Chrysoma

Woody Goldenrod

Chrysoma Nutt. includes a single species C. pauciflosculosa (Michx.) Greene.  Small evergreen woody shrubs to 1 meter tall native to sand hills etc. on the coastal plain from North Carolina (inner coastal plain) to Mississippi (near the coast).  The genus has been included in Solidago by some authors as Solidago pauciflosculosa Michx.

Chrysoma pauciflosculosa (Michx.) Greene; Florida Panhandle, shrub about 1 m tall.

In their DNA sequence study, Schilling et al. (2008) found Chrysoma to be in a clade with Brintonia that was sister clade to the genus Solidago. Semple et al. (2023 in press) in a polygenomic study determined that C. pauciflosculosa was sister to all of Solidago and warranted genus level status due to a combination of traits including being a woody shrub, having persistent leave bases on older stems, and by having sunken leaf veins. Brintonia was placed well within Solidago subg. Solidago and is treated here as Solidago discoidea.

Semple, J.C., McMinn-Sauder, H., Stover, M., Lemmon, A., Lemmon E., and J. B. Beck. 2023 in press. Goldenrod herbariomics: Hybrid-sequence capture reveals the phylogeny of diploid Solidago. Amer. J. Bot. 110: xxxx-xxxx.

Revised 2 June 2023 by J.C. Semple

© 2023 J.C. Semple, including all photographs unless otherwise indicated