Silverleaf Cotoneaster Cotoneaster pannosus
Silverleaf Cotoneaster is an introduced perennial shrub, found in Hawaii and the lower 48 states. It blooms Jan – Jun.
More about this plant
Cotoneaster pannosus is a species of Cotoneaster known by the common name silverleaf cotoneaster. This woody shrub is native to south central China but it has been introduced to other areas of the world, including southern Africa and Australia as an ornamental. It has become naturalized in some areas but it is a troublesome noxious weed in others, for example, in Hawaii. This is a sprawling shrub easily reaching over 3 meters in height. It is covered in dull green oval-shaped leaves with fuzzy white undersides and blooms in white flowers. The fruits are red-orange pomes containing two seeds each. These fruits are very attractive to birds, which are the main agent of seed dispersal. It grows on the elevation of 3,280 feet (1,000 m). Wikipedia →
Silverleaf Cotoneaster is flagged invasive in the U.S. These natives fill a similar niche — same growth habit, bloom season, height, and region — so you keep the look and feed local wildlife instead of spreading a problem.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~3 caterpillar species
Cotoneaster supports ~3 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 for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Cotoneaster in North America, including:
✦ Bees 5 bee visitors
5 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Silverleaf Cotoneaster :
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird
Open records of who else uses Silverleaf Cotoneaster — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
Related plants
More Cotoneaster →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
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 (22) 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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