Drummond's False Pennyroyal Hedeoma drummondii
Drummond's False Pennyroyal is an annual shrub native to the lower 48 states. It blooms May – Sep.
More about this plant
Hedeoma drummondii is a species of flowering plant in the mint family known by the common name Drummond's false pennyroyal. It is native to western North America, where it is distributed mainly in the United States west of the Mississippi River and adjacent Mexico. This is a hairy perennial herb with an erect mintlike form up to 45 centimeters tall. The oppositely arranged paired leaves are linear to narrowly oval in shape, pointed, and up to about a centimeter long. The leaves have a strong sweet mint scent when crushed. The herb tastes like peppermint and is used as a minty flavoring in parts of Mexico. The inflorescence arises from the axils of these leaf pairs, bearing three to seven flowers each between one and two centimeters in length on short pedicels. The flowers are generally light to deep lavender with some white markings. The fruit is a waxy, mucilaginous nutlet. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 4 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos — lower-confidence (a more subjective call, often an inconspicuous flower); not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~2 caterpillar species
Hedeoma 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 Hedeoma in North America, including:
Related plants
More Hedeoma →
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 (19) 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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