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Pleione formosana; photograph (c) Wang.QG, some rights reserved (CC BY) CC BY(c) Wang.QG, some rights reserved (CC BY) · observed growing wild · 2026-05-10

Pleione formosana Hayata

Windowsill Orchid

Orchidaceae · China South-Central, China Southeast +1

No habitat climate
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Pleione formosana, photograph author not stated, no rights reservedPleione formosana, photograph author not stated, no rights reservedPleione formosana, photograph author not stated, no rights reservedPleione formosana, photograph author not stated, no rights reservedPleione formosana, photograph author not stated, no rights reservedPleione formosana, photograph (c) cboss2, some rights reserved (CC BY) 54 photographs ›

Summary

Pleione formosana, the Taiwan pleione or windowsill orchid, is a species of flowering plant in the family Orchidaceae, native to southeastern China as well as northern and central Taiwan. It is a deciduous perennial, terrestrial orchid growing to 15 cm (6 in) tall by 30 cm (12 in) wide, with spherical pseudobulbs that produce a single folded leaf. The pink flowers, borne in spring, have fringed white lips that are strongly marked and mottled with brown on the inner surface.

Quoted from Wikipedia, "Pleione formosana", CC BY-SA 4.0.

Cultivation

Nothing derived: no habitat climate for this species.

Climate across the habitat

No habitat climate can be derived: 388 in-range records, none placed to within 10 km. 388 of the 388 in-range records are placed to worse than 10 km, or to no stated accuracy and fewer than three decimals or by something other than a person's observation, and cannot place a climate cell, though they count for the map and its marker.

Natural habitat

Native range as published by WCVP; the marker is where the records are densest and decides nothing.
Openly licensed records inside the range, framed on where they fall.
NativeChina South-Central, China Southeast, Taiwan · regions are the level-3 units of the World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions, as Kew's World Checklist records ranges, some under historical names such as Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia (how).
Map marker23.644, 120.943 · in the densest population, 286 records (74% of those in range)
Kew's description“epiphyte” · “temperate” · quoted from WCVP, RBG Kew (CC BY 4.0); not derived here
Evidence usedThe map marker rests on all 388 georeferenced records inside the native range; the map shows only the 30 openly licensed ones, which alone would put the marker 18 km away. 1 record outside the WCVP native range not used. No climate across the range is derived for this species. 388 in-range records are placed to worse than 10 km, or with no stated accuracy (admitted only as a person's observation to three decimals), and stay on the map but off the climate.
How this section is made
The map marker: the openly licensed record nearest the middle of the densest 1° population of the 388 in-range records; it decides nothing. Records outside the native range, living specimens and records marked introduced are not used; which records count.

Photographs

Pleione formosana, photograph 1did not loadPleione formosana, photograph 2did not loadPleione formosana, photograph 3did not loadPleione formosana, photograph 4did not loadPleione formosana, photograph 5did not loadPleione formosana, photograph 6did not load

Photographs: author not stated, no rights reserved · CC0 (5); (c) cboss2, some rights reserved (CC BY).

Other Pleione 12 in the reference

Pleione aurita Pleione aurita Orchidaceae Photo: CC BY-SA, Naoki Takebayashi from Fairbanks, AK…Pleione bulbocodioides Pleione bulbocodioides Orchidaceae Photo: CC BY, Jiao Sun (孙娇) Pleione × confusa Orchidaceae Pleione forrestii Orchidaceae Pleione grandiflora Pleione grandiflora Orchidaceae Photo: CC BY-SA, OrchiPleione hookeriana Pleione hookeriana Orchidaceae Photo: CC BY, Wang.QGPleione humilis Pleione humilis Orchidaceae Photo: CC BY, Jakkarin BurananitPleione limprichtii Pleione limprichtii Orchidaceae Photo: CC BY, EpibasePleione maculata Pleione maculata Orchidaceae Photo: CC BY, Tristan Jobin Pleione pleionoides Orchidaceae Pleione praecox Pleione praecox Orchidaceae Photo: CC BY, Sebastian DoakPleione yunnanensis Pleione yunnanensis Orchidaceae Photo: CC BY-SA, 阿橋 HQ

Names & registers

Also known as Coelogyne formosana; Cymbidium hookerianum f. nivea; Pleione bulbocodioides var. nivea; Pleione formosana f. alba; Pleione formosana f. nivea and 3 more. (GBIF Backbone)

GBIFPOWOIPNIWFOWikidataWikipediaiNaturalist

The record

Family
Orchidaceae
Described by
Hayata
Native to
China South-Central, China Southeast, Taiwan
Wild records
388 in range · 30 open

Every figure here is derived from public data by a stated rule and names its source; nothing about this species is written for its page by a person or by AI, apart from the marked, credited quotations. How →

Where this page came from built 2026-10-22
GBIF species record gbif.species answeredasked 2026-10-22
GBIF synonyms gbif.synonyms answeredasked 2026-10-22
GBIF common names gbif.vernacular answeredasked 2026-10-22names fetched 2026-10-22
WCVP native range wcvp.distribution answeredas of 2026-06-04
GBIF occurrence records gbif.occurrences answeredas of 2026-10-21GBIF occurrence download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.hbdw64, of 2026-10-21
Habitat climate climate nothing to reportasked 2026-10-22388 in-range records, none placed to within 10 km
Wikidata wikidata answeredasked 2026-10-22
Wikipedia wikipedia answeredasked 2026-10-22
iNaturalist photographs, wild inat.photos.wild answeredasked 2026-10-22from iNaturalist's open data of 2026-09-27: research-grade observations with an open-licence photograph, the 24 whose photographs iNaturalist received last (the open data holds no votes); filled 2026-10-22
iNaturalist photographs, cultivated inat.photos.cultivated not asked
GBIF media gbif.media answeredasked 2026-10-22
OpenAlex papers openalex not askednot yet asked for this reference; a later fill takes the papers from OpenAlex's snapshot

Every source is recorded as having answered, reported nothing, refused, failed, not been asked, or answered twice where one answer is taken (“not taken: two items answered”), and, for a source asked when this page was built, when: the figures are as the source held them that day; a source read from a file (Kew's World Checklist, a GBIF download) says "as of" the file's day instead; a row carried from an earlier build of the page names that build instead. Only “nothing to report” is ever shown as an absence. Records came from 8 datasets via GBIF.org; each carries its own licence.

Cultifolio

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