Pink Stickseed Hackelia mundula
Pink Stickseed is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Jun – Aug.
More about this plant
Hackelia mundula is a species of flowering plant in the borage family known by the common name pink stickseed. It is native to the high mountains of California, especially the Sierra Nevada. Its range extends into Oregon. This is a lush, hairy perennial herb growing to maximum heights between 40 and 80 centimeters. It produces an array of erect stems with oval- or lance-shaped leaves most abundant around the bases, growing up to 22 centimeters (8.7 in) long. The upper stems are mostly leafless and hold cyme inflorescences of flowers. Each petite flower has 5 rounded lobes which are light pink and age to light blue in color, each with a smaller petallike appendage at its base. The fruit is a small nutlet covered in thin, hairlike prickles. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Flower colour
- Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Hackelia in North America, including:
Related plants
More Hackelia →
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 (15) 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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