Leavenworth's Eryngo Eryngium leavenworthii
Leavenworth's Eryngo is an annual wildflower native to the lower 48 states.
More about this plant
Eryngium leavenworthii, also known as Leavenworth's eryngo, is an annual plant in the family Apiaceae that is native to the central United States. It can reach heights up to 3 feet. It inhabits dry rocky prairies, roadside fields, open woodlands and waste areas. The plant is mostly found in areas with limestone or chalk soils. Its flowers appear between July and September, although in some areas the flowers may bloom as late as November. The flower ranges in length from 1.5 to 3 inches and in width approximately 0.5 inches (13 mm). It is frequently mistaken for thistle. The flowers sit atop elongated stems on spiked leaves and form cones of purple or wine colored, tightly clustered blossoms that resemble small fuzzy pineapples. It was named after, Melines Conklin Leavenworth (1796–1862) who is credited with its discovery. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 6 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Purple AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~1 caterpillar species
Eryngium supports ~1 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 Eryngium in North America, including:
✦ Bees 4 bee visitors
4 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Leavenworth's Eryngo :
Wildlife & visitors 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Leavenworth's Eryngo — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Eryngium →
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 (21) 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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