Twisted Cleomella Cleomella plocasperma
Twisted Cleomella is an annual wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms May – Sep. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Cleomella plocasperma is a species of flowering plant in the cleome family known by the common name twisted cleomella and alkali stinkweed. It is native to the Great Basin and Mojave Desert in the western United States, where it grows mainly in wet, alkaline soils such as those around hot springs. There is a disjunct population in the Bruneau Valley of southwestern Idaho. It grows with other halophytic species such as saltgrass and greasewood. This is an annual herb producing a smooth, hairless stem which divides into several erect or upright branches which may exceed half a meter tall. The sparse leaves are each split into three narrow leaflets. The flowers occur in a raceme at the top of each stem branch. Each flower has four yellow petals and several long stamens which may be over a centimeter long. The fruit is a capsule with large lobes. It hangs at the tip of the remaining flower receptacle. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →✦ 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. Cleomella 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 Twisted Cleomella :
Related plants
More Cleomella →
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 (16) 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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