White heath aster is one of Missouri's most widespread and weedy native asters. It grows in uplands, bottomlands, and nearly all habitats in between. It has a shrubby, wide-branching habit, and the stem leaves are thin and needlelike.
White heath aster is a much-branched perennial, with short, rather woody and stout rootstocks. The branches may be spreading or ascending; the stalks may be hairy or not. It is a spindly-looking plant with many small needle-like leaves all along the flower stems.
Each flowerhead arises on its own peduncle (stem), which usually has a number of tiny bracts; each flowerhead has 16–35 white (sometimes pink) ray florets and a yellow disk about ¾ inch across.
Blooms August–November.
The leaves are alternate, linear, often needlelike, usually less than ⅜ inch wide, and variable in length.
Similar species: Missouri has 24 species of New World asters (genus Symphyotrichum). Most have purple or white ray flowers and yellow disk flowers that turn reddish over time, and most bloom in late summer and fall. There are about nine species that most commonly bloom white.
- Of these, small white aster (S. parviceps), with its inrolled spinelike tips to its involucral bracts, looks most similar to white heath aster, but it is much less common and has smaller, fewer-flowered heads.
For more information about our native New World asters, see their group page.
Height: to 5 feet.
Common statewide.
Habitat and Conservation
Occurs in uplands, bottomlands, and nearly all habitats in between: prairies, glades, forests, savannas, banks of streams and rivers, margins of ponds, lakes, and sinkhole ponds, fallow fields, pastures, old fields, fencerows, gardens, railroads, roadsides, and open, disturbed areas.
This species is not common in high-quality native habitats. It is more associated with overgrazed pastures, roadsides, and other disturbed places.
It is quite hardy, and it is easy to establish as a profuse, late-blooming member of a wildflower garden. But because it readily self-seeds, it can spread aggressively.
Status
Native Missouri wildflower.
Human Connections
The pink-flowered form of this hardy native aster can be used as a beautiful, carefree, late-season ornamental in wildflower gardens, but its weedy nature can make it problematic.
- Be careful if you’re considering any New World aster species with smaller flowerheads and white ray flowers, as most of them can spread aggressively both by seeds and by the rootstocks.
- If you’re looking for a native plant with large displays of white-rayed flowerheads, instead consider species of Boltonia, especially false starwort (B. asteroides), which would be easier to manage.
Ecosystem Connections
Asters and other late-season bloomers provide nectar to many types of insects, including monarch butterflies that are migrating south.
White heath aster, in particular, has been associated as a favorite nectar source for the southern dogface butterfly and Leonard's skipper, both locally common in the Ozarks.
- Leonard's skipper is single-brooded and only flies from late August to mid-October.
- If you want to see either of these butterflies, try visiting brushy fields and open woods in the Ozarks, in late summer and fall, where white heath aster abounds.
"Weedy" pioneer plants, like this one, are among the first colonizers of disturbed ground, helping immediately to bind the soil and prevent erosion.
This plant’s scientific name used to be Aster pilosus, but botanists in the 1990s firmly established that the big genus Aster now only applies mainly to Eurasian species, and that our native “asters” are not closely related to them and deserve their own genera. Thus the only “true aster” (in the genus Aster) growing wild in Missouri is an escape from gardens.
