Sorrelvine Cissus trifoliata
Sorrelvine is a perennial vine native to the lower 48 states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It grows to 36 ft and blooms Jun – Sep.
More about this plant
Cissus trifoliata, known variously as possum-grape, sorrelvine, vine-sorrel, or hierba del buey is a New World plant species in the grape family. It is native to the southern United States, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and perhaps Ecuador (Loja). It is also dispersed among some islands in the Caribbean. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 36 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~3 caterpillar species
Cissus supports ~3 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 for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Cissus in North America, including:
✦ Bees 2 bee visitors
2 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Sorrelvine :
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Sorrelvine — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Cissus →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
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.
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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