Virginia Creeper Parthenocissus quinquefolia
A vigorous native climber with five-fingered leaves that blaze crimson in fall; its inconspicuous flowers feed bees and its blue berries feed dozens of bird species.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Dry – medium
- Soil pH
- 5–7.5
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 3 – 9
- Height
- climbs 30 – 50 ft
- Spacing
- 1.5–4 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Rapid
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Stoloniferous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Blue
- Propagate by
- Seed, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Spring – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Medium moderately palatable
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~32 caterpillar species
Parthenocissus supports ~32 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 Parthenocissus in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 30 bee visitors
30 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Virginia Creeper — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 80 birds · 1 mammal · 12 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Virginia Creeper — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 80 birds and 1 mammal species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
+ 1 more species → ↑ show fewer
12 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Across 1,007 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Virginia Creeper, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Parthenocissus →
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.
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.
Sources for this entry (38) 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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