Robert Frost, the poet who best captured the soul of New England, may have once written that “nothing gold can stay,” but when it comes to goldenrod, the region’s signature plant of the transition between summer and fall, these sparkling members of the genus Solidago are at least bound and determined to stick around for a while. Their reign begins towards the end of July, when the first early goldenrods, known to botanists as Solidago juncea, open tiny yellow flowers packed into plume-like inflorescences, and it won’t stop until November, when the aptly named Tall goldenrods, a.k.
a. Solidago altissima, call a halt to the floral gold show. From warm start to cold finish, I’ll be watching and monitoring — and I won’t, at least from this particular effort, be sniffling.
As I mentioned in earlier journals, goldenrods, persistent bad press to the contrary, are not the cause of anyone’s hay fever; the party responsible for that seasonal malady is a decidedly non-showy plant known as Ragweed. With that important bit of record-correcting out of the way, I hope no one will now hesitate going for the gold. Fortunately, this is easy.
Goldenrods are ubiquitous in our region. To be sure, determining precisely which of the 25 Solidago species listed on the Native Plant Trust’s authoritative Go Botany website you’re looking at can be an extreme challenge — and it’s made more tricky since there are other lookalike former goldenrods that were recently moved into the ge.