Doellingeria sericocarpoides (southern whitetop)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Doellingeria sericocarpoides, photographed by Lauren McLaurin — fig. a Lauren McLaurin, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-09-26 / obs. 159999939

Doellingeria sericocarpoides, photographed by John Kees — fig. e John Kees, CC0 1.0 / obs. 165035659

Doellingeria sericocarpoides, photographed by Sam Kieschnick — fig. f Sam Kieschnick, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 161200689

Doellingeria sericocarpoides, photographed by Will McFarland — fig. g Will McFarland, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 54550993

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 11 botanical countries

Native distribution of Doellingeria sericocarpoides, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Alabama	ALA	NORTHERN AMERICA
Arkansas	ARK
Florida	FLA
Georgia	GEO
Louisiana	LOU
Maryland	MRY
Mississippi	MSI
North Carolina	NCA
Oklahoma	OKL
South Carolina	SCA
Texas	TEX

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 67 in flower of 76 examined

93%

100%

95%

83%

Proportion of examined Doellingeria sericocarpoides in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	0	2	too few examined
May	0	0	too few examined
Jun	1	1	too few examined
Jul	2	2	too few examined
Aug	13	14	93%	69% to 99%
Sep	26	26	100%	87% to 100%
Oct	20	21	95%	77% to 99%
Nov	5	6	83%	44% to 97%
Dec	0	4	too few examined

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Doellingeria sericocarpoides observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 67 of 76 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 4 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Aster sericocarpoides K.Schum.
Aster umbellatus var. brevisquamus Fernald
Aster umbellatus var. latifolius A.Gray
Doellingeria umbellata var. latifolia (A.Gray) House

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.