False Daisy Eclipta prostrata
False Daisy is an annual wildflower native to Canada, the lower 48 states, and Puerto Rico. It grows to 3.2 ft and blooms Jul in full sun – part shade.
More about this plant
Eclipta prostrata, the false daisy, is a species of plant in the family Asteraceae. It is widespread across much of the world. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.2–7.9
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 11+
- Height
- 3.2 ft
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Bunch
- Lifespan
- Annual · moderate
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Summer
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- No known commercial source
- Deer browsing
- Medium moderately palatable
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →✦ Bees 106 bee visitors
106 native & managed bee species are documented visiting False Daisy — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 5 nectaring
Open records of who else uses False Daisy — 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 Eclipta →
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 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 (34) 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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