Japanese Pachysandra Pachysandra terminalis
Japanese Pachysandra is an introduced perennial shrub, found in the lower 48 states. It grows to 0.8 ft and blooms Jun in full sun.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.5–7.5
- Fertility need
- High
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 5+
- Drought tolerance
- Low
- Shade tolerance
- High
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Low waterlogging
- Height
- 0.8 ft
- Spacing
- 1–3 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Moderate
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Rhizomatous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Container, Sprigs
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →✦ Bees 13 bee visitors
13 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Japanese Pachysandra — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 2 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Japanese Pachysandra — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
2 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Pachysandra →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (29) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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