Bottle Gentian Gentiana clausa
Bottle Gentian is a perennial wildflower native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 1.5 ft and blooms Aug in full sun – part shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Gentiana clausa, one of several plants with the common name "bottle gentian", is a 1'–2' tall flowering plant in the Gentianaceae family. It is native to Eastern North American moist meadows and woods at higher elevations, from Quebec in the north, through the Appalachian range to North Carolina and Tennessee in the south. It has paired, lanceolate leaves, usually on unbranched stalks, and blue blooms which remain closed or nearly so. Bumblebees are strong enough to push open the petals to suck nectar, thus pollinating the flower, just like for Gentiana andrewsii. Gentiana clausa flowers from late August to October. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.8–7.2
- Fertility need
- High
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Height
- 1.5 ft
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Bunch
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring through autumn
- Fruit
- Brown
- Flower colour
- Blue AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~1 caterpillar species
Gentiana supports ~1 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 Gentiana in North America, including:
✦ Bees 3 bee visitors
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Bottle Gentian :
Related plants
More Gentiana →
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 (31) 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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