Clustered Green Gentian Frasera fastigiata
Clustered Green Gentian is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states.
More about this plant
Frasera fastigiata is a species of flowering plant in the gentian family known by the common name clustered green gentian. It is native to the northwestern United States, where it grows in meadows, grasslands, woodlands, and forest openings. It is a perennial herb that grows 5 ft (1.5 m) tall. The basal leaves have oval or spoon-shaped blades up to 30 centimeters long by 10 wide. Leaves higher on the stem may be smaller and narrower. Some of the leaves have white margins. The inflorescence is a dense panicle atop the stem, sometimes interrupted into a series of clusters of flowers. Each flower has a corolla of four pointed lobes each roughly a centimeter long. They are greenish, often tinged with yellow or blue. There are four stamens tipped with large anthers and a central ovary. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Flower colour
- Blue AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~2 caterpillar species
Frasera supports ~2 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 Frasera in North America, including:
✦ Bees 15 bee visitors
15 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Clustered Green Gentian — the 12 most-recorded:
Related plants
More Frasera →
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 (18) 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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