PlantKey Open ecological atlas
Planner
Home / Browse / Asimina / Woolly Pawpaw
iNaturalist — CC, credited & licensed per image
Annonaceae family

Woolly Pawpaw Asimina incana

Native
Early-season nectar — Flowers in a late-winter / early-spring window when few other plants in our catalog bloom — valuable early forage for pollinators (relative to our catalog's bloom coverage).

Woolly Pawpaw is a perennial shrub native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Mar – Apr.

More about this plant

Asimina incana, also known as the woolly pawpaw, is a species of pawpaw. Its botanical synonyms include Asimina speciosa and Pityothamnus incanus Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
Cold hardiness (derived) — Hardiness
Hardiness
≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
McKenzie et al. 2025 — community-science image analysis (MIT) — Flower colour
Lifespan
Perennial
Flower colour
White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
In the garden
Shrub layer — Sits in the shrub of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
derived roles
AI = read by an AI vision model · DERIVED = a computed estimate, not a direct measurement. The “How we know this” section below details each.
The garden year bloom → fruit → fall colour
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Bloom
Fall colour
Bloom (the flower's colour) Fall colour
Bloom · Mar – Apr — 24 obs · Herbarium specimens — Park et al. 2023 (CC BY 4.0)
Fall colour · 193 obs · USA-NPN observed “coloured leaves” — timing varies by site & year
Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
❧ Caterpillar hosts ~12 caterpillar species

Asimina 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 Asimina in North America, including:

Eurytides marcellus · Zebra Swallowtail ✦ Agrius cingulata · Pink-Spotted Hawkmoth Apatelodes torrefacta · Spotted Apatelodes Choristoneura obsoletana · leafroller moth Dichrorampha sedatana · leafroller moth Dolba hyloeus · Pawpaw Sphinx
+ 6 more species →
Hemerocampa leucostigma · White-Marked Tussock Moth Hyphantria cunea · tiger moth Omphalocera cariosa · snout moth Omphalocera munroei · Asimina Webworm Moth Parasa indetermina · Stinging Rose Caterpillar Moth Talponia plummeriana · Speckled Talponia Moth
Keystone count (genus-level) from Warren II 2026 (CC0) · Tallamy host-use records. Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (CC0). ✦ = recorded on this exact species.
Wildlife & visitors 1 nectaring

Open records of who else uses Woolly Pawpaw — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.

1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:

Protographium marcellus
Interaction records (observations, not exhaustive) from GloBI → (CC0). Counts are distinct species; names are the most-recorded. Common names from Wikidata (CC0).
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
Frequently grows with

Across 21 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Woolly Pawpaw, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.

Beyrich Threeawn · 100% Longleaf Pine · 95% Narrowleaf Silkgrass · 95% Queen's-delight · 90% Capillary Hairsedge · 86% Shortleaf Blazing Star · 86% Turkey Oak · 86% Lopsided Indiangrass · 86%
"%" = share of this plant's plots that also held the species. From sPlotOpen → (Sabatini et al. 2021, CC BY 4.0) — open vegetation plots: wild community composition, not garden design.
How we know this (1) Methods & honest limits
Flower colour Derived

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.

McKenzie, P., Berardi, A.E., Hopkins, R. (2025). flower_color_phenology (MIT).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation. Full methodology →
Sources for this entry (17) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[05] Invasive / introduced status — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — native status
[07] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[08] Ecological value — Warren II 2026 (CC0) · Tallamy host-use counts
[11] Conservation rank — NatureServe Explorer (CC BY)
[12] Cold hardiness (derived) — Derived from U.S. range × USDA PHZM zones
[13] Wildlife & visitors — GloBI — Global Biotic Interactions (CC0)
[15] Caterpillar host count — Warren II 2026 (Dryad, CC0) · Tallamy host-use counts
[16] Caterpillar species — NHM HOSTS (CC0)
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
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).

Citation

Loading…

BibTeX 
Loading…