Redstem Ceanothus Ceanothus sanguineus
Redstem Ceanothus is a perennial shrub native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 10 ft and blooms Apr in full sun – part shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Ceanothus sanguineus is a species of shrub in the family Rhamnaceae known by the common name redstem ceanothus. It is native to western North America from British Columbia to Montana to far northern California; it is also known from Michigan. It grows in temperate coniferous forest habitat in forest openings amidst the conifers. This is an erect shrub approaching 3 meters in maximum height. Its stem is red to purple in color, its woody parts green and hairless when new. The deciduous leaves are alternately arranged and up to about 10 centimeters long. They are thin, light green, oval, and generally edged with glandular teeth. The undersides are sometimes hairy. The inflorescence is a cluster of white flowers up to about 12 centimeters long. The fruit is a three-lobed smooth capsule about 4 millimeters long. This shrub is an important food plant for wild ungulates such as the Rocky Mountain Elk, it is browsed eagerly by many types of livestock, and the seed is consumed by many types of animals. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 6.5–8
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 6+
- Height
- 10 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 8 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 21 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Multiple stems
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Brown
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- No known commercial source
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~45 caterpillar species
Ceanothus supports ~45 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 strong genus.
Recorded feeding on Ceanothus in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 1 bee visitor
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Redstem Ceanothus :
Wildlife & visitors 2 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Redstem Ceanothus — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
2 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Ceanothus →
How we know this (4) 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.
For woody plants that have a height but no measured crown, we estimate width = height × a crown-to-height ratio fit for that plant’s form (conifers narrower than broadleaf trees, shrubs widest), calibrated on our measured open-grown crowns and capped at the largest one ever measured. A measured crown always wins; herbaceous plants get nothing (no anchor).
Honest limits: A coarse class-median estimate for garden-scale spacing, not a measurement; woody single/multi-stem forms only.
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 (36) 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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