Showy Dewflower Drosanthemum floribundum
Showy Dewflower is an introduced perennial shrub, found in the lower 48 states. It grows to 2.6 ft and blooms Apr – Jul.
More about this plant
Drosanthemum floribundum, commonly known as rodondo creeper, pale dewplant, or dew-flower, is a succulent plant in the ice plant family, Aizoaceae. The species is native to the Eastern Cape in South Africa and is naturalised in Portugal and the states of South Australia, Western Australia, and Victoria in Australia, as well as Pacific Grove, California where it is called the Magic Carpet. It is a trailing perennial with hairy stems and leaves that are either cylindrical or triangular in cross section. These are between 3 and 15 mm in length and 1 to 2.5 mm in width. Flowers are up to 2.5 cm in diameter and are lavender, pink or occasionally white. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 2.6 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →✦ Bees 3 bee visitors
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Showy Dewflower :
Wildlife & visitors 5 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Showy Dewflower — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
5 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Drosanthemum →
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 (21) 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).
Loading…
BibTeX
Loading…