Sticky Blue Eyed Mary Collinsia rattanii
Sticky Blue Eyed Mary is an annual wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Apr – Jul.
More about this plant
Collinsia rattanii is a species of flowering plant in the plantain family known by the common name sticky blue-eyed Mary. It is native to the coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest of the United States from Washington to northern California. It is an annual herb growing up to 40 centimeters tall with linear leaves rolled under along the edges. The leaves are hairy on the upper surface and hairless and purple-tinted underneath. The inflorescence is coated in sticky glandular hairs. It has a series of nodes from which arise one to five flowers each on pedicels. The flower is only 4 to 8 millimeters long, with two mostly white upper lobes and three mostly purple lower lobes. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- 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 ~2 caterpillar species
Collinsia supports ~2 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 Collinsia in North America, including:
Related plants
More Collinsia →
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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