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iNaturalist — CC, credited & licensed per image
Hamamelidaceae family

Mountain Witchalder Fothergilla major

Native

Mountain Witchalder is a perennial shrub native to the lower 48 states.

More about this plant

Fothergilla latifolia, the large witch alder or mountain witch alder, is a species of flowering plant in the genus Fothergilla, family Hamamelidaceae, that is native to woodland and swamps in the Allegheny Mountains and southern Appalachian Mountains of the southeastern United States. It is a deciduous shrub growing to 2.5 m with fragrant white bottlebrush flowers appearing along with, or before, the glossy leaves. The leaves often turn brilliant shades of red and orange in autumn. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
Cold hardiness (derived) — Hardiness
Hardiness
≥ zone 8 derived from its U.S. range
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0) — Foliage
McKenzie et al. 2025 — community-science image analysis (MIT) — Flower colour
Lifespan
Perennial
Foliage
Broadleaf
Flower colour
White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
In the garden
Shrub layer — Sits in the shrub of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
derived roles
AI = read by an AI vision model · DERIVED = a computed estimate, not a direct measurement. The “How we know this” section below details each.
Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
Wildlife & visitors 3 nectaring

Open records of who else uses Mountain Witchalder — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.

Interaction records (observations, not exhaustive) from GloBI → (CC0). Counts are distinct species; names are the most-recorded. Common names from Wikidata (CC0).
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
How we know this (1) Methods & honest limits
Flower colour Derived

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.

McKenzie, P., Berardi, A.E., Hopkins, R. (2025). flower_color_phenology (MIT).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation. Full methodology →
Sources for this entry (13) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[05] Invasive / introduced status — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — native status
[07] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[08] Ecological value — GloBI
[09] Conservation rank — NatureServe Explorer (CC BY)
[11] Cold hardiness (derived) — Derived from U.S. range × USDA PHZM zones
[12] Wildlife & visitors — GloBI — Global Biotic Interactions (CC0)
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
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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