One of the most beautiful but polarizing fall flowers is getting cranked up, and people are starting to sneeze… but blaming the wrong culprit while overlooking a real garden workhorse.
Showy goldenrod and wimpy ragweed are pictured. While goldenrod is often blamed for autumn allergies, ragweed pollen is often the true source of the pollen in the wind. Courtesy Photo
Much-maligned native goldenrod is one of the easiest, showiest native flowers to punch up a fall garden, with nearly zero maintenance; I grow several kinds, along with equally showy, garden-quality native blazing star (Liatris), wild blue ageratum, tall narrowleaf sunflowers and glorious, compact purple asters. And they’re all awash this month in butterflies and small songbirds.
I totally get the alleged allergy woes; my autumn cheeriness is actually an antihistamine high. But lots of folks lay fault on the first thing we see, and goldenrod is often unfairly included as visual click bait in allergy medication adverts. Truth is, goldenrod pollen is sticky and too heavy to float in the wind and requires insect pollinators to move it around; the plant giving me fits right now is ragweed, whose thin flower spikes shed dust-like pollen which can be blown, nearly unseen, for a mile or more by wind. Truth.
In the same family as sunflowers and zinnias, the aptly named goldenrod makes excellent, long-stemmed, long-lasting additions to flower vases. It’s a source of food for more than a hundred species of butterflies, moths, bees, hover flies and other pollinating insects, plus songbirds which feed on their nutritious oily seeds, and colorful crab spiders and even hummingbirds that eat even tinier insects.
Without getting into the many medicinal benefits, its strong nectar makes a dark, spicy honey, and dried goldenrod seeds make an excellent, nutritious flour “extender” that country folk with meager food supplies used to bulk up their pancake and bread batters.
Not many folks eat goldenrod anymore, but it is finally gaining in popularity here as a fall flower border mainstay. It’s long been a mainstay in English, European and Japanese gardens and perennial borders; Louis XIV, the Sun King, had it all over his formal plantings at Versailles. Monet’s fabulous cutting garden at Giverny includes goldenrod.
But it isn’t just the common tall field goldenrod that rocks gardens. I routinely see several other smaller, less invasive cultivars such as the thin, arching Fireworks (in bloom now at the William Faulkner Literary Garden in New Albany) and non-spreading dwarf kinds with names like Cloth of Gold and Peter Pan.
Weedy? Sorta, like any good native wildflower. But errant goldenrod seedlings are pitifully easy to pull with one hand, and I cut the remaining plants to knee high in midsummer to make them bushier with more flowers and less flopping in the fall.
Word to the wise: If you use these in a suburban garden, clue in your neighbors. Put up a bit of fence, a wagon wheel, a group of birdhouses, an all-green bottle tree, gazing globe, or some other naturalistic feature to help neighbors get your drift, that you’re up to something, not just letting your yard go.
Meanwhile, take a country drive and grab a gander at Mississippi’s fabulous fall wildflowers. See if any are worthy of your own garden.
Step over to a clump of goldenrod and cut two or three stems for an informal flower arrangement. While you’re at it, take a really close look at the fluffy plume and single out one of its petite individual flowers, which looks like a yellow zinnia. You’d need tweezers to do the “she loves me, she loves me not” thing, but you’ll have a forever appreciation of the whole plant, not just its false allergenic, weedy reputation.
Just watch for the Plain Jane ragweed right beside it. It’s a baddie.
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to [email protected].
Posted in Columns
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