White Bladderflower Araujia sericifera
White Bladderflower is an introduced perennial vine, found in the lower 48 states. It blooms Jun – Oct.
More about this plant
Araujia sericifera is a perennial vining plant in the genus Araujia, of the family Apocynaceae, that is native to South America. The species was described in 1817 by the Portuguese botanist Félix de Avelar Brotero. The synonym Araujia hortorum is in more frequent use in New Zealand. Its common names include bladderflower, white bladderflower, bladder vine, cruel vine, cruel plant, moth plant, moth vine, common moth vine, and false choko. Wikipedia →
White Bladderflower is flagged invasive in the U.S. These natives fill a similar niche — same growth habit, bloom season, height, and region — so you keep the look and feed local wildlife instead of spreading a problem.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- 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 Araujia in North America, including:
✦ Bees 3 bee visitors
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting White Bladderflower :
Wildlife & visitors 6 nectaring
Open records of who else uses White Bladderflower — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
6 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Araujia →
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 (19) 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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