PlantKey Open ecological atlas
Planner
Home / Browse / Borrichia / Bushy Seaside Tansy
iNaturalist — CC, credited & licensed per image
Asteraceae family

Bushy Seaside Tansy Borrichia frutescens

Native Specialist-bee host
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).
Also known as: Sea Oxeye

Bushy Seaside Tansy is a perennial shrub native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 2.6 ft and blooms Feb – Nov in part shade – shade, with black fruit. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.

More about this plant

Borrichia frutescens is a North American species of flowering plants in the family Asteraceae known by the common names sea oxeye, sea oxeye daisy, bushy seaside tansy, and sea-marigold. In Veracruz it is called verdolaga de mar. It is native to the United States and Mexico, where it occurs along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Its distribution extends from Maryland south to Florida and west to Texas in the US, and along the Mexican Gulf Coast to the Yucatán Peninsula. It is an introduced species in some areas, such as Bermuda and Spain. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
USDA PLANTS — Sun · Soil & moisture
USDA — SoilPH — Soil pH
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Fertility Requirement / Soil Adaptation — Fertility need · Adapts to
USDA — Temp-Min °F — Hardiness
Sun
Part shade – shade
Soil & moisture
Medium moisture
Soil pH
6.1–7.5
Fertility need
Low
Adapts to
Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
Hardiness
USDA zone 9+
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Height, Mature — Height
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Planting Density (per acre) — Spacing
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Growth Rate / Spread / Growth Form / Lifespan / Active Growth Period / Seed Period — Spread · Growth rate · Growth form · Active growth
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0) · USDA PLANTS — Foliage
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Fruit/Seed Color / Fruit Persistence — Fruit
McKenzie et al. 2025 — community-science image analysis (MIT) — Flower colour
Height
2.6 ft
Spacing
2–3 ft apart from USDA planting density
Spread
Moderate
Growth rate
Rapid
Growth form
Rhizomatous
Lifespan
Perennial · moderate
Foliage
Broadleaf · coarse texture
Active growth
Spring
Fruit
Black
Flower colour
Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
In the garden
Sources · In the garden
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Propagation Method / Commercial Availability — Propagate by · In the trade
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Germination (cold stratification) — Seed starting
USDA PLANTS — Seed Period — Seeds ripen
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Foliage Texture / Browse Palatability / Resprout — Deer browsing · Resprouts if cut
Propagate by
Seed, Bare root, Container
Seed starting
No stratification needed
Seeds ripen
Spring – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
In the trade
Routinely available
Deer browsing
Medium moderately palatable
Resprouts if cut
No
Herb layer — Sits in the herb of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
Rain garden / bioswale — Rated OBL on the wetland list — tolerates wet feet, so it suits the soggy zone of a rain garden or bioswale that catches and filters runoff.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
Bloom (the flower's colour)
Bloom · Feb – Nov — 103 obs · Herbarium specimens — Park et al. 2023 (CC BY 4.0)
When to sow · for your area

Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.

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 Documented caterpillar host
Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (CC0). ✦ = recorded on this exact species.
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 12 bee visitors

Specialist native bees depend on it.

Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Borrichia is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.

Xerces pollinator conservation →

12 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Bushy Seaside Tansy :

Halictus poeyi · sweat bee Apis mellifera · Honey Bee Megachile xylocopoides · Carpenter-Mimic Leaf-Cutter Bee · ✦ specialist Agapostemon splendens · sweat bee Megachile inimica · Hostile Leaf-Cutter Bee · ✦ specialist Bombus impatiens · Common Eastern Bumblebee
+ 6 more bees →
Coelioxys slossoni · cuckoo leafcutter bee Epeolus lectoides · cuckoo bee Megachile bahamensis · Bahama Leaf-Cutter Bee Megachile policaris · leafcutter bee · ✦ specialist Melissodes bimaculatus · long-horned bee Triepeolus rufithorax · cuckoo bee
Specialist hosts from Smith et al. 2024. Visitor records (observations, not exhaustive) from Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI → · ✦ = pollen-specialist bee (Smith et al. 2024)
Wildlife & visitors 17 nectaring

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

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 77 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Bushy Seaside Tansy, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.

Saltmeadow Cordgrass · 66% Saltgrass · 53% Seaside Goldenrod · 48% Eastern Redcedar · 42% Lavender Thrift · 42% Jesuit's Bark · 38% Needlegrass Rush · 35% Yaupon · 34%
"%" = 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 (2) Methods & honest limits
Climate niche (heat tolerance & native rainfall) Derived

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.

Realized-niche / climate-envelope approach (Pearson & Dawson 2003; Soberón 2007). Climate: NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county normals (1991–2020).
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 (35) 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)
[17] Invasive / introduced status — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — native status
[18] Wetland indicator — USACE National Wetland Plant List (2022)
[20] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[21] Ecological value — GloBI · Smith et al. 2024 (CC BY)
[23] Conservation rank — NatureServe Explorer (CC BY)
[25] Functional traits — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[26] Climate niche — Derived — realized climate niche from U.S. county occurrences (GBIF) × NOAA NCEI county climate normals 1991–2020 (public domain)
[27] Wildlife & visitors — GloBI — Global Biotic Interactions (CC0)
[29] Other common names — Wikidata (CC0)
[31] Bee specialists — Smith et al. 2024 (Zenodo, CC BY 4.0)
[32] Flower-visitor value (derived) — Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI
[33] Caterpillar species — NHM HOSTS (CC0)
[34] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
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…