Plants of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden

Stems: White Heath Aster is a native perennial aster with stems that can reach up to 3 feet high. The bottom 1/3 of the stem is usually unbranched but above that the plant can branch frequently creating a bush like appearance. Stems are hairy, green initially and becoming brown toward flowering time.

The leaves are narrow and small, with basal leaves no more than 1/2 inch across and up to 3 inches long, but most stem leaves are much narrower and shorter, all with rough edges from stiff hairs. The more upper stem leaves also have undersides with short stiff hair and a soft spine. Like the flowers, they are numerous and while alternate, are closely crowded. There are frequently fascicles of very small leaves in the leaf axils. Like most asters, the lower basal leaves drop away by flowering time.

The floral array is a branched panicle with flowers clustered tightly, frequently overlapping, along the panicle branches. The branch stems and the flower stalks are hairy.

Flowers: There are many small (1/3 to 1/2 inch) flowers composed of two types of florets: There are 10 to 18 white ray florets, although they may occasionally be light blue or pink. These are pistillate and fertile. The rays surround a group of 6 to 12+ fertile tubular disc florets. These have a yellow corolla with the five lobe tips at the throat slightly turned outward. Anthers of the five stamens of the disc florets are appressed against the style which has appendages at its tip. The style is exserted from the corolla throat when the floret opens. The disc floret corollas turn brownish at maturity. The green flower bracts on the flower stalks graduate into an overlapping series (3 to 4) of phyllaries surrounding the flower head; they are unequal in size, hairy, and with green spade-like or diamond shaped tips.

Seeds are a dry narrow cypsela, 1.2–2 × 0.4–0.6 mm in size, with tufts of white hair for wind distribution. The surface of the cypsela is faintly nerved. These very small seeds require light and warm soil to break dormancy, but do not need cold stratification. Seeds should be surface sown.

Habitat: Heath Aster grows from a rhizome with fibrous roots. This is a plant for full sun without excessive moisture - mesic to dry. It can withstand dry conditions. Besides seed dispersal, the plant will form colonies by creeping roots. Of all the white flowered asters, this is one of the easiest to identify due to the dense clusters of small flowers, the small heath-like leaves with rough edges and the hairy stem, brown at flowering time. The nursery trade frequently offers 'Aster ericoides' but many are not the native variety but are derived from European garden plants as explained at the bottom of the page.

Names: The species name, ericoides, refers to being "heath" like. All the new world asters, formerly in the genus Aster, have now been reclassified, most into the genus Symphyotrichum. The genus name is from the Greek symphysis, for 'junction', and 'trichos', for hair and, while obscure, it was first applied by Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck in the 1800s in describing the type aster for the genus. A previously used scientific name for this plant that is no longer accepted is Aster multiflorus, which gave the plant its alternate common name of Many-flowered Aster. It was originally classified in 1753 as Aster ericoides by 'L.' which refers to Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), Swedish botanist and the developer of the binomial nomenclature of modern taxonomy. His work was updated in 1995 by - ‘G. L. Nesom’ which is Guy L. Nesom (b. 1945) American botanist who has published papers on the nomenclature of asters.

Comparisons: This is the only white flowered aster in our area that has dense clusters of many small flowers combined with the dense small hairy leaves.