Family Compositae or Asteraceae (Composite family).
A more contemplative sort of goldenrod. Its showier cousins brighten fields and meadows, but the Wreath or Blue-Stemmed Goldenrod is happiest in an open woodland, thriving in deeper shade than almost any other other fall flower. Its arched stems of golden flowers have a restrained elegance that seems appropriate to the dim religious light of the woods.
From Gray’s Manual of Botany:
SOLIDAGO L. GOLDEN-ROD. Heads few-many-flowered, radiate; the rays 1-16, pistillate. Bracts of the involucre appressed, destitute of herbaceous tips (except nos. 1 and 2). Receptacle small, not chaffy. Achenes many-ribbed, nearly terete; pappus simple, of equal capillary bristles. —Perennial herbs, with mostly wand-like stems and sessile or nearly sessile never heart-shaped stem-leaves. Heads small, racemed or clustered; flowers both of the disk and ray yellow (cream-color in no. 6). Closely related species tending to hybridize freely. (Name from solidare, to join, or make whole, in allusion to reputed vulnerary qualities.)
VIRGAÚREA DC. Rays mostly fewer than the disk-flowers; heads all more or less pediceled.
Involucral bracts without green tips and wholly appressed.
Heads small; the involucres 2-5 (rarely 6) mm. long, clustered along the stem in the axils of the feather-veined leaves, or the upper forming a thyrse.
Achenes pubescent.
Stem terete, mostly glaucous (the bloom easily rubbed off)
S. caesia L. Smooth; at length much branched and diffuse; leaves lanceolate or oblong-lanceolate, serrate, pointed, sessile; heads in very short clusters, or somewhat racemose-panicled on the branches. Deciduous woods, s. Me. to Ont., Minn., and southw. Aug.-Oct.
