Woodland Pink Dianthus sylvestris
Woodland Pink is an introduced perennial herb, found in Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 0.4 ft.
More about this plant
Dianthus sylvestris, also known as wood pink, is a species of Dianthus found in Europe, particularly in the Alps, and also said to be disjunctly found in the mountains of Greece. A perennial, it prefers to grow in drier, stony places, so it is occasionally planted in rock gardens. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 0.4 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~10 caterpillar species
Dianthus 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 for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Dianthus in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 53 birds · 7 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Woodland Pink — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 53 birds species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
7 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Dianthus →
How we know this (3) 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.
We place each species on Grime’s competitor–stress-tolerator–ruderal (C–S–R) triangle using the globally-calibrated “StrateFy” method: leaf size drives the competitor score, dense low-area leaves the stress-tolerator score, and thin high-area leaves the ruderal score. The result is a C/S/R percentage mix and one of 19 strategy classes; we show it in plain words and keep the percentages for the curious.
Honest limits: A species-mean strategy from pooled global leaf measurements — a broad ecological signal, not a precise per-plant or per-site value. Derived, never a measured 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.
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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