Plant guide by bird

Plants for Goldfinches

Plants for goldfinches are seed plants: American Goldfinches eat seeds almost exclusively — composites such as sunflowers, thistle and asters, grasses, and trees like alder, birch, western red cedar and elm ¹.

All About Birds' own advice is to plant native thistles, other composite plants and native milkweed ¹; the profiles below add the Wildflower