Brittle Spineflower Chorizanthe brevicornu
Brittle Spineflower is an annual wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Mar – May.
More about this plant
Chorizanthe brevicornu is a species of flowering plant in the buckwheat family which is known by the common name brittle spineflower. It is native to the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, where it is widely distributed but is most abundant in the deserts. The plant extends an erect, naked, highly branching stem which is greenish in color. Most of the leaves grow from the base of the plant, but a few small ones may appear up on the stem. At the end of each of the many branches is a tube-shaped inflorescence which opens into a tiny white or greenish-yellow flower a few millimeters wide. Chorizanthe brevicornu relies on wind and small mammals for seed dispersal. The brittle nature of the plant allows the inflorescence to break apart, aiding in spreading seeds across arid landscapes. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Green 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 Chorizanthe in North America, including:
Wildlife & visitors 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Brittle Spineflower — 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 Chorizanthe →
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 (18) 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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