Waltham Creek Clarkia Clarkia modesta
Waltham Creek Clarkia is an annual wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Apr – Jun. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Clarkia modesta is a species of flowering plant in the evening primrose family known by the common name Waltham Creek clarkia. It is endemic to California, where it is known from the woodlands of several of the central mountain ranges, including the North and Central Coast Ranges and the Sierra Nevada foothills. It is an erect annual herb often exceeding half a meter in height. The oval, linear, or lance-shaped leaves are 2 to 4 centimeters long. The inflorescence bears opening flowers and closed, hanging flower buds. The sepals remain fused as the petals bloom from one side. The petals are about a centimeter long and vary in shape from diamond to widely lance-shaped. They are pale to deep pink and generally dark-flecked or spotted. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Flower colour
- Pink 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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