This Week's Mystery Plant

This is a very curious plant. It is blooming brilliantly now, here in South Carolina, and you might see it if you hike around parts of Peachtree Rock Nature Conservancy Preserve. It appears to be "just" a goldenrod, but if you look closely, you will see that this plant is a shrub, producing woody stems. (All the other goldenrods that grow around here are herbaceous plants. They may get big and tall, but the stems always die back following blooming time.) Furthermore, this low shrub is evergreen; its leaves are somewhat greenish-gray.

Our mystery plant is found, naturally, only in the southeastern USA. Its distribution is very curious. It appears to occur in an odd pattern from the lower coast of North Carolina in a sort of crescent, down through the South Carolina midlands into Lexington and (probably) Aiken Counties. Then it picks up again in a handful of counties in east-central Georgia. Large populations of it may be found in the Florida panhandle, along the Gulf Coast, and it occurs sparingly in the lowest parts of Alabama and Mississippi, again along the coast. (This distribution is remarkably similar to that exhibited by several other sandhill species, including "sandhill rosemary," which has appeared previously in this column.) When it does occur in large populations on white "sugar" sand, it makes an impressive display of deep, rich gold flowers, which are wildly popular with butterflies.

Unhappily, this beautiful native is probably declining throughout its range, due to the onslaught of urbanization. It does receive official protection in some reserved areas, though, such as at Peachtree Rock, and at Ohoopee Sandhills in Georgia. (Both of these are managed by the Nature Conservancy. For information on the web concerning their programs and protected areas, go to http://nature.org) (Photo by Linda Lee.)

Photo by Linda Lee