Tuber Anemone Anemone tuberosa
Tuber Anemone is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Feb – May.
More about this plant
Anemone tuberosa, the desert anemone or tuber anemone, is a herbaceous species of flowering plant in the buttercup family Ranunculaceae. Plants grow 10 to 30, sometimes 40 cm (16 in) tall, from a woody-like tuber shaped like a caudex. Plants have 1 to 3 basal leaves that are 1 or 2 times ternate. The few basal leaves have long petioles and are deeply 3-parted with leaflets lacking stems or rarely with a stalk. Plants flowering early to late spring with the flowers composed of 8 to 10 sepals normally white or pink colored, 10 to 14 mm long. The plants produce one peduncle with one solitary flower or 2–5 flowered cymes. Fruits in heads fusiform in shape, with 7–20 cm (2.8–7.9 in) long pedicels. Fruits called achenes measure 2.5 to 3.5 mm long and 2 to 2.5 mm wide with a rounded outline and flat in shape, densely woolly, not winged also with straight 1.5 mm (0.059 in) long beaks. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 8 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Flower colour
- Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~1 caterpillar species
Anemone supports ~1 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 Anemone in North America, including:
Related plants
More Anemone →
How we know this (2) 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.
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 (16) 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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