Pine Barren Goldenrod Solidago fistulosa
Pine Barren Goldenrod is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 6.6 ft and blooms Aug in full sun, with white fruit. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 4.5–7
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 8+
- Height
- 6.6 ft
- Spacing
- 4 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Rapid
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Rhizomatous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Summer & autumn
- Fruit
- White
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Sprigs
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- No known commercial source
- Deer browsing
- High browsed readily
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~118 caterpillar species
Solidago supports ~118 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is an exceptional genus.
Recorded feeding on Solidago in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 15 bee visitors
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Solidago is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
15 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Pine Barren Goldenrod — the 12 most-recorded:
Across 25 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Pine Barren Goldenrod, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Solidago →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (32) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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