PlantKey Open ecological atlas
Planner
Home / Browse / Dasylirion / Common Sotol
iNaturalist — CC, credited & licensed per image
Liliaceae family

Common Sotol Dasylirion wheeleri

Native

Common Sotol is a perennial shrub native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 15 ft and blooms Apr in part shade – shade, with brown fruit.

More about this plant

Dasylirion wheeleri is a species of flowering plant in the asparagus family (Asparagaceae), native to arid environments of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
USDA PLANTS — Sun · Soil & moisture
USDA — SoilPH — Soil pH
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Fertility Requirement / Soil Adaptation — Fertility need · Adapts to
USDA — Temp-Min °F — Hardiness
Sun
Part shade – shade
Soil & moisture
Low moisture
Soil pH
6.6–9
Fertility need
Low
Adapts to
Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam)
Hardiness
USDA zone 10+
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Height, Mature — Height
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Planting Density (per acre) — Spacing
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Growth Rate / Spread / Growth Form / Lifespan / Active Growth Period / Seed Period — Spread · Growth rate · Growth form · Active growth
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0) · USDA PLANTS — Foliage
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Fruit/Seed Color / Fruit Persistence — Fruit
Height
15 ft
Spacing
4–6 ft apart from USDA planting density
Spread
Slow
Growth rate
Slow
Growth form
Single crown
Lifespan
Perennial · long-lived
Foliage
Broadleaf · coarse texture
Active growth
Spring & summer
Fruit
Brown
In the garden
Sources · In the garden
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Propagation Method / Commercial Availability — Propagate by · In the trade
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Germination (cold stratification) — Seed starting
USDA PLANTS — Seed Period — Seeds ripen
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Foliage Texture / Browse Palatability / Resprout — Resprouts if cut
Propagate by
Seed, Bare root, Container, Sprigs
Seed starting
No stratification needed
Seeds ripen
Summer seed-collection / harvest window
In the trade
Contract growing only
Resprouts if cut
Yes regrows after top-kill
Shrub layer — Sits in the shrub of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
derived roles
The garden year bloom → fruit → fall colour
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Bloom
Bloom (the flower's colour)
Bloom · Apr — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — BloomPeriod
When to sow · for your area

Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.

Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
✦ Bees 20 bee visitors
Visitor records (observations, not exhaustive) from Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI → · ✦ = pollen-specialist bee (Smith et al. 2024)
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird

Open records of who else uses Common Sotol — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.

Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):

Patagioenas fasciata · Band-Tailed Pigeon
Interaction records (observations, not exhaustive) from GloBI → (CC0). Counts are distinct species; names are the most-recorded. Common names from Wikidata (CC0).
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
Frequently grows with

Across 78 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Common Sotol, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.

Sideoats Grama · 44% Velvet Mesquite · 42% Redberry Juniper · 32% Sonoran Scrub Oak · 29% Catclaw Acacia · 27% Banana Yucca · 26% Sacahuista · 24% Cactus Apple · 22%
"%" = share of this plant's plots that also held the species. From sPlotOpen → (Sabatini et al. 2021, CC BY 4.0) — open vegetation plots: wild community composition, not garden design.
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
Photosynthesis Direct fact

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.

Kattge, J. et al. TRY plant trait database — Categorical Traits Dataset (2012).
Climate niche (heat tolerance & native rainfall) Derived

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.

Realized-niche / climate-envelope approach (Pearson & Dawson 2003; Soberón 2007). Climate: NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county normals (1991–2020).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation. Full methodology →
Sources for this entry (31) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[18] Invasive / introduced status — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — native status
[20] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[21] Ecological value — GloBI
[23] Functional traits — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[24] Photosynthetic pathway — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[25] Climate niche — Derived — realized climate niche from U.S. county occurrences (GBIF) × NOAA NCEI county climate normals 1991–2020 (public domain)
[26] Wildlife & visitors — GloBI — Global Biotic Interactions (CC0)
[28] Bee specialists — Smith et al. 2024 (Zenodo, CC BY 4.0)
[29] Flower-visitor value (derived) — Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI
[30] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
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).

Citation

Loading…

BibTeX 
Loading…