Cornish Heath Erica vagans
Cornish Heath is an introduced perennial shrub, found in the lower 48 states. It grows to 1.3 ft.
More about this plant
Erica vagans, the Cornish heath or wandering heath, is a species of flowering plant in the family Ericaceae, native to Ireland, Cornwall, western France and Spain. It is a vigorous, spreading, evergreen heather reaching 75 cm (30 in) tall and wide, with pink flowers borne in racemes 14 cm (6 in) long in summer and autumn. The Latin specific epithet vagans literally means "wandering"; in this context it means "widely distributed". Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Drought tolerance
- Low
- Shade tolerance
- Low
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Moderate waterlogging
- Height
- 1.3 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Evergreen needleleaf
- 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 →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~4 caterpillar species
Erica supports ~4 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 modest genus for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Erica in North America, including:
+ 1 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 29 bee visitors
29 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Cornish Heath — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 6 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Cornish Heath — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
6 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Erica →
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.
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.
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 (23) 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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