All over America the goldenrod is in bloom. Sneeze-weed you may call it, if you blame it for hayfever; pestilent weed, if it invades your pasture-land; or just plain weed, if it is too common to have any significance for you. But the children of Alabama love it well enough to have chosen it for their state flower, awl there is no other flower, except the rose, that ranks so high in popularity as a state symbol. Four states have chosen the rose and three the goldenrod: Nebraska and Kentucky, as well as Alabama. And the bees and butterflies throng to it everywhere.
The Romans treasured the goldenrod, calling it solidago, or “makes whole” plant, for its healing powers. And so Elizabethan England valued it, importing large quantities to be sold in powdered form in the London markets at half a crown a pound. Twentieth-century America has also discovered some virtue in the plant. Chemists extract some three to five pounds of oil (resembling oil of anise, the conventional liquorice flavoring) from 150-250 pounds of the bloom of sweet-scented goldenrod to flavor chewing gum and candy. And, from the same variety, some people brew themselves a refreshing drink.
Goldenrod – Glories of the American Autumn
Think of it as either weed or flower, but you cannot deny that goldenrod is one of the glories of the American Autumn. In England it is one of the glories of the Autumn garden, and one of the mainstays of the herbaceous border. I remember the first time I saw the white-faced Hereford cattle grazing among goldenrod on a Pennsylvanian hillside. For a split second I was back at home, thinking someone had left the gate open, and the cows were out in the herbaceous border. And I instantly remembered another garden where I had set the plants too near the fence, so that both horses and cattle had neatly beheaded the golden plumes within their reach.
William Cobbett, the fiery pamphleteer and writer who spent a number of years in America as a refugee from debt and political unpopularity at home, wrote of the goldenrod in his American Gardener of 1819. He described goldenrod as “the torment of the neighbouring farmer,” who regarded it as “that accursed stinking thing, with a yellow flower, called the Plain-Weed.” He spoke of Americans’ amazement that it had “above all the plants in the world been chosen as the most conspicuous ornament of the front of the King of England’s grandest palace, that of Hampton Court, where, growing in a rich soil to the height of five or six feet, it, under the name of Golden Rod nods over the whole length of the edge of a walk. three quarters of a mile long and, perhaps thirty feet wide, the most magnificent, perhaps, in Europe.” How delighted he was to find the corn-poppy, a pernicious weed in Europe, growing in American gardens.
I listened to a twentieth-century echo of Cobbett’s words when a friend, who had been to England, came to tell me of her visit to Hampton Court. “It can’t be,” she had thought, to herself. si raining her eyes to the long border, “they can’t have planted goldenrod there. surely?” then, pulling her friend by the coat sleeve they had advanced together towards the herbaceous border to find goldenrod growing there as it was planted years ago. Thus rarity sets the value on shrubs and flowers as it sets the price of all the world’s commodities, and goldenrod, that blooms so lavishly in every state of its native hand, is very rarely seen in American gardens.
Sentimental Love For Goldenrod
For myself, I have a sentimental love for goldenrod; for the pictures it brings to mind of my mother’s garden and the glorious arrangements she made with the gold sprays and michaelmas daisies that she set in a copper howl on an old oak chest. I like it in the old flower prints, and for the way it nods its head among the flowers of English poetry and prose: W. H. Hudson, the prose naturalist, bound it to his memory of a downland valley, and the peasant poet, John Clare, to the memory of his childhood.
I love it for its own sake. When I see it here on its native ground, I think of it in an English garden. At first it took its place, plumed and alien like the Roman centurion along the English border until, after centuries of planting, it has, like the Roman road, become part and parcel of the English scene so that it is now cherished as an old-fashioned garden flower.
When I am in England I shall think of goldenrod in its native fastness. I shall remember it bending to the sea breeze along the sand dunes of the eastern seaboard, and along the sandy hills of California’s coast from Point Reyes South to Monterey; gold against the blue of the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. I shall remember the fragrant blooms clustering one side of the stern in the Blue Mountains of Virginia; and dwarf and miniature in the mountains of Colorado and the Pacific Northwest.
Goldenrod is everywhere. Some one of its 85 species grows not only in every state of North America but in almost every terrain. It grows not only along the shoreline and the mountains, but across the dry hillsides and in the swamps and bogs. Two of the most common goldenrods are also two of the most beautiful: Sotidago canadenais, whose recurving sprays of densely-flowered panicles color the waste places, and Solidago nintifolia, whose deep-yellow spires finger the partial shade of wood and copse.
Solidago ulmifolia – there is a hint in the species name that may lead you on to a discovery. If you would see a forest of elm trees, look at a hillside yellow with goldenrod. And still, you will not have seen all; for the individual beauty of a tree is lost in the forest as the personal identity of a face is lost in a crowd. If you would see but one miniature elm in Autumn gold, bend down and look up at the sky through the branches of one single plant Ñ one stem of goldenrod. Do you not see the same up-pouring branches and the same spread arms that crown the elm? And is not this canopy of gold like a golden rocket, spangled and then stilled, against the Autumn sky?
by J Parry – 61893
