Davy's Clarkia Clarkia davyi
Davy's Clarkia is an annual wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Apr – Jul. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Clarkia davyi is a species of flowering plant in the evening primrose family known by the common name Davy's fairy fan, or Davy's clarkia. It is endemic to California, where it grows in coastal habitats such as beaches and bluffs. This is an annual herb producing a thin stem which grows along the ground or somewhat upright. It is lined with small oval-shaped leaves one or two centimeters long. While in bud the flower is enclosed in four fused thick sepals. It blooms into a petite bowl-shaped corolla of four pink petals which often have lighter bases. Each petal is 5 to 11 millimeters long. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~3 caterpillar species
Clarkia 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.
Recorded feeding on Clarkia in North America, including:
✦ Bees specialist-bee host
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Clarkia is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
Related plants
More Clarkia →
How we know this (2) 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.
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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