Browne's Savory Clinopodium brownei
Browne's Savory is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Feb – Nov. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Clinopodium brownei, or Browne's savory, is a perennial with sprawling square stems and opposite leaves. This herb is heavily pubescent on the stem and inner and outer calyx. The corolla is bilabiate. The lips are thin and delicate and may contain hairs. The corolla color is pinkish-white to lavender and sometimes white. There are four stamens which are didynamous and epipetalis. The ovary is 4 lobed with a gynobasic style with acute apices. Under the ovary appears to be a nectiferous gland. This herb is found during late winter and early spring in marshy environments along the coastal plain of the southeastern United States, specifically from Texas through South Carolina, as well as in Mexico, Central America, South America and the West Indies. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos — lower-confidence (a more subjective call, often an inconspicuous flower); 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. Clinopodium 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 Browne's Savory :
Wildlife & visitors 2 birds · 2 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Browne's Savory — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 2 birds species (fruit, seed, browse):
2 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Clinopodium →
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 (18) 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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