Alpine Pussytoes Antennaria alpina
Alpine Pussytoes is a perennial wildflower native to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. It grows to 0.2 ft and blooms Jun – Sep. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Antennaria alpina is a European and North American species of plant in the family Asteraceae. Antennaria alpina is native to mountainous and subarctic regions of Scandinavia, Greenland, Alaska, and the Canadian Arctic, extending south at high altitudes in mountains in the Rocky Mountains south to Montana and Wyoming. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 6 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 0.2 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~6 caterpillar species
Antennaria supports ~6 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 Antennaria in North America, including:
+ 2 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Antennaria is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird
Open records of who else uses Alpine Pussytoes — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
Across 29 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Alpine Pussytoes, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Antennaria →
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.
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.
Sources for this entry (22) 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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