Ginger-leaf Morning-glory Ipomoea asarifolia
Ginger-leaf Morning-glory is an introduced perennial herb, found in the lower 48 states.
More about this plant
Ipomoea asarifolia, known as the ginger-leaf morning-glory, is a species of plant in the family Convolvulaceae, of the genus Ipomoea. It is a scrambling subshrub native to the tropical Americas, tropical Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Indochina, Java, and the Lesser Sunda Islands. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Purple AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~39 caterpillar species
Ipomoea supports ~39 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 strong genus.
Recorded feeding on Ipomoea in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 1 bee visitor
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Ipomoea is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Ginger-leaf Morning-glory :
Related plants
More Ipomoea →
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.
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.
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 (20) 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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