Early-season nectar — Flowers in a late-winter / early-spring window when few other plants in our catalog bloom — valuable early forage for pollinators (relative to our catalog's bloom coverage).
San Nicholas Biscuitroot is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Mar – May. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
Herb layer — Sits in the herb of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
derived roles
The garden yearbloom → fruit → fall colour
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
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Bloom
Bloom (the flower's colour)
Bloom · Mar – May — 26 obs · Herbarium specimens — Park et al. 2023 (CC BY 4.0)
Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a
guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.
Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (CC0).
✦ Beesspecialist-bee host · 3 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. Lomatium is a recorded
specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
Specialist hosts from Smith et al. 2024. Visitor records (observations, not exhaustive) from Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) ·
GloBI → · ✦ = pollen-specialist bee (Smith et al. 2024)
Wildlife & visitors1 nectaring▸
Open records of who else uses San Nicholas Biscuitroot — a generalist food-web signal, kept
separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
1 adult butterfly & moth
species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Interaction records (observations, not exhaustive) from
GloBI → (CC0). Counts are distinct species; names are the most-recorded. Common names from Wikidata (CC0).
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
[16] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
Cite this pageOpen 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).
