This month, I want to highlight a late-blooming perennial: the Aster. We have had asters in our garden for a while, but last year and this year, they put on a tremendous display. When something captures my attention that way, my next step is to write about it.
I took my picture, then sat down in front of the computer. I didn’t think it would be that hard. After all, I knew it was an aster.
However, on one internet page, I read that 600 species of asters existed. Really? Well, that was old information. It seems that a great deal of research, including “morphologic and molecular research”, was done during the 1990’s.
That led botanists to split the genus Aster into eleven genera — 180 species, all but one from Europe, retained the name Aster. All of the rest from North America were put into 10 new genera. Among those was the genus Symphyotricum, and the pictured species that we have is, according to Plant Finder, Symphyotrichum novi-belgii.
The species name, novi-belgii, literally translates to “New Belgium”, but it refers to the Dutch colony in the New World, where the plants were first found. Aster flowers are star-shaped, so, logically, the name comes from the Greek word for “star” (yes, like an asterisk). This species goes by a number of common names, but the most widely used is Michaelmas daisy which, according to Wikipedia, has over 1,000 cultivars (!).
Michaelmas refers to St. Michael’s Day, which is celebrated on September 29. In some climates, that .
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