Woolly Geranium Geranium erianthum
Woolly Geranium is a perennial wildflower native to Alaska and Canada. It grows to 3 ft and blooms Jun in part shade – shade, with brown fruit. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Geranium erianthum, the woolly geranium, is a flowering plant found in China, Japan, Russia, North America and England. Within its range, it is often known as "wild geranium" or "cranesbill", but note that these common names are also used for several other species within the genus Geranium. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil pH
- 4–7.5
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 5+
- Height
- 3 ft
- Spacing
- 1.5–3 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Moderate
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Rhizomatous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Fruit
- Brown
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- 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 ~24 caterpillar species
Geranium supports ~24 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 moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Geranium in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 37 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. Geranium is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
37 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Woolly Geranium — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 2 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Woolly Geranium — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
2 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Geranium →
How we know this (1) 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.
Sources for this entry (35) 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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