Narrow-leaved Iceplant Conicosia pugioniformis
Narrow-leaved Iceplant is an introduced perennial herb, found in the lower 48 states. It blooms May – Nov.
More about this plant
Conicosia pugioniformis is a species of succulent plant in the ice plant family known by the common names narrow-leaved iceplant and pigroot. It is native to South Africa and it is known on other continents as an introduced species and sometimes a noxious weed. It is an invasive species on the Central Coast of California, where it is a minor threat to native coastal vegetation, although not as harmful as other species of invasive iceplant. This is a short-lived perennial herb growing from an underground caudex. It can sprout vegetatively from the caudex if its aboveground parts are destroyed. The fingerlike leaves are fleshy, gray-green, hairless, and up to 20 centimeters long. The inflorescence is a solitary, malodorous flower up to 8 centimeters wide. It has rings of up to 250 thin petals. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →✦ Bees 2 bee visitors
2 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Narrow-leaved Iceplant :
Wildlife & visitors 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Narrow-leaved Iceplant — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Conicosia →
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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