — fig. a Quentin Groom, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-14 / obs. 197469989

Styrax officinalis, photographed by Eleftherios Katsillis — fig. c Eleftherios Katsillis, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 174604341

Styrax officinalis, photographed by Edmundas Greimas — fig. d Edmundas Greimas, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 170417954

Styrax officinalis, photographed by Vincenzo Lattanzi — fig. e Vincenzo Lattanzi, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 128407805

Styrax officinalis, photographed by Kristof Zyskowski — fig. g Kristof Zyskowski, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 121132954

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 Styrax officinalis, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
Kriti	KRI
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
Cyprus	CYP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is.	EAI
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
Palestine	PAL
Türkiye	TUR

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 68 in flower of 125 examined

94%

85%

17%

Proportion of examined Styrax officinalis in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	2	2	too few examined
Mar	3	4	too few examined
Apr	32	34	94%	81% to 98%
May	29	34	85%	70% to 94%
Jun	1	6	17%	3% to 56%
Jul	0	12	0%	0% to 24%
Aug	0	10	0%	0% to 28%
Sep	1	4	too few examined
Oct	0	11	0%	0% to 26%
Nov	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Dec	0	3	too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Styrax officinalis 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. 68 of 125 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 698 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-1.7 °C	5.8 °C	11.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.4 °C	29.0 °C	33.1 °C
Annual rainfall	584 mm	840 mm	1,303 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	2 mm	9 mm	171 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 698 research-grade observations of Styrax officinalis 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 2 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.

Styrax cotinifolius Salisb.
Styrax officinarum Crantz

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.