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Lamiaceae family

Ashe's Calamint Clinopodium ashei

Native Specialist-bee host

Ashe's Calamint is a perennial shrub native to the lower 48 states. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.

More about this plant

Clinopodium ashei is a species of flowering plant in the mint family known by the common names Ashe's savory and Ashe's calamint. It is native to Florida and Georgia in the United States. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
Cold hardiness (derived) — Hardiness
Hardiness
≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
Lifespan
Perennial
In the garden
Shrub layer — Sits in the shrub of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
derived roles
Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 17 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. Clinopodium is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.

Xerces pollinator conservation →

17 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Ashe's Calamint — the 12 most-recorded:

Megachile mendica · Flat-Tailed Leaf-Cutter Bee · ✦ specialist Anthidiellum perplexum Dianthidium floridiense Lasioglossum nymphale · sweat bee Megachile texana · Texas Leaf-Cutter Bee Coelioxys sayi · Say's Cuckoo-Leaf-Cutter
+ 6 more bees →
Megachile albitarsis · White-Footed Leaf-Cutter Bee Halictus poeyi · sweat bee Megachile exilis · Slender Resin Bee Megachile georgica · leafcutter bee Megachile policaris · leafcutter bee · ✦ specialist Megachile pruina · Hoary Leaf-Cutter Bee
Specialist hosts from Smith et al. 2024. Visitor records (observations, not exhaustive) from Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI → · ✦ = pollen-specialist bee (Smith et al. 2024)
Wildlife & visitors 5 nectaring

Open records of who else uses Ashe's Calamint — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.

Interaction records (observations, not exhaustive) from GloBI → (CC0). Counts are distinct species; names are the most-recorded. Common names from Wikidata (CC0).
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
How we know this (1) Methods & honest limits
Climate niche (heat tolerance & native rainfall) Derived

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.

Realized-niche / climate-envelope approach (Pearson & Dawson 2003; Soberón 2007). Climate: NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county normals (1991–2020).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation. Full methodology →
Sources for this entry (16) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[05] Invasive / introduced status — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — native status
[07] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[08] Ecological value — GloBI · Smith et al. 2024 (CC BY)
[09] Conservation rank — NatureServe Explorer (CC BY)
[10] Climate niche — Derived — realized climate niche from U.S. county occurrences (GBIF) × NOAA NCEI county climate normals 1991–2020 (public domain)
[11] Cold hardiness (derived) — Derived from U.S. range × USDA PHZM zones
[12] Wildlife & visitors — GloBI — Global Biotic Interactions (CC0)
[14] Bee specialists — Smith et al. 2024 (Zenodo, CC BY 4.0)
[15] Flower-visitor value (derived) — Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI
[16] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
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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