Plum Blossom Meaning: Endurance in China, Ume in Japan, Maehwa in Korea, and a Lunar New Year Symbol (6 February 2027)

Plum blossom means endurance and perseverance in Chinese tradition, and related things in Japan, where the flower is called ume, and in Korea, where it is called maehwa. The flower comes from Prunus mume, a small tree in the rose family that the Royal Horticultural Society lists as the Japanese apricot, under the other names mei, mume and ume. It opens on bare branches in late winter, and the traditional meaning is tied to that timing. Museums group it with orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum as the Four Gentlemen, and with pine and bamboo as the Three Friends of Winter. The Republic of China (Taiwan) made it the national flower in 1964. Lunar New Year 2027 begins on 6 February, which falls inside the January-to-February bloom window that NC State gives for the tree, although the exact timing depends on cultivar and climate. This guide separates what the sources document from what later retellings added, and it treats every symbolic reading as tradition, not fact.

What does plum blossom mean?

Plum blossom means endurance, perseverance and purity in Chinese tradition. The Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art says the blossoms of the first tree to bloom each year stand for renewal and the coming of spring, and that the flower also symbolizes perseverance and purity. Harvard Art Museums adds that because pine, bamboo and Chinese plum survive the harsh winter months, they symbolize strength in the face of adversity.

The reading rests on how the tree behaves. NC State Extension says P. mume blooms on the previous year’s wood, with buds set during the growing season before, so the flowers can open on bare branches from January to February and the leaves follow afterwards. The curator of the Japanese garden at Denver Botanic Gardens writes that ume blossoms in Japan appear in early January to February “while the snow still stays on the ground.” The RHS describes the same pattern: fragrant flowers on bare branches in late winter and early spring.

Get a free pre-planned flower bed (vase-worthy from June to frost)

Printable planting plans for a cut-flower bed and a cottage pollinator bed — plant list, spacing, and calendar included.

Send me the plans

I agree to receive emails from Blooming Expert and accept the Privacy Policy. Unsubscribe anytime.

The open flowers are not frost-proof. NC State advises planting the tree in a protected spot so that winter cold does not damage the flowers. So the endurance in the symbol is about when the tree flowers, not about the blossoms being immune to a hard freeze.

The oldest strand of the meaning is literary. The Cleveland Museum of Art says the plum’s status as the orthodox symbol of the literati’s pure spirit originated in Lin Bu’s poem “Tiny Plum Flowers in Mountain Garden.” A later Song-dynasty poem makes the endurance explicit. Wang Anshi (1021–1086) wrote four lines titled “Plum Blossoms,” and the original text reads:

墙角数枝梅，凌寒独自开。遥知不是雪，为有暗香来。

Our literal gloss of the characters: a few branches of plum at the corner of the wall; braving the cold, they open alone. From far off one knows it is not snow, because a hidden fragrance comes. The fragrance matters in the plant as well as the poem. The RHS lists the flowers as fragrant, and NC State says they smell strongly of clove.

The Four Gentlemen and the Three Friends of Winter

The Four Gentlemen are plum, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum, and the Three Friends of Winter are pine, bamboo and plum, so plum and bamboo belong to both sets. The graphic below shows the overlap and one quality for each plant.

Harvard Art Museums says each of the Four Gentlemen is said to embody a noble virtue of the ideal Confucian gentleman-scholar. A Hong Kong Museum of Art exhibition in 2014 traced the grouping to the reign of Wanli in the Ming dynasty, when the literati painter Chen Jiru inscribed the phrase in an artist’s manual for painting plum blossoms, bamboo, orchids and chrysanthemums. Museums do not use identical wording for the qualities. The table sets the Hong Kong list, which the graphic follows, against two other museum accounts.

The takeaway is that every account ties plum to steadfastness or endurance, while the qualities given to orchid, chrysanthemum and bamboo vary from account to account. The Smithsonian also credits bamboo with endurance, a quality it shares with plum.

