Fringed Spiderflower Cleome rutidosperma
Fringed Spiderflower is an introduced annual herb, found in the lower 48 states. It grows to 3 ft.
More about this plant
Cleome rutidosperma, commonly known as fringed spider flower or purple cleome, is a species of flowering plant in the genus Cleome of the family Cleomaceae, native to tropical Africa. This species is an invasive weed throughout most lowland wet tropical areas of Asia and Australia. It is a very common weed of lawns. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 3 ft
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Purple AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~5 caterpillar species
Cleome supports ~5 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 Cleome in North America, including:
+ 2 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 4 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. Cleome is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
4 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Fringed Spiderflower :
Wildlife & visitors 7 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Fringed Spiderflower — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
7 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Cleome →
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.
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 (20) 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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