As the colors of autumn arrive in the Adirondacks, chrysanthemums seem to appear everywhere from garden centers to front porches. But while their bright blooms signal the season, mums offer little for the ecosystems we depend on.
In a new opinion piece for the Adirondack Almanack, AdkAction Board Member Lisa Salamon makes the case for a better fall flower: the native aster. With its late-season nectar, resilience in Adirondack conditions, and deep ties to our region’s biodiversity, the aster is more than ornamental—it’s essential.
Read Lisa’s full article in the Almanack here The Mum Conundrum: A Case for Asters or below:
As autumn quickly descends on the Adirondacks, we are inundated with advertisements for pumpkin spice, apple picking, and corn mazes. Big box retailers and local nurseries also beckon us to buy chrysanthemums—prized for their striking fall colors but, ironically, thousands of miles from the Chinese soil that once sustained them.
Chrysanthemums are beautiful. But buying (and tossing) several mums every year
creates a conundrum for those of us trying to reduce our ecological impact by planting native species. For generations, we’ve been conditioned to purchase fall mums. Yet mums offer our Adirondack ecosystems and the insects that depend on late-season
blooms about as much sustenance as a garden statue. Pollinator-friendly nectar and
bird-sustaining seeds have been bred out of mums over centuries in favor of showier petals.
A perfect Adirondack alternative is the aster. Native asters, with their star-shaped
blossoms in shades of purple, magenta, blue, and white, are not merely ornamental—they are a lifeline for local pollinators. Their late-season nectar feeds weary bees, moths, and butterflies long after other flowers have faded. By shunning annual mums and choosing perennial asters, our gardens become part of local ecosystems, supporting insect life cycles that have evolved here over millennia. Chrysanthemums—while undeniably colorful—consume vast resources: imported soil amendments, pesticides, and heavy applications of fertilizer. Native perennial asters, on the other hand, thrive with minimal human intervention. They are adapted to Adirondack rainfall patterns and gritty glacial soils, resist disease and drought, and stand tall
through the unpredictable whims of autumn weather. Asters also serve as larval hosts for many insects.
The argument for asters is not just ecological but cultural. Planting flowers native to the
Adirondacks honors this place, invites birds and insects back into our yards, and helps
us rediscover what naturally flourishes here. By choosing native asters over cloned
mums to celebrate fall, we foster biodiversity in this extraordinary region.
This fall, let us turn away from exotic mums and instead embrace the humble aster. In their quiet resilience, asters offer a vision of gardens that are not just beautiful, but sustainable—where every petal matters, and every bloom provides nourishment for the creatures that call the Adirondacks home.
