Engelmann's Aster Eucephalus engelmannii
Engelmann's Aster is a perennial shrub native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 6 ft and blooms Jun in full sun, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Eucephalus engelmannii is a North American species in the family Asteraceae known by the common name Engelmann's aster. It is native to the United States and Canada from Alberta and British Columbia to far northern California and Colorado. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.9–7.3
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Height
- 6 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 5 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 3–5 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Multiple stems
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Brown
- Propagate by
- Seed, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- No known commercial source
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Eucephalus in North America, including:
Wildlife & visitors 2 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Engelmann's Aster — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
2 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Eucephalus →
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.
For woody plants that have a height but no measured crown, we estimate width = height × a crown-to-height ratio fit for that plant’s form (conifers narrower than broadleaf trees, shrubs widest), calibrated on our measured open-grown crowns and capped at the largest one ever measured. A measured crown always wins; herbaceous plants get nothing (no anchor).
Honest limits: A coarse class-median estimate for garden-scale spacing, not a measurement; woody single/multi-stem forms only.
Sources for this entry (29) 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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