Common Bugle Ajuga reptans
Common Bugle is an introduced perennial herb, found in Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 0.3 ft and blooms Jul in full sun.
More about this plant
Ajuga reptans is commonly known as bugle, blue bugle, bugleherb, bugleweed, carpetweed, carpet bugleweed, and common bugle, and traditionally as St. Lawrence plant. It is an herbaceous flowering plant in the mint family Lamiaceae, native to Europe. It is also a component of purple moor grass and rush pastures, a Biodiversity Action Plan habitat in the United Kingdom. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.5–7.5
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 5+
- Height
- 0.3 ft
- Spacing
- 1–3 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Moderate
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Stoloniferous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring through autumn
- Flower colour
- Blue AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Container, Sprigs
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →✦ Bees 68 bee visitors
68 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Common Bugle — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 33 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Common Bugle — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
33 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Ajuga →
How we know this (4) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
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.
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 (34) 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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