Wilkes' Acalypha Acalypha wilkesiana
Wilkes' Acalypha is an introduced plant, found in the lower 48 states and Puerto Rico. It grows to 5 ft.
More about this plant
Acalypha wilkesiana, common names copperleaf, Jacob's coat and Flamengueira, is an evergreen shrub growing to 3 metres (9.8 ft) high and 2 metres across. It has a closely arranged crown, with an erect stem and many branches. Both the branches and the leaves are covered in fine hairs. The leaves, which may be flat or crinkled, are large and broad with teeth around the edge. They can be 10–20 centimetres (3.9–7.9 in) long and 15 centimetres (5.9 in) wide. The leaves are coppery green with red splashes, giving them a mottled appearance. Separate male and female flowers appear on the same plant. The male flowers are in long spikes which hang downwards while the female flowers are in short spikes. The latter do not show up easily as they are often hidden among the leaves. The flower stalks are 10–20 cm long. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 5 ft
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~3 caterpillar species
Acalypha supports ~3 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus.
Recorded feeding on Acalypha in North America, including:
Wildlife & visitors 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Wilkes' Acalypha — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Acalypha →
How we know this (1) 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.
Sources for this entry (19) 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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