| Section 6 » Family Rosaceae |
Show/Hide Synonym
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| Spiraea latifolia | = | Spiraea alba var. latifolia | Flora of North America (1993b, 1997, 2000, 2002a, 2002b, 2003a, 2004b, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2007a, 2009, 2010) | | | Spiraea latifolia | = | Spiraea alba var. latifolia | Godfrey and Wooten (1979, 1981) | | | Spiraea latifolia | = | Spiraea alba var. latifolia | Radford, Ahles, and Bell (1968) | | | Spiraea latifolia | = | Spiraea latifolia var. latifolia | Fernald (1950) | | | Spiraea latifolia | > | Spiraea latifolia var. septentrionalis latifolia | | | | Spiraea latifolia | > | Spiraea septentrionalis | | | | Source: Weakley's Flora |
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| Author | (Aiton) Burkhart | |
| Distribution | Strictly in the Mountains, probably throughout the province, from VA to GA, but there is much confusion with Spiraea alba, with which it was recently a part of, but now split as a separate species. RAB (1968) shows records for 8 counties for S. latifolia, but 10 for S. alba.
Unlike the range of S. alba, this species seems to range westward essentially only to western PA, and then down the Appalachians to northern GA. There are very few records for the Great Lakes states, and perhaps these are for S. alba. Despite a number of records for NC, TN seems to lack a record for this species.
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| Abundance | Rare to uncommon, as with S. alba, but older literature probably did not distinguish between the two taxa, and exact abundances of the two are not at all clear. As with S. alba, this is also an NC Watch List species. | |
| Habitat | These are very similar to those of S. alba – bogs, seepages, wet meadows, etc., but Weakley (2018) indicates that this taxon occurs mainly or more often over mafic or calcareous rocks, such as in damp glades in shallow soils over rocks such as amphibolite, greenstone, and olivine. Whether this distinction holds in NC is probably not well known. | |
| Phenology | Blooms from June to September, and fruits from August to October; probably identical phenology to S. alba. | |
| Identification | This species is extremely similar to Spiraea alba, being a small and slender deciduous shrub growing to 5 feet tall, including the conspicuous terminal panicles of small white flowers. However, this taxon/species has smooth (glabrous) branches of the inflorescences instead of tomentose branches. As the common names imply, this meadowsweet has somewhat wider leaves than does S. alba; the leaves average 2-3 times longer than wide (versus 3-5 times longer than wide in S. alba). | |
| Taxonomic Comments | Until recently, this was long considered as a variety of Spiraea alba (broad sense), and thus was listed as Spiraea alba var. latifolia. There is still some hesitation for this split as being valid; NatureServe Explorer lists the two as the same species, with the two varieties; each variety is globally ranked as G5T5. As our website follows the taxonomy of Weakley (2018), we list S. latifolia as a full species, but have to give it a new global rank, of G5Q – globally secure, but of questionable taxonomy. We have put the rank in brackets as [G5Q] to let the reader know that this is not the NatureServe rank but the rank needed for the full species.
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| Other Common Name(s) | White Meadowsweet (for the enlarged species) | |
| State Rank | S2? | |
| Global Rank | G5T5 [G5] | |
| State Status | W7 [W1] | |
| US Status | | |
| USACE-agcp | FACW link |
| USACE-emp | FACW link |
