Scabland Sagebrush Artemisia rigida
Scabland Sagebrush is a perennial shrub native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 2 ft and blooms Aug in part shade – shade, with white fruit.
More about this plant
Artemisia rigida is a species of flowering plant in the aster family known by the common names scabland sagebrush and stiff sagebrush. It is native to the northwestern United States, in Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. It has been recorded in western Montana but these sightings may have been misidentifications. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 6.5–8.5
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 3+
- Height
- 2 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 2 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 4 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Multiple stems
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- White
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- No known commercial source
- Deer browsing
- Medium moderately palatable
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~12 caterpillar species
Artemisia supports ~12 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 moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Artemisia in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
Related plants
More Artemisia →
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.
For woody plants that have a height but no measured crown, we estimate width = height × a crown-to-height ratio fit for that plant’s form (conifers narrower than broadleaf trees, shrubs widest), calibrated on our measured open-grown crowns and capped at the largest one ever measured. A measured crown always wins; herbaceous plants get nothing (no anchor).
Honest limits: A coarse class-median estimate for garden-scale spacing, not a measurement; woody single/multi-stem forms only.
Sources for this entry (29) 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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