PlantKey Open ecological atlas
Planner
Home / Browse / Taraxacum / Northern Dandelion
No openly-licensed photo yetWe add Creative-Commons photos from iNaturalist as they’re published.
Asteraceae family

Northern Dandelion Taraxacum phymatocarpum

Native

Northern Dandelion is a perennial wildflower native to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
Lifespan
Perennial
In the garden
Herb layer — Sits in the herb of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
derived roles
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.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
❧ Caterpillar hosts ~87 caterpillar species

Taraxacum supports ~87 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 for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.

Recorded feeding on Taraxacum in North America, including:

Agrotis orthogonia · Pale Western Cutworm Agrotis subterranea · owlet moth Agrotis vetusta · Old Man Dart Anagrapha falcifera · Celery Looper Anhimella contrahens · owlet moth Apamea niveivenosa · Snowy-Veined Apamea
+ 8 more species →
Apantesis nais · Nais Tiger Moth Apantesis phalerata · Harnessed Tiger Moth Apantesis vittata · Banded Tiger Moth Aphelia alleniana · Wide-Striped Leafroller Arctia caja · Garden Tiger Athetis miranda · owlet moth Autographa biloba · owlet moth Autographa bimaculata · Two-Spotted Looper
Keystone count (genus-level) from Warren II 2026 (CC0) · Tallamy host-use records. Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (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.
Frequently grows with

Across 21 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Northern Dandelion, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.

Entireleaf Mountain-avens · 95% Beautiful Sandwort · 71% Grayleaf Draba · 67% Bering Chickweed · 62% Blackish Oxytrope · 57% Glaucous Bluegrass · 52% Sweetflower Rockjasmine · 48% Macoun's Poppy · 48%
"%" = share of this plant's plots that also held the species. From sPlotOpen → (Sabatini et al. 2021, CC BY 4.0) — open vegetation plots: wild community composition, not garden design.
Sources for this entry (12) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[05] Invasive / introduced status — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — native status
[06] Ecological value — Warren II 2026 (CC0) · Tallamy host-use counts
[07] Conservation rank — NatureServe Explorer (CC BY)
[09] Caterpillar host count — Warren II 2026 (Dryad, CC0) · Tallamy host-use counts
[10] Caterpillar species — NHM HOSTS (CC0)
[11] 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 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).

Citation

Loading…

BibTeX 
Loading…