Coastal Sand Verbena Abronia latifolia
Coastal Sand Verbena is a perennial wildflower native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 5 ft and blooms Apr – Sep.
More about this plant
The perennial flower Abronia latifolia or Abronia arenaria is a species of sand-verbena known commonly as the coastal sand-verbena, or yellow sand-verbena. It is native to the west coast of North America, from southern California to southern British Columbia. In Canada, it is at risk of becoming extirpated, threatened, or endangered. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 5 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Abronia in North America, including:
+ 1 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 13 bee visitors
13 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Coastal Sand Verbena — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 4 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Coastal Sand Verbena — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
4 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 29 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Coastal Sand Verbena, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Abronia →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
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 (24) 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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