Tarweed Fiddleneck Amsinckia lycopsoides
Tarweed Fiddleneck is an annual wildflower native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 3 ft and blooms May in part shade – shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Amsinckia lycopsoides is a species of flowering plant, known by the common name tarweed fiddleneck or bugloss fiddleneck, in the family Boraginaceae. It is one of the more common species of fiddleneck. It is native to much of western North America from California to British Columbia. It can be found in a wide variety of areas. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.8–8.2
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 5+
- Height
- 3 ft
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Single crown
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Brown
- Flower colour
- Orange AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Spring – Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- No known commercial source
- 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 →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Amsinckia in North America, including:
✦ Bees 9 bee visitors
9 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Tarweed Fiddleneck :
+ 3 more bees → ↑ show fewer
Related plants
More Amsinckia →
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 (30) 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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