Reveal's Buckwheat Eriogonum contiguum
Reveal's Buckwheat is an annual wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Mar – May. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Eriogonum contiguum is an uncommon species of wild buckwheat. It is commonly known as Reveal's buckwheat and annual desert trumpet. It is native to Death Valley in California and adjacent sections of Nevada. It is commonly found in Death Valley National Park and Mojave National Preserve. Eriogonum contiguum grows in sandy to gravelly flats and slopes, or rocky hills, and lower bajadas with Atriplex species. It is an annual herb which produces an erect, spreading stem up to about 30 centimeters high. Leaves are basal, small rounded, and woolly. The many scattered inflorescences are small, compact clusters of tiny hairy yellow flowers. Flowers bloom April to June. It is threatened due to habitat degradation by off-road vehicles, competition with exotic plant species, trampling, grazing, and erosion. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 10 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~9 caterpillar species
Eriogonum supports ~9 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.
Recorded feeding on Eriogonum in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Eriogonum is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
Related plants
More Eriogonum →
How we know this (1) Methods & honest limits
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 (15) 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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