Virginia Sweetspire Itea virginica
Virginia Sweetspire is a perennial shrub native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 10 ft and blooms Apr in full sun, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Itea virginica, commonly known as Virginia willow or Virginia sweetspire, is a small North American flowering shrub that grows in low-lying woods and wetland margins. Virginia willow is a member of the Iteaceae family, and native to the southeast United States. Itea virginica has small flowers on pendulous racemes. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 4–7.5
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 5+
- Drought tolerance
- Low
- Shade tolerance
- High
- Wet-soil tolerance
- High waterlogging
- Height
- 10 ft
- Spacing
- 4–6 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Slow
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Stoloniferous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Fruit
- Brown
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- High browsed readily
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →✦ Bees 13 bee visitors
13 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Virginia Sweetspire — the 12 most-recorded:
+ 6 more bees → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 54 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Virginia Sweetspire — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
54 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Itea →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
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.
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 (34) 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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