Drummond's Clematis Clematis drummondii
Drummond's Clematis is a perennial vine native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 10 ft and blooms May – Oct.
More about this plant
Clematis drummondii is a species of flowering plant in the buttercup family, Ranunculaceae, that is native to the Southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Common names include old man's beard, Texas virgin's bower, and barba de chivato. It is a white-flowered vine that can be found clambering among other wildflowers, on shrubs and on fence rows. The natural habitat of C. drummondii includes the Chihuahuan Desert and Sonoran Desert, as well as prairies and grasslands. The sap of this plant is caustic, although its foliage, stems, and roots can be used for dye if caution is used while handling and if breathing the fumes is avoided. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 10 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- 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 ~6 caterpillar species
Clematis supports ~6 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 Clematis in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 14 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Drummond's Clematis — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
14 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Clematis →
How we know this (3) 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.
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 (22) 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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