Bagflower Clerodendrum thomsoniae
Bagflower is an introduced plant, found in the Pacific Basin and Puerto Rico.
More about this plant
Clerodendrum thomsoniae is a species of flowering plant in the genus Clerodendrum of the family Lamiaceae, native to tropical west Africa from Cameroon west to Senegal. It is an evergreen liana growing to 4 m (13 ft) tall, with ovate to oblong leaves 8–17 cm (3–7 in) cm long. The flowers are produced in cymes of 8–20 together, each flower with a pure white to pale purple five-lobed calyx 2.5 cm in diameter, and a red five-lobed corolla 2 cm long and in diameter. The flowers are born in cymose inflorescences arising from the axils of the leaves. The leaves, in turn, are arranged opposite to each other and at right angles to the pairs above and below. Wikipedia →
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~1 caterpillar species
Clerodendrum supports ~1 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 for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Clerodendrum in North America, including:
✦ Bees 1 bee visitor
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Bagflower :
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Bagflower — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Clerodendrum →
How we know this (1) 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.
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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