Mountain Clarkia Clarkia heterandra
Mountain Clarkia is an annual wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms May – Jun. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Clarkia heterandra is a species of flowering plant in the family Onagraceae known by the common name mountain clarkia. It is endemic to California, where it is from the forests and woodlands of several of eastern and western mountain ranges. It is an annual herb producing an erect, glandular stem to around half a meter in maximum height. The lance-shaped to oval leaves are up to 8 centimeters long and are borne on petioles of up to 2 centimeters. The top of the stem is occupied by the inflorescence, with open flowers and closed buds. The sepals remain fused as the flower blooms from one side. The pink petals are oval in shape and just a few millimeters long. There are 8 stamens, some large and some small and sterile. The fruit is a small, hard body 2 or 3 millimeters long containing 1 or 2 seeds. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Flower colour
- Purple AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
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
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 (16) 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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