Three different questions
A native range is where a plant evolved. A growing region is where it is farmed now. A production centre is where it is turned into the thing you buy. Jasmine is native to India, grown across Asia, and scented onto tea in Fujian — and almost everything written about it names Fujian and stops.
The catalogue got this wrong five times
Checking fourteen botanicals against a taxonomic authority found five records giving an industry’s geography as a plant’s range: jasmine credited to Fujian, orange blossom to Tunisia, aged mandarin peel to Xinhui, barley and rice to East Asia. Every one read as confident provenance. Tunisia distils orange flowers beautifully and the tree is native to Hainan.
Why it matters to a buyer
Provenance claims are priced. If a packet’s value rests on a region, knowing whether that region is where the plant grows or where it is processed tells you what you are paying for. With chenpi you are paying for Xinhui’s ageing, not for a Guangdong mandarin.
Hybrids have no native range at all
Peppermint, the lemon and the bitter orange are all hybrids, which is why a native range for them is a category error rather than a missing fact. A hybrid has parents and a place it arose in cultivation, and those are different things.
A fourth question: grown where, or from there?
The subtlest version of the mistake is a country that genuinely grows the plant in quantity but is not where it is from. Persimmon leaf tea is Japanese and Korean and the tree is Chinese — the taxonomic authority lists Japan as cultivated and does not list Korea at all. Bael is drunk across Thailand as matoom from a tree Thailand grows rather than one it has. Barberry is Iranian in every way that matters to a cook, and Iran is not in the recorded native range. None of these looks wrong on the page, which is exactly why they survive.
What this catalogue does now
A hundred and thirteen of 150 botanicals carry a citation to a taxonomic authority covering the accepted name and distribution. Where the source hedges — 'probable origin Asia', 'native range obscure' — the record carries the hedge. Where it gives no native range, the record says so rather than supplying one. Where the source separates a cultivated range from a wild one, the page keeps both and says which is which.