Small plants can make a big difference for wildlife! Meet Field Pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta), a charming native groundcover whose soft, fuzzy flower clusters resemble tiny cat paws—giving this little wildflower its memorable name.
🌸 Why add Field Pussytoes to your landscape?
🐛 A Host Plant: Field Pussytoes is a larval host plant for the American Lady butterfly. Females lay their eggs on plants in the pussytoes group, giving developing caterpillars the food they need to grow.
🌱 A Native Groundcover: Its low-growing foliage can form attractive patches, making it useful in native gardens, rock gardens, borders, and other sunny spaces.
☀️ Tough & Adaptable: Field Pussytoes thrives in sunny, relatively dry sites with well-drained soil—conditions where many fussier garden plants may struggle.
🌼 Early-Season Interest: Its small whitish flower heads appear in spring, adding subtle beauty to the landscape while other plants are just beginning to get started.
🦋 Part of a Bigger Habitat: Pair Field Pussytoes with native grasses and a succession of spring, summer, and fall-blooming wildflowers. You’ll provide not just flowers for adult pollinators, but the host plants their young need, too.
💚 Native Plant Takeaway:
When choosing plants for wildlife, don’t overlook what’s growing close to the ground. A patch of Field Pussytoes can become an important piece of a much larger habitat.
Plant for the butterfly—and don’t forget to feed the caterpillar! 🐛➡️🦋
Photo: University of Maryland Extension
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