Goldenrod | Flower Art Prints

Wealth | Abundance | Native to North America

Goldenrod is often wrongly confused with ragweed. It is one of the last wildflowers to blossom and provide sustenance for pollinators before winter.

Goldenrod and asters are often seen together and in Cherokee legend, there’s a tale of a brutal attack on a village in which everyone was killed except two sisters, who managed to run off and hide. One wore a lavender-blue-fringed dress and the other, a yellow-fringed dress.

A medicine woman found them sleeping in the forest. Able to see into the future and know that the girls would be pursued and slaughtered, the elderly spiritualist covered the sleeping children with leaves and magically transformed one into the lavender-blue aster, and the other into yellow goldenrod.

In the 1920s, Thomas Edison discovered that Goldenrod plants contained roughly 12% latex; enough latex to produce a usable rubber. He cultivated a 12ft plant and formed a partnership with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone to manufacture tires for Ford’s Model T, using latex from goldenrod as the raw material. He died before he could bring this to commercial production and nobody after him was able to cultivate a plant containing enough latex as he was able to.