Giant Red Indian Paintbrush Castilleja miniata
Giant Red Indian Paintbrush is a perennial shrub native to Alaska, Canada, and the lower 48 states. It blooms May – Jul.
More about this plant
Castilleja miniata is a species of Indian paintbrush known by the common name giant red paintbrush. It is native to western North America from Alaska to Ontario to California to New Mexico, where it grows usually in moist places in a wide variety of habitat types. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 4 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Orange 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 3 bee visitors
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Giant Red Indian Paintbrush :
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Giant Red Indian Paintbrush — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 55 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Giant Red Indian Paintbrush, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
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 (25) 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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