The Three Friends have their own history. Harvard Art Museums says pine, bamboo and Chinese plum are called the Three Friends of Winter in Chinese art and literature. The Smithsonian gives the Chinese name as suihan sanyou (歲寒三友) and calls the three models of endurance and honesty in adverse conditions. A University of Washington course page shows a painting by Zhao Mengjian (1199?–1264) that has all three and describes bamboo as a symbol of survival in adversity because it bends in storms without breaking.

The trio pairs two different kinds of winter survivor. The Smithsonian calls pine an evergreen, while the RHS lists P. mume as deciduous. One friend stays green through the cold, and the other flowers on bare wood.

Five petals, five blessings

Tradition reads the plum blossom’s five petals as the Five Blessings (wufu), and two sources give slightly different lists. The Smithsonian names long life, wealth, health, virtue and a peaceful death. NC State says the petals are said to represent wealth, health, love of virtue, old age and natural death. The two lists cover the same five themes: wealth and health are worded identically, and the other three differ in wording (long life or old age, virtue or love of virtue, a peaceful or a natural death).

The reading assumes the single flower. Nippon.com’s guide to Japanese plum varieties lists double-flowering types (yae) alongside single ones (hitoe), so not every cultivar fits a five-petal reading.

The national flower of the Republic of China (Taiwan)

The plum blossom was designated the national flower of the Republic of China by the Executive Yuan on 21 July 1964. The Office of the President says the flower has great symbolic value for the Chinese people because of its resilience during the harsh winter. Its page reads the three-part grouping of stamens (one long, two short) as Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People, and the five petals as the five branches of the ROC government.

That adds a political reading to an older meaning. NC State’s Plant Toolbox gives the native range as south-central China and Laos and lists Taiwan among the places where the species is introduced, while the RHS gives the plant range as China, Laos and Vietnam.

Plum blossom at Lunar New Year 2027

Lunar New Year 2027 begins on Saturday 6 February 2027. The Hong Kong Observatory’s conversion table lists that date as the first day of the first lunar month in the Ding-wei year of the Goat, two days after the solar term Spring Commences on 4 February.

The Smithsonian calls the plum blossom a popular symbol of Chinese New Year, because it is the first tree to bloom and stands for renewal. It names a second flower for the same reason: narcissus, which blooms in late winter or early spring and is described as a beloved flower of the festival (see our narcissus meaning guide). The Hong Kong exhibition notes add that the Four Gentlemen were commonly used in traditional folk culture at Chinese New Year as a way of sending blessings.

The Smithsonian calls the plum a symbol of the festival, and this guide stops there: it does not prescribe an arrangement or a ritual.

Whether a tree is in flower on 6 February depends on the cultivar and the climate. NC State’s Plant Toolbox gives January to February for P. mume. The Denver curator reports that the Gardens’ ume bonsai bloomed in the last week of December and was displayed indoors, and that he has never successfully grown ume in Colorado gardens, because the tree does not like its dormancy disrupted by winter temperature swings.

Plum blossom meaning in Japan and Korea

In Japan the flower is ume, and the Denver curator calls it a sign of spring’s arrival and of renewal at New Year. Nippon.com says the eighth-century poetry collection Man’yōshū contains more than 100 poems about ume, which suggests the nobility already cultivated and admired the trees. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds an 1834 Japanese hanging scroll by Yamamoto Baiitsu of plum, bamboo and orchid, which it describes as three of the Four Gentlemen of Chinese painting. The Denver curator says it is common in Japan to display ume bonsai in flower for the New Year celebration, and he tells how the scholar and statesman Sugawara no Michizane (845–903) wrote a farewell poem to his plum tree when he was posted away from the capital.

A Nara tourism bureau article says plum came before cherry as the flower people gathered to view, that the Man’yōshū holds 110 poems about plum blossoms and 43 about cherry blossoms, and that cherry rose in the Heian period that followed. Counts of the poems vary by source, so treat 110 to 43 as one bureau’s count. The Denver curator puts the contrast as a matter of taste: if sakura appeals to the majority with “in-your-face” beauty, ume “requires sophisticated taste.”

