Berberis repensLindl.

creeping mahonia

WFO wfo-0000563761 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Berberis repens, photographed by Cecelia Alexander
fig. a Cecelia Alexander, CC0 1.0 / 2022-06-07 / obs. 204291159
Berberis repens, photographed by Eric Knight
fig. b Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203944913
Berberis repens, photographed by Henrik Kibak
fig. c Henrik Kibak, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202377252
Berberis repens, photographed by John Krampl
fig. d John Krampl, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201440320
Berberis repens, photographed by Josiah Londerée
fig. e Josiah Londerée, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202599454
Berberis repens, photographed by Bob Walker
fig. f Bob Walker, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203540206
Berberis repens, photographed by James H. Thomas
fig. g James H. Thomas, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201988234
Berberis repens, photographed by Josiah Londerée
fig. h Josiah Londerée, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202599622

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.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 1,271 observations

Peak flowering in May, from 1,271 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 17 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.

  • Berberis aquifolium f. repens (Lindl.) B.Boivin
  • Berberis aquifolium subsp. repens (Lindl.) Brayshaw
  • Berberis aquifolium var. repens (Lindl.) Scoggan
  • Berberis nana Greene
  • Berberis repens var. macrocarpa (Jouin) Marroq. & Laferr.
  • Berberis repens var. rotundifolia (May) Marroq. & Laferr.
  • Berberis sonnei (Abrams) McMinn
  • Mahonia nana (Greene) Fedde
  • Mahonia repens (Lindl.) G.Don
  • Mahonia repens f. subcordata Rehder
  • Mahonia repens var. macrocarpa Jouin
  • Mahonia repens var. rotundifolia (May) Fedde
  • Mahonia repens var. scopulatilis S.L.Welsh
  • Mahonia repens var. typica C.K.Schneid.
  • Mahonia rotundifolia May
  • Mahonia sonnei Abrams
  • Odostemon repens (Lindl.) Cockerell

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.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.