Saltmarsh Morning-glory Ipomoea sagittata
Saltmarsh Morning-glory is a perennial vine native to the lower 48 states. It blooms May – Oct. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Ipomoea sagittata, commonly called the saltmarsh morning glory, is a species of flowering plant in the morning glory family. It is native to the Caribbean, Mexico, and the Southeastern United States where it is found in coastal areas. It has been introduced in the Mediterranean Basin at least since the 17th century as a result of seeds transported in ship ballast soil, the ornamental trade or its uses in medicine. This species can be found in the wild in thickets on barrier islands, the edges of salt marshes, and in hammocks. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- 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 Saltmarsh Morning-glory :
Wildlife & visitors 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Saltmarsh Morning-glory — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 22 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Saltmarsh Morning-glory, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Ipomoea →
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 (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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