Hooker's Balsamroot Balsamorhiza hookeri
Hooker's Balsamroot is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 1 ft and blooms Apr in full sun – part shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Balsamorhiza hookeri is a North American species of perennial plant in the family Asteraceae. It grows in the Great Basin and neighboring regions in the Western United States. It is found in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 6.6–9
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 6+
- Height
- 1 ft
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Single crown
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Fruit
- Brown
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Spring seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Contract growing only
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Balsamorhiza in North America, including:
✦ Bees 14 bee visitors
14 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Hooker's Balsamroot — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Hooker's Balsamroot — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Balsamorhiza →
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 (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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