Showy Goldenrod Solidago speciosa
An upright, well-behaved goldenrod with dense golden plumes. A specialist-bee powerhouse and key late-season nectar — and no, goldenrod does not cause hay fever.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- Dry – medium
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 3 – 8
- Height
- 2 – 3 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
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 · 42 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.
42 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Showy Goldenrod — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 16 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Showy Goldenrod — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
16 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Across 25 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Showy 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 (3) Methods & honest limits
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
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 (22) 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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