In Korea the flower is maehwa. Gwangju News, an English-language magazine, says maehwa is the earliest flower to bloom, so its opening signifies spring’s arrival in Korea. Harvard Art Museums says plum, orchid, chrysanthemum and bamboo are popularly known as the Four Gentlemen in the Korean tradition, and the Cleveland Museum of Art notes that the plum was widely depicted in Korean paintings as part of that motif. We found no official Korean source that gives the flower a distinct national meaning, so the museum sources place Korean use inside the same literati tradition.

The common thread across the rows is winter: each source ties the flower to cold-season flowering, to resilience, or to the first signs of spring.

Ume vs sakura: how to tell plum blossom from cherry blossom

Plum blossoms sit directly on the branch and often have rounded petals, while cherry blossoms hang on stalks and often have a notch at the tip of each petal. Denver Botanic Gardens and Nippon.com give the same two tests.

Both belong to the genus Prunus in the rose family. Nippon.com cautions that varieties and individual trees differ, so it is difficult to generalize and the attachment and petal shape are only the easiest signs. The two sources also disagree on the plum’s bloom month, which is why the table shows both. For what the cherry blossom means, see our cherry blossom meaning guide.

Prunus mume or Prunus domestica: which plum is it?

The blossom in this guide comes from Prunus mume, not from the plum trees that fill orchards. NC State describes Prunus domestica, the European plum, as a tree of Turkey and Europe with showy white flowers, and calls it the latest blooming of the plums. The RHS describes P. mume as bearing fragrant flowers from white to dark pink, followed by edible but sour, apricot-like yellow fruit. Nippon.com says ume is technically somewhat closer to apricots than to plums, although not the same as either. An English catalogue that says “plum blossom” can mean either tree, and the East Asian meanings in this guide belong to mume.

Sources disagree on how old the relationship with people is. NC State says the tree has been cultivated for over 1,500 years, while a 2012 genome paper in Nature Communications says P. mume was domesticated in China over 3,000 years ago as an ornamental plant and fruit. The Denver curator adds that the discovery of ume fruit in a Yayoi-period tumulus (400 BC) shows the tree reached Japan along with rice cultivation, earlier than the older belief of about 600 AD.

The fruit explains part of the tree’s place in Japanese households. The Denver curator says Japanese households traditionally pickled homemade umeboshi and that the fruit can also be made into umeshu. He adds that the rainy season that starts in early June is called baiu, “plum rain,” when the small ume fruits start ripening.

What does the Western language of flowers say about the plum?

Kate Greenaway’s Language of Flowers lists “Plum Tree” as fidelity, “Plum, Wild” as independence and “Plum, Indian” as privation. The dictionary does not say which plum it means and has no entry for mei or ume, so nothing in it links the Western meanings to the East Asian ones. Our flower symbolism guide sets the Western dictionary meanings beside those of other cultures.

Chinese flower meanings: peony, lotus, orchid, chrysanthemum and plum

Chinese tradition pairs flowers with qualities and months, and the Smithsonian worksheet is a compact guide to five of them. Plum is the flower of endurance, peony of wealth and honor, lotus of purity, orchid of scholarly pursuit and chrysanthemum of longevity.

A Song-dynasty essay characterizes three of these. In the original text of “On the Love of the Lotus,” Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073) calls the chrysanthemum the recluse among flowers (菊，花之隐逸者也), the peony the flower of wealth and honor (牡丹，花之富贵者也) and the lotus the gentleman among flowers (莲，花之君子者也). The plum does not appear in the essay.

Growing a plum blossom tree

NC State lists Prunus mume for USDA zones 6a to 9b, in full sun to partial shade and moist, acidic, loamy soil (the RHS says acid, alkaline or neutral), and says it does best in a protected spot. The RHS gives it hardiness rating H5, meaning hardy in most places throughout the UK even in severe winters, and lists the exposure as sheltered. Because the tree blooms on the previous year’s wood, NC State advises pruning immediately after flowering, while the RHS says minimal pruning is needed.

Our plum tree care guide covers the fruiting trees (European, Japanese and damson plums), not Prunus mume. Its warnings about frost at bloom time are still worth reading before you plant a mume, because NC State gives the same advice for it: shelter the flowers from winter cold.

Frequently asked questions

What does plum blossom symbolize?

Plum blossom symbolizes endurance, perseverance, purity and renewal in Chinese tradition, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art. Japanese and Korean sources tie it to the arrival of spring.

What is the difference between plum blossom and cherry blossom?

Plum blossoms sit directly on the branch and often have rounded petals, while cherry blossoms hang on stalks and often have a notch in each petal. In Japan, the sources say plum blooms before cherry.

What are the Four Gentlemen in Chinese art?

The Four Gentlemen are plum, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum, each said to embody a virtue of the Confucian gentleman-scholar. The Three Friends of Winter are a separate set: pine, bamboo and plum.

Is the plum blossom the national flower of Taiwan?

The plum blossom is the national flower of the Republic of China (Taiwan). The Executive Yuan designated it on 21 July 1964, according to the Office of the President.

When is Lunar New Year 2027?

Lunar New Year 2027 begins on Saturday 6 February 2027, the first day of the first lunar month in the Ding-wei year of the Goat, according to the Hong Kong Observatory.

Sources

1. Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art. A Selected Illustrated Guide to Common Chinese Symbols (worksheet, Symbolism in Cloisonné) (linked in text)
2. Harvard Art Museums. Plum, Orchid, Chrysanthemum, and Bamboo: Botanical Motifs and Symbols in East Asian Painting, 2002 (linked in text)
3. Harvard Art Museums. Cultivating Virtue: Botanical Motifs and Symbols in East Asian Art, 2006 (linked in text)
4. Hong Kong SAR Government. Museum of Art exhibition “The Four Gentlemen: A Selection of Flower Paintings from the Hong Kong Museum of Art Collection” opens, 5 December 2014 (linked in text)
5. Cleveland Museum of Art. Bird Sleeping on a Plum Tree, Yang Ki-hun, accession 1998.31 (linked in text)
6. Cleveland Museum of Art. Plums, Bamboo, and Orchid, Yamamoto Baiitsu, accession 1975.93 (linked in text)
7. University of Washington. Bamboo, Plum, and Other Plants, Chinese Civilization course (linked in text)
8. Royal Horticultural Society. Prunus mume plant profile (linked in text)
9. NC State Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox. Prunus mume (linked in text)
10. NC State Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox. Prunus domestica. plants.ces.ncsu.edu
11. Denver Botanic Gardens. Ebi Kondo, “Ume: Prunus mume in Japanese culture,” 3 January 2017 (linked in text)
12. Nippon.com. Heralding the Spring: A Japanese Plum Blossom Guide, 31 January 2025 (linked in text)
13. Kansai Nara Treasure Travel. Plum Blossoms: the Original Flower of Japan’s Tradition of Hanami, 27 February 2022 (linked in text)
14. Gwangju News. 15th Maehwa (Plum Blossom) Festival Preview (linked in text)
15. Office of the President, Republic of China (Taiwan). National flower (linked in text)
16. Hong Kong Observatory. Gregorian-Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 2027 (linked in text)
17. Zhang Q. et al. The genome of Prunus mume. Nature Communications 3:1318, 2012 (linked in text)
18. Greenaway K. Language of Flowers. Project Gutenberg ebook 31591 (linked in text)
19. Wang Anshi. “Plum Blossoms,” Chinese text. Classical Chinese Poetry, cn-poetry.com (linked in text)
20. Zhou Dunyi. “On the Love of the Lotus,” Chinese text. Classical Chinese Poetry, cn-poetry.com (linked in text)