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Berberidaceae family

Sweet After Death Achlys triphylla

Native
Also known as: Achlys · Deer's Foot · Deerfoot · Deervetch Vanillaleaf

Sweet After Death is a perennial wildflower native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It blooms May.

More about this plant

Achlys triphylla, with the common names deer foot, vanilla leaf, or sweet after death, is a plant species native to the mountains of the West Coast of North America. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
Cold hardiness (derived) — Hardiness
Hardiness
≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0) — Foliage
McKenzie et al. 2025 — community-science image analysis (MIT) — Flower colour
Lifespan
Perennial
Foliage
Broadleaf
Flower colour
White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
In the garden
Herb layer — Sits in the herb of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
derived roles
AI = read by an AI vision model · DERIVED = a computed estimate, not a direct measurement. The “How we know this” section below details each.
The garden year bloom → fruit → fall colour
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Bloom
Bloom (the flower's colour)
Bloom · May — 30 obs · USA-NPN — Nature's Notebook (CC BY 4.0)
Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host

Recorded feeding on Achlys in North America, including:

Walshia miscecolorella · Sweetclover Root Borer Moth ✦
Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (CC0). ✦ = recorded on this exact species.
✦ Bees 1 bee visitor

1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Sweet After Death :

Bombus mixtus · Fuzzy-Horned Bumble Bee
Visitor records (observations, not exhaustive) from Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI →
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
Frequently grows with

Across 21 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Sweet After Death, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.

Douglas-fir · 71% Grand Fir · 62% Dwarf Rose · 62% Largeleaf Sandwort · 52% Bride's Bonnet · 48% Western Rattlesnake Plantain · 48% Oregon Boxleaf · 48% White Spirea · 43%
"%" = share of this plant's plots that also held the species. From sPlotOpen → (Sabatini et al. 2021, CC BY 4.0) — open vegetation plots: wild community composition, not garden design.
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
Photosynthesis Direct fact

A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.

Kattge, J. et al. TRY plant trait database — Categorical Traits Dataset (2012).
Climate niche (heat tolerance & native rainfall) Derived

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.

Realized-niche / climate-envelope approach (Pearson & Dawson 2003; Soberón 2007). Climate: NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county normals (1991–2020).
Flower colour Derived

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.

McKenzie, P., Berardi, A.E., Hopkins, R. (2025). flower_color_phenology (MIT).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation. Full methodology →
Sources for this entry (24) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[05] Invasive / introduced status — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — native status
[07] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[08] Ecological value — GloBI
[10] Conservation rank — NatureServe Explorer (CC BY)
[12] Functional traits — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[13] Photosynthetic pathway — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[14] Climate niche — Derived — realized climate niche from U.S. county occurrences (GBIF) × NOAA NCEI county climate normals 1991–2020 (public domain)
[15] Cold hardiness (derived) — Derived from U.S. range × USDA PHZM zones
[19] Other common names — Wikidata (CC0)
[21] Flower-visitor value (derived) — Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI
[22] Caterpillar species — NHM HOSTS (CC0)
[23] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
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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