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Giant Goldenrod

Giant Goldenrod

Solidago gigantea

Identify the Giant Goldenrod from a photo and log your finds with Florapass.

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How common: Fairly rare

Invasive alien species – remove it if you can

Giant Goldenrod is a very tall, long‑lived plant from North America, often grown in gardens but frequently escaping. It forms dense stands and shows broad, cone‑shaped sprays of many small, bright yellow flower heads from late summer into autumn. You can see it along roadsides, rough grassland and waste ground.

Did you know?

  • Classified in Finland as a harmful invasive alien species.
  • A single stem can produce thousands of wind‑carried seeds.

About the species

Identification

Very tall, sturdy plant (50–250 cm). Stems upright, firm and smooth up to the flower branches, often with a pale whitish coating. Leaves many and close together, long and narrow with a pointed tip and a few sharp teeth; mostly smooth; upper leaves smaller and almost plain‑edged. The yellow flowers form a large, broad cone‑shaped spray with fairly straight side branches and countless tiny heads (<1 cm). Seeds carry a soft hair tuft for wind travel. Like Canada Goldenrod but smoother‑stemmed and with slightly larger heads; European Goldenrod is smaller (to 1 m), with a tighter, more upright spray and blooms earlier. Flowers in Finland from August to October.

Plant group

Herbaceous plants

Habitat

yards and roadsides, shore

Flowering

Aug–Oct

About the habitat

An introduced ornamental that thrives in disturbed, sunny places such as roadsides, river and railway edges, abandoned fields, rough grassland and open waste ground. Established as a garden escape; scattered records, most frequent in the Helsinki area and found north to around Oulu; generally rarer than Canada Goldenrod.

Sources

Photo: Sofia Voynovskaya, CC BY 4.0 https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/5938331734

Text: Pinkka: IPS-177 Fennoscandian flora - Sagina-Symphytum, CC BY 4.0 https://laji.fi/taxon/MX.39732

Text: FinBIF species descriptions, CC BY 4.0 https://laji.fi/taxon/MX.39732

Text: Wikipedia (Finnish), CC BY-SA 4.0 https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isopiisku

See also