This scrappy white wildflower is having its fall moment
iNaturalist Community
Native Plants
If you've noticed clouds of small white daisy-like flowers taking over unmowed edges and meadows this week, you're seeing frost aster at peak bloom, a key late-season nectar source for bees and butterflies fueling up before winter.
Frost aster is a common wildflower with small white, daisy-shaped blooms that shows up in fields, roadsides, and disturbed ground across much of the US in fall. Right now it's one of the most-observed plants on iNaturalist, with people logging 968 sightings in one week, down just slightly from 1,025 the week before. Its name comes from the fact that it keeps blooming right up until the first hard frost.
Key Findings
968 frost aster observations were logged in the US over the past 7 days, among the highest counts for any plant species on iNaturalist this week
That's a decrease of 57 observations (about 5.6%) from the prior week's total of 1,025
The species, Symphyotrichum pilosum of the Asteraceae family, is tracked here as a trending citizen-science observation rather than a formal research finding
chevron_right Technical Summary
Frost aster, a late-blooming wildflower, is lighting up fields and roadsides across the US right now, with nearly 1,000 iNaturalist sightings logged in a single week, a sign its fall bloom is in full swing even as counts dip slightly from the prior week.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Trending: frost aster (Symphyotrichum pilosum) — 968 observations this week
Frost aster (Symphyotrichum pilosum) is a species in the family Asteraceae. iNaturalist users recorded 968 observations of it in the United States in the 7 days before today, among the most for any...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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Symphyotrichum pilosum is a perennial, herbaceous, flowering plant in the Asteraceae family native to central and eastern North America. It is commonly called hairy white oldfield aster, frost aster, white heath aster, heath aster, hairy aster, common old field aster, old field aster, awl aster, ...