Candle Larkspur Delphinium elatum
Candle Larkspur is an introduced perennial herb, found in Alaska, Canada, and the lower 48 states. It grows to 4 ft.
More about this plant
Delphinium elatum is a species of flowering plant in the buttercup family Ranunculaceae, known by the common names alpine delphinium, bee larkspur, or candle larkspur. It is native to temperate Asia and Europe, it is an erect herbaceous perennial growing to 1.8 m (5.9 ft), with deeply divided leaves. It produces spikes of blue or purple flowers in summer. Wikipedia →
Candle Larkspur 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.
Part of why it adapts so well: Candle Larkspur is a polyploid complex — multiple chromosome races are on record (2n = 16, 32). Spare genome copies give a plant extra raw material to evolve fast, and polyploidy is a documented correlate of successful plant invasions (te Beest et al. 2012). A labelled association from open cytology (ChromoDB), not a prediction for your specific site.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 6 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 4 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Blue AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~10 caterpillar species
Delphinium supports ~10 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 moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Delphinium in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 14 bee visitors
14 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Candle Larkspur — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Candle Larkspur — 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 Delphinium →
How we know this (2) 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.
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 (23) 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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