Desert Trumpet Eriogonum inflatum
Desert Trumpet is an annual wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 0.7 ft and blooms Mar – Oct. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Eriogonum inflatum, the desert trumpet, is a perennial plant of the family Polygonaceae. The plant possesses very small yellow or pink flowers and an inflated stem just below branching segments. Eriogonum: from the Greek erion, "wool", and gonu, "joint or knee", in reference to the hairy or woolly joints of some of the species of the genus, but not particularly inflatum. It is found in the Mojave Desert and other deserts. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 0.7 ft
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf
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 · 14 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. Eriogonum is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
14 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Desert Trumpet — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 2 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Desert Trumpet — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
2 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 58 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Desert Trumpet, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Eriogonum →
How we know this (2) 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.
Sources for this entry (25) 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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