Here is the thing about goldenrod. If you ask ten people what causes their hay fever in late summer, eight of them will say goldenrod. They are wrong. The plant they are looking at, blooming in big yellow plumes alongside every roadside in the country, is not the plant making them sneeze. It is the plant in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The actual culprit is ragweed — Ambrosia artemisiifolia — a small, drab, green-flowered plant that blooms at the same time as goldenrod and grows in the same kinds of disturbed places. ragweed is wind-pollinated. It releases enormous amounts of microscopic pollen into the air, where it floats for days, gets into your sinuses, and makes you miserable. A single ragweed plant can release a billion grains of pollen in a season.
Goldenrod, by contrast, is insect-pollinated. Its pollen is heavy and sticky. It is designed to cling to the leg of a bee, not to drift on the breeze. You could stand next to a goldenrod plant for a week and not breathe in a single grain of its pollen, because almost none of it ever leaves the flower. The reason goldenrod gets blamed is the reason a lot of innocent things get blamed: it is showy and yellow and visible, and it blooms at exactly the moment when something invisible is making you sneeze. Ragweed has the bad manners not to be photogenic.
This matters because goldenrod is one of the most important plants in the late-season eastern food web. When most other flowers have given up for the year, goldenrod is still pumping nectar. Migrating monarchs fuel up on it before flying to Mexico. Native bees — over thirty-five species in this region — depend on it as their last meal of the year. The songbirds that follow the late-season insect bloom follow the goldenrod. There is no good substitute. There is barely a substitute at all.
So: if you have ever pulled goldenrod out of your backyard because someone told you it was making you sneeze, you have been doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason. The correct response, if you actually want to do something about your allergies, is to find ragweed and remove that. Goldenrod, you should leave. You should plant more of it. It is one of the most useful natives you can have on your patch.
One more reason goldenrod has been miscast: some kinds of goldenrod are aggressive growers. The Canada goldenrod that dominates abandoned fields can take over a small garden in a season. If you have room for a wilder spot, that's fine — that's where you want it. If you have a smaller backyard and want a better-behaved version, look for stiff goldenrod (Solidago rigida), showy goldenrod (S. speciosa), or zigzag goldenrod (S. flexicaulis). All native, all useful, all ten times less likely to take over the place.
Plant the goldenrod. Pull the ragweed. The story is the opposite of what you've been told.
— The editors