Miniature Woollystar Eriastrum diffusum
Miniature Woollystar is an annual wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 0.7 ft and blooms Mar – Jun. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Eriastrum diffusum is a species of flowering plant in the phlox family known by the common name miniature woollystar. It is native to the southwestern United States from California to Texas, where it grows in many types of open habitat. This is an annual herb producing a thin, usually woolly stem up to about 20 centimeters long, growing erect or spreading outward. The leaves are divided into 2 to 4 narrow, threadlike linear lobes. The inflorescence is a woolly cluster of narrow, leaflike bracts laced with webby fibers. The small flowers are funnel-shaped, with yellowish throats and white to pale blue corollas. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 0.7 ft
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Eriastrum in North America, including:
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 3 bee visitors
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Eriastrum is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Miniature Woollystar :
Related plants
More Eriastrum →
How we know this (3) 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.
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 (20) 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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