Rio Grande Butterflybush Buddleja sessiliflora
Rio Grande Butterflybush is a perennial shrub native to the lower 48 states.
More about this plant
Buddleja sessiliflora, commonly known as Rio Grande butterfly-bush or tepozán, native to southern Arizona and the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas in the United States as well as much of central and northern Mexico excluding the Chihuahua Desert and Baja California Sur. The shrub grows in thorn savannah, forests, riparian zones, along roadsides and in disturbed areas from sea level to 2,800 m. The species was first named and described by Kunth in 1818. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 10 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Green AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~1 caterpillar species
Buddleja supports ~1 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 modest genus for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Buddleja in North America, including:
✦ Bees 1 bee visitor
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Rio Grande Butterflybush :
Wildlife & visitors 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Rio Grande Butterflybush — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Buddleja →
How we know this (1) Methods & honest limits
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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