Lingonberry Vaccinium vitis-idaea
Lingonberry is a perennial shrub native to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. It grows to 0.5 ft and blooms Jul in part shade – shade, with red fruit. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil pH
- 4.5–6
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 1+
- Height
- 0.5 ft
- Spacing
- 6–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Moderate
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Rhizomatous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Fruit
- Red persists into winter
- 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, Cuttings, Bare root, Container, Sprigs
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – 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 ~294 caterpillar species · keystone genus
Vaccinium supports ~294 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 powerhouse genus.
Recorded feeding on Vaccinium in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 17 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. Vaccinium is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
17 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Lingonberry — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 61 birds · 6 mammals · 4 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Lingonberry — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 61 birds and 6 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
4 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 175 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Lingonberry, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Vaccinium →
How we know this (5) 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.
A small, hand-checked crosswalk: each native edible is matched to its food in the USDA nutrient database (e.g. American persimmon → "Persimmons, native, raw", black walnut → "walnuts, black"), and we read that food’s per-100 g values. We only include matches that are unambiguous; a few genus-level commodities (e.g. mulberries) are marked as the closest food match. We do NOT auto-match by name (too error-prone) — so coverage is deliberately small.
Honest limits: Composition of the edible part as a food (often the cultivated/commodity form), matched by common food name — a guide, not a measurement of the exact wild plant. Never an identification or edibility guarantee.
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 (39) 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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