Carolina Springbeauty Claytonia caroliniana
Carolina Springbeauty is a perennial wildflower native to Canada, the lower 48 states, and Saint-Pierre & Miquelon. It blooms Mar – Apr. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Claytonia caroliniana, the Carolina springbeauty, is an herbaceous perennial in the family Montiaceae. It was formerly placed in the Portulacaceae. Its native range is eastern and central North America. It is most commonly found in the New England area of the United States but its habitat extends from Ontario and a northern limit in the Cape Anguille Mountains of Newfoundland and south to Alabama. It grows approximately 6 inches tall in forests of the Appalachian Mountains and piedmont Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 5 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- 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 Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Claytonia in North America, including:
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 23 bee visitors
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Claytonia is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
23 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Carolina Springbeauty — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 6 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Carolina Springbeauty — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
6 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Claytonia →
How we know this (3) 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.
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 (21) 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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