Smooth Hawkweed Hieracium laevigatum
Smooth Hawkweed is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 1.8 ft. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Hieracium laevigatum, or smooth hawkweed, is a Eurasian plant species in the tribe Cichorieae within the family Asteraceae. It is widespread across much of Europe and western Asia. It is very similar to Hieracium sabaudum and can be found on dry, more or less nutrient rich soil in light woods, grassy embankments and fields, or on walls. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 1.8 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~4 caterpillar species
Hieracium supports ~4 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 Hieracium in North America, including:
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 84 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. Hieracium is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
84 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Smooth Hawkweed — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 1 mammal · 2 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Smooth Hawkweed — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird and 1 mammal species (fruit, seed, browse):
2 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Hieracium →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
We place each species on Grime’s competitor–stress-tolerator–ruderal (C–S–R) triangle using the globally-calibrated “StrateFy” method: leaf size drives the competitor score, dense low-area leaves the stress-tolerator score, and thin high-area leaves the ruderal score. The result is a C/S/R percentage mix and one of 19 strategy classes; we show it in plain words and keep the percentages for the curious.
Honest limits: A species-mean strategy from pooled global leaf measurements — a broad ecological signal, not a precise per-plant or per-site value. Derived, never a measured fact.
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.
Sources for this entry (23) 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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