Heartleaf Springbeauty Claytonia cordifolia
Heartleaf Springbeauty is a perennial wildflower native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It blooms Jun – Aug. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Claytonia cordifolia is a species of wildflower in the family Montiaceae known by the common name heartleaf springbeauty. It is native to western North America from British Columbia to Utah, where it grows in shallow lakes and in streams or springs and wetlands including bogs and fens according to Miller and Chambers (2006). It is a perennial herb growing from a long, budding rhizome and producing an erect stem up to 40 centimeters tall. The basal leaves have oval blades up to 9 centimeters long with heart-shaped bases where they attach to their long petioles. There is also a pair of oval-shaped leaves at a midpoint on the stem. The stalked inflorescence bears up to 12 small flowers with five white petals each about a centimeter long. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 6 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Flower colour
- White 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
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.
Related plants
More Claytonia →
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 (15) 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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