Wright's Beebrush Aloysia wrightii
Wright's Beebrush is a perennial shrub native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Aug – Nov.
More about this plant
Aloysia wrightii is a species of flowering plant in the verbena family known by the common names Wright's beebrush and oreganillo. It is native to the Sonoran Desert of southwestern United States and northern Mexico, where it can be found in moist desert canyons, scrub, and woodland habitat. This is a thickly branching shrub which reaches nearly two meters in maximum height and is generally rounded in form. It has small, oval-shaped to nearly round leaves each no more than two centimeters long. The leaves have lightly toothed edges and hairy undersides. The inflorescence is a narrow, woolly spike up to 6 centimeters long, with small, widely spaced white flowers. It is a valuable nectar source for native solitary bees. It is also larval and adult food plant for the rustic sphinx moth (Manduca rustica). Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 8 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Flower colour
- White 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 Aloysia in North America, including:
✦ Bees 2 bee visitors
2 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Wright's Beebrush :
Wildlife & visitors 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Wright's Beebrush — 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 Aloysia →
How we know this (3) 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.
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 (20) 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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