From the family of true garden workhorses, this fall-blooming aster will enjoy the shade, offering its starry white flowers with mahogany stems from midsummer into fall. Lush and spreading, this is an incredibly versatile and useful plant: an airy ground cover, amenable to sun, shade, or even dry shade when established, attracts butterflies and bees, offers seeds in winter to juncos, goldfinches, and sparrows, provides fluffy nesting material, is deer- and rabbit resistant, tolerates moist or dry soils of many compositions, is disease-resistant…need we say more? Okay natural to woodland gardens, (an eastern US woodland native), works also in cottage gardens, or even a soft filler in a formal garden. Yet it is so unassuming at first glance.

Mature size:1-2.5 ft Ttall and spreading

Minimum temperature: -40F