Saguaro Carnegiea gigantea
Saguaro is a perennial tree native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 50 ft and blooms Apr – Jun.
More about this plant
The saguaro is a tree-like cactus species in the monotypic genus Carnegiea that can grow to be over 12 meters tall. It is native to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, the Mexican state of Sonora, and the Whipple Mountains and Imperial County areas of California. Saguaro typically grow at elevations ranging from sea level to 4,500 feet (1,400 m), although they may be found at up to 5,000 feet (1,500 m). The saguaro blossom is the state wildflower of Arizona. Its scientific name is given in honor of Andrew Carnegie. In 1933, Saguaro National Park, near Tucson, Arizona, was designated to help protect this species and its habitat. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 10 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 50 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Carnegiea in North America, including:
✦ Bees 4 bee visitors
4 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Saguaro :
Wildlife & visitors 6 birds · 2 mammals · 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Saguaro — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 6 birds and 2 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse):
+ 2 more species → ↑ show fewer
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 386 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Saguaro, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Carnegiea →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
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 (27) 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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