Alpine Aster Aster alpinus
Alpine Aster is a perennial wildflower native to Alaska, Canada, and the lower 48 states. It grows to 0.3 ft and blooms Jun in full sun – part shade, with brown fruit. A keystone plant for native insects and the food web.
More about this plant
Aster alpinus, the alpine aster or blue alpine daisy, is a species of flowering plant in the family Asteraceae, native to the mountains of Europe, with a subspecies native to Canada and the United States. This herbaceous perennial has purple, pink, white or blue flowers in summer. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 6–7.5
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 5+
- Height
- 0.3 ft
- Spacing
- 3–4 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Single crown
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Brown
- Propagate by
- Seed, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~109 caterpillar species
Aster supports ~109 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 an exceptional genus.
Recorded feeding on Aster in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 96 bee visitors
96 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Alpine Aster — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 8 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Alpine Aster — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
8 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Aster →
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.
We place each species on Grime’s competitor–stress-tolerator–ruderal (C–S–R) triangle using the globally-calibrated “StrateFy” method: leaf size drives the competitor score, dense low-area leaves the stress-tolerator score, and thin high-area leaves the ruderal score. The result is a C/S/R percentage mix and one of 19 strategy classes; we show it in plain words and keep the percentages for the curious.
Honest limits: A species-mean strategy from pooled global leaf measurements — a broad ecological signal, not a precise per-plant or per-site value. Derived, never a measured fact.
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.
Sources for this entry (34) 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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