Probably Boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum). It is common here, I think it is wonderful in the woods and road cuts. It has quite nice leaves and no pests seem to bother it. It also attracts lots of butterflies. I have it in a large landscaped area - it does get huge but can be trimmed easily, I even made one into a single stem "tree" instead of a multi-branched shrub. It does have a quite large root system and once you have it it is hard to get rid of it, so placing it in a manicured landscape might not be advisable.

Nancy the nancedar

Actually I'm pretty sure your mystery plant is groundsel-bush, Baccharis halimifolia. I've got them all over my property. Beware, if conditions are right they can seed in like crazy. Boneset is an herbaceous perennial that blooms earlier and is seeding out now.

Here is a link that may be useful: Groundsel-bush

Ohhhh dear! I have been calling that Groundsel Bush a Boneset because that was what a fellow gardener "who knew all the names of the wild plants" told me it was when I moved to this property. Well, phooey, he "done me wrong" on this one and I blame myself for not looking it up in my native plants book to verify.

Mea culpa. Sorry to have steered you wrong cribscreek, and thank you Alicia7b for correcting me. Now I'm going to go poke that "native plant expert" in the arm.

Nancy the nancedar

P.S. Do you suppose that Baccharis will be happier if I call her by her real name? I know I hate it when someone calls me Kathy, and for some reason it happens a lot.

Here is a link that might be useful: Boneset

what i saw all along Rte. 1 between sanford and raleigh yesterday looked like a woody Joe Pye weed. I thought eupatoria died back to the ground, but these looked like woody bushes. from a distance they looked more like boneset than the groundsel. The flowers must be very similar.

They don't really look all that similiar. I've got a lot of boneset, dog fennel, groundsel-bush, anything that kind of looks like that, and they're pretty easy to tell apart once you get familiar with the look of them.

Don't poke to hard nancedar, it's so easy to get a name wrong on these native plants. Just when you think you are starting to learn something, you realize how much more you need to know lol.
Wouldn't it be lovely if you could just snap a pic of a plant, send it to the web, and the web would just come right back and tell you what it was.......someday maybe. Thanks for the input all, and now I know what to call my little pet.

cribs, this forum is just about as accurate and fast as your futuristic ID system. Just give them a description and they're off!

Actually, I prefer the going back and forth on a particular plant. We learn so much that way.

Thanks for bringing groundsel-bush to our attention. I thought my husband was going to pull over and drop me off, if I made one more comment about it as we drove to Raleigh on Saturday!

I definitely have the baccharris on my property. I had a pretty large one in the yard that I had limbed up to be a small tree but cut it down this year to make way for the veggie beds. I have several along the property line which works out better anyway. However, they can prove to be very invasive - I do pull them out of other gardens and in special shrub borders.

You know what I love about these things? They just seem to have a personality all their own. Their growth pattern is so different from other trees as if they were bonsai. And just when I start to overlook it, it puts on one of the best fall shows in the whole yard. I am going to have to prune mine back soon, but I think I'll just go with the personality and try to compliment its odd growing pattern.