Cape-ivy Delairea odorata
Cape-ivy is an introduced perennial vine, found in Hawaii and the lower 48 states. It grows to 6 ft and blooms Jan – Dec.
More about this plant
Delairea odorata is a climber within the family Asteraceae that is native to South Africa. One of the two species in the genus Delairea, it was previously included in the genus Senecio as Senecio mikanioides. It is known as Cape ivy in some parts of the world (US) and German ivy in others. Other names include parlor ivy and Italian ivy. Wikipedia →
Cape-ivy 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 6 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 6 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- 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 1 bee visitor
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Cape-ivy :
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 4 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Cape-ivy — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
4 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Delairea →
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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