Gopherweed Baptisia lanceolata
Gopherweed is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Mar – May.
More about this plant
Baptisia lanceolata, the gopherweed, is a species of flowering plant in the family Fabaceae. It is native to the US states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. A perennial reaching 3 ft (1 m), it is found in dry sandy areas such as the Carolina sand hills and open piney woodlands such as the longleaf pine ecosystem. It has bright yellow pea like flowers which attract insect pollinators and bees. The Latin specific epithet lanceolata refers to the shape of the foliage. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~17 caterpillar species
Baptisia supports ~17 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 Baptisia in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 2 bee visitors
2 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Gopherweed :
Across 31 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Gopherweed, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Baptisia →
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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