Solidago vaseyi

Southern Cut-leaved Goldenrod

Solidago vaseyi Heller is native to open woods, woodland borders, piney woods, open slopes, roadsides and embankments in much of the southeastern U.S. from Missouri to Kentucky and Virginia southward.  The leaves are glabrous and the fruit bodies are sparsely to densely hairy at least on the distal portion. The species has been included in S. arguta by many authors over many years. The species was treated as S. arguta var. caroliniana A. Gray in Semple & Cook 2006 FNA, while Semple and Beck (2021) treated it as a separate species. The species includes diploids and tetraploids.  Morton (1973) restricted S. vaseyi to just tetraploids and placed diploids in the northern eastern portion of the species's range in his S. arguta subsp. pseudoyadkinensis Morton (1974), which is included here as a synonym of S. vaseyi. 

In the multivariate study of S. sect. Argutae, S. vaseyi was morphologically more similar to S. boottii than to S. arguta based on mostly technical floral traits (Semple et al. 2021).  Thus, the sometimes minor difference in numbers of fruit hairs between S. vaseyi and S. arguta indicates other larger differences between the two species.  Semple and Morton (2024) presented a map of the cytogeography of S. vaseyi.