Lyall's Mariposa Lily Calochortus lyallii
Lyall's Mariposa Lily is a perennial wildflower native to Canada and the lower 48 states. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Calochortus lyallii, or Lyall's mariposa lily, is a North American species of flowering plant in the lily family. It is native and endemic to Province of British Columbia in western Canada, as well as the State of Washington in the northwestern United States. It only grows east of the Cascade crest in the mountains and foothills, and though its numbers are apparently secure in Washington, it is considered to be a blue-listed species in Canada- blue-listed taxa are at risk, but are not extirpated, endangered or threatened. It is found in dry to mesic open forest at lower to middle elevations in the mountains, commonly found with Pinus ponderosa, Pseudotsuga menziesii, Calamagrostis rubescens (pinegrass) and Carex geyeri. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Flower colour
- Blue AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos — lower-confidence (a more subjective call, often an inconspicuous flower); not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 11 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. Calochortus is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
11 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Lyall's Mariposa Lily :
Related plants
More Calochortus →
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 (16) 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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