Packera aurea - GOLDEN RAGWORT

Groundcovering native wildflower for half shade or shade garden. Adaptable.

2' tall with flowers, rather large fresh green 6" tall leaves, spreads by rhizomes and groundcovers soil. In optimum conditions can be fast spreader.

Golden-yellow , smaller flowers in May/June (flowers for about 3 weeks) are attractive to small native bees (small carpenter bees, cuckoo bees, and Halictid bees).

Prefers half shade to full shade and likes moisture - optimal is moist, medium-moist to wet soils (but will adapt to average moisture, if shaded).

With constant moisture can grow in full sun (where is usually shaded by taller plants in the summer). Tolerates short term flooding, so could be used in rain gardens as well. can form large colonies and can seed too.

Leaves are toxic to mammals, so deer and rabbit avoid it.

Hardy in zones 3 to 7. Native to most of the eastern USA and Texas, see the BONAP distribution map.

It is quite common wildflower, so often overlooked, but it is also good groundcovering plant, but usually it's not super aggressive. Landscape designers Claudia West and Thomas Rainer - Phyto Studio - like to use it as a low groudcover and filler - combined with taller late emerging perennials, that will shade it later on.

Best used as medium-sized groundcovering patches in half shade or shade garden, in rain garden, for naturlizing, in pollinator gardens or wildlife gardens. Can be used in matrix planting to form the understory layer.

Combine rather with taller and competitive perennials like Anemone hupehensis, Aralia, woodland Asters, Brunnera, Chelone, Eupatorium, Gallium, more robust Geranium (like Geranium mcrorrhizum), Monarda, Nepeta subsessilis, Persicaria virginica, Perscaria amplexicaulis, Physostegia, tall Phlox Rudbeckia fulgida, Rudbeckia laciniata, Solidago, Tradescantia, Vernonia and grasses like Carex, Hakonechloa, Calamagrostis brachytricha.

Pot size : square 3.5" x 4" deep perennial pot

 Pictures copyright : Edward Scott Lyon, Spellboundgarden