Red Brome Bromus rubens
Red Brome is an introduced annual grass, found in Hawaii and the lower 48 states. It grows to 1.3 ft and blooms Mar in part shade – shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Bromus madritensis is a species of brome grass known by the common name compact brome. The specific epithet madritensis refers to Madrid, Spain. It has a diploid number of 28. Wikipedia →
Red Brome is flagged invasive in the U.S. These natives fill a similar niche — same growth habit, bloom season, height, and region — so you keep the look and feed local wildlife instead of spreading a problem.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 6–8.2
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 10+
- Height
- 1.3 ft
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Bunch
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Autumn through spring
- Fruit
- Brown
- Flower colour
- Brown AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Spring 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 ~12 caterpillar species
Bromus 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 Bromus in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 1 mammal · 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Red Brome — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird and 1 mammal species (fruit, seed, browse):
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Bromus →
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 (30) 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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