Yellow Fritillary Fritillaria pudica
Yellow Fritillary is a perennial wildflower native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 1 ft and blooms Mar in full sun – part shade, with red fruit.
More about this plant
Fritillaria pudica, the yellow fritillary, is a small perennial plant found in the sagebrush country in the western United States and Canada. It is a member of the lily family Liliaceae. Another common name is "yellow bells", since it has a bell-shaped yellow flower. It may be found in dryish, loose soil; it is amongst the first plants to flower after the snow melts, but the flower does not last very long; as the petals age, they turn a brick-red colour and begin to curl outward. The flowers grow singly or in pairs on the stems, and the floral parts grow in multiples of threes. The species produces a small corm, which forms corms earning the genus the nickname 'riceroot'. During his historic journey, Meriwether Lewis collected a specimen while passing through Idaho in 1806. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 6.5–9
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 12+
- Height
- 1 ft
- Spacing
- 1–2 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Moderate
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Fruit
- Red
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Bulbs
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Spring seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- No known commercial source
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →✦ Bees 5 bee visitors
5 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Yellow Fritillary :
Across 25 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Yellow Fritillary, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Fritillaria →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
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 (32) 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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