Early Whitetop Fleabane Erigeron vernus
Early Whitetop Fleabane is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Feb – Oct. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Erigeron vernus is a North American species of flowering plant in the family Asteraceae known by the common name early white-top fleabane. It is native to the southeastern United States from Virginia to Louisiana. It is found most commonly in habitat types such as interdunal swales, wet savannas, cypress swamps, among others. It acts as an indicator species in the savannas of the Florida Panhandle. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 8 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- 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 ~15 caterpillar species
Erigeron supports ~15 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.
Recorded feeding on Erigeron in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 2 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. Erigeron is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
2 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Early Whitetop Fleabane :
Across 67 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Early Whitetop Fleabane, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Erigeron →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
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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