Fire On The Mountain Euphorbia cyathophora
Fire On The Mountain is an annual wildflower native to the lower 48 states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It grows to 3 ft and blooms Mar – Oct. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Euphorbia cyathophora, known by various names including painted spurge, dwarf poinsettia, fire-on-the-mountain, paintedleaf, and wild poinsettia. Native to subtropical and tropical North and South America, it is widely naturalized elsewhere. They belong to the Cyathium type of inflorescence. Here, the inflorescence axis is convex in shape. Dwarf poinsettia is an annual herb growing up to 3 feet tall. It has green stems with leaves that are oblanceolate with lobed margins. It grows near disturbed sites. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 5 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 3 ft
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Orange AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos — lower-confidence (a more subjective call, often an inconspicuous flower); not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~7 caterpillar species
Euphorbia supports ~7 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 Euphorbia 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. Euphorbia is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
Wildlife & visitors 9 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Fire On The Mountain — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
9 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Euphorbia →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
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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