Ropevine Clematis Clematis pauciflora
Ropevine Clematis is a perennial vine native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Jan – May.
More about this plant
Clematis pauciflora is a species of clematis known by the common name ropevine. This flowering plant is native to the high desert and chaparral slopes of southern California and Baja California. It is a woody vine with nodes every few centimeters which produce leaves and flowers. The leaves are made up of several dark green lobed leaflets, each one to three centimeters wide. From each leaf-bearing node grows an inflorescence of one to three flowers with narrow petallike sepals in shades of light yellow. Most of the flower is made up of a spray of up to 50 stamens and almost as many similar-looking pistils. The fruit is an achene equipped with a long plume-like style. The specific epithet pauciflora is Latin for 'few-flowered'. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- 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
✦ Bees 1 bee visitor
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Ropevine Clematis :
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 (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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