Zarzabacoa Comun Desmodium incanum
Zarzabacoa Comun is a perennial shrub native to U.S. outlying islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It grows to 4 ft and blooms Feb – Nov in part shade – shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Desmodium incanum, also known as creeping beggarweed, Spanish clover, Spanish tick-trefoil or hitchhikers is a perennial plant native to Central and South America. In Hawaiʻi it is known as kaʻimi or kaimi clover from the Hawaiian for "seeker". Initially introduced as forage crop around the world, it has spread to many places although it is no longer an important fodder crop. It is considered a weed both within and outside its native range. It has spread through Florida and across the southern USA into southern Texas and across many Pacific islands, including Hawaiʻi. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 5–7
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 8+
- Height
- 4 ft
- Spacing
- 6–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Rapid
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Stoloniferous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Fruit
- Brown
- Flower colour
- Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Sprigs, Sod
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- High browsed readily
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~17 caterpillar species
Desmodium supports ~17 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 Desmodium in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 3 bee visitors
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Zarzabacoa Comun :
Wildlife & visitors 1 mammal · 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Zarzabacoa Comun — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 mammal species (fruit, seed, browse):
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Desmodium →
How we know this (4) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
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 (35) 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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