Turkey Tangle Fogfruit Phyla nodiflora
Turkey Tangle Fogfruit is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It grows to 0.2 ft and blooms Apr – Sep in full sun – part shade.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 6–8.5
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 6+
- Height
- 0.2 ft
- Spacing
- 3–4 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Rapid
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Stoloniferous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Summer
- Flower colour
- Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos — lower-confidence (a more subjective call, often an inconspicuous flower); not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Sprigs
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Spring – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~4 caterpillar species
Phyla supports ~4 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 modest genus.
Recorded feeding on Phyla in North America, including:
✦ Bees 39 bee visitors
39 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Turkey Tangle Fogfruit — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 84 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Turkey Tangle Fogfruit — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
84 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Phyla →
How we know this (4) 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.
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 (37) 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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