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Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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Plant · P-1149
Snowbrush
Ceanothus velutinus
Snowbrush is an evergreen shrub of western mountain slopes that thickens into dense stands through root sprouting and layering, its sticky balsam-scented foliage carrying fragrant white flowers from spring into summer. Root nodules fix nitrogen with a soil fungus rather than the bacteria legumes use, and every part of the plant lathers into a gentle soap when crushed with water. The seed can sit dormant in the ground for well over a century, waiting for fire or scarification to trigger germination, so a burned or cleared patch can return thick with seedlings decades after the parent plants are gone.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun · Partial Sun · Shade
- USDA zone
- Not yet recorded
- Soil
- Sand · Loam
- Moisture
- Dry · Moist · Well-Drained
Vertical layer
Shrub- Soil pH
- 5.5–8.3
- Plant type
- Perennial
- Mature height
- 3–15 ft
- Mature spread
- Not yet recorded
- Plant spacing
- Not yet recorded
- Root type
- Tap
- Spread pattern
- Both
Keep exploring
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Ocimum kilimandscharicum
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Agarita
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American Beautyberry
Callicarpa americana
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American Black Currant
Ribes americanum
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American Elderberry
Sambucus canadensis
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The deeper layer
Plan what comes next.
- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
- Locked ecological function
- Byproduct
- Locked ecological function
Behind the record
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