Virginia Dayflower Commelina virginica
Virginia Dayflower is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states and Puerto Rico. It grows to 3.5 ft and blooms Jul in full sun, with red fruit.
More about this plant
Commelina virginica, commonly known as the Virginia dayflower, is a perennial herbaceous plant in the dayflower family. It is native to the mideastern and southeastern United States, where it is typical of wet soils. While most members of the genus have thin, fibrous roots, the Virginia dayflower is unusual for its genus in having a perennial rhizome. The plant was first described by Carl Linnaeus in his 1762 publication of the second edition of Species Plantarum. A phylogenetic study based on the nuclear ribosomal DNA region 5S NTS and the chloroplast region trnL-trnF, two commonly used gene regions for determining relationships, suggested that Commelina virginica is most closely related to two African species, namely Commelina capitata and Commelina congesta. However, the statistical support for this result was low. Morphologically speaking the supposedly related species do share some unique traits. C. virginica and C. capitata have red hairs at the top of their leaf sheaths, an unusual character in the genus, while C. virginica and C. congesta both have clustered inflorescences on very short stalks. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 4.7–6.7
- Fertility need
- High
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 6+
- Height
- 3.5 ft
- Spacing
- 3–4 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Rapid
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Rhizomatous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Summer & autumn
- Fruit
- Red
- Flower colour
- Blue AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- No known commercial source
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~2 caterpillar species
Commelina 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 Commelina in North America, including:
Across 123 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Virginia Dayflower, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Commelina →
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 (32) 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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