Serrate Spurge Euphorbia serrata
Serrate Spurge is an introduced perennial herb, found in the lower 48 states. It grows to 1.7 ft.
More about this plant
Euphorbia serrata is a species of spurge known by the common names serrated spurge and sawtooth spurge, and also known as Tintern spurge and upright spurge. It is native to Europe but it is present elsewhere as a weedy introduced species. This is a perennial herb growing anywhere from 20 centimetres to about half a metre in height. The leaves are long and very narrow on most of the plant, with more oval-shaped leaves toward the tips of the stems. They are finely toothed. At the ends of the branches are inflorescences of tiny flowers. The fruit is a spherical capsule about half a centimetre wide containing tiny gray seeds. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 1.7 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
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 · 4 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. Euphorbia is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
4 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Serrate Spurge :
Wildlife & visitors 9 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Serrate Spurge — 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.
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 (19) 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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