Italian Leather Flower Clematis viticella
Italian Leather Flower is an introduced perennial vine, found in Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 7 ft.
More about this plant
Clematis viticella, the Italian leather flower, purple clematis, or virgin's bower, is a species of flowering plant in the buttercup family Ranunculaceae, native to Southern Europe and Western Asia, from the Italic Peninsula to Iran. This deciduous climber was the first clematis imported into English gardens, where it was already being grown in 1569 by Hugh Morgan, apothecary to Elizabeth I. By 1597, when it was already being called "virgin's bower", there were two varieties in English gardens, a blue and a red. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 7 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
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 10 bee visitors
10 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Italian Leather Flower :
Wildlife & visitors 3 birds · 2 mammals
Open records of who else uses Italian Leather Flower — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 3 birds and 2 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse):
Related plants
More Clematis →
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.
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.
Sources for this entry (23) 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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