Denseflower Indian Paintbrush Castilleja densiflora
Denseflower Indian Paintbrush is an annual wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Mar – May.
More about this plant
Castilleja densiflora is a herbaceous flowering plant species known by the common names denseflower Indian paintbrush or white / denseflower owlclover. Like other members of the Indian paintbrushes, it is a root-parasite. It is native to California and northern Baja California, where it grows in grassland and chaparral habitat. It is a variable species. It is generally 10 to 40 centimeters tall with linear or lance-shaped leaves up to 8 centimeters long, and with or without lobes. The inflorescence is as small as 3 centimeters or as long as 25 centimeters in length, and has bracts tipped in white to dull or bright pink or purple. Between the bracts appear the flowers, which are somewhat rounded and pouched, and white to yellow to pink or purple in color. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- 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 ~5 caterpillar species
Castilleja supports ~5 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.
Recorded feeding on Castilleja in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 11 bee visitors
11 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Denseflower Indian Paintbrush :
Wildlife & visitors 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Denseflower Indian Paintbrush — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Castilleja →
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 (22) 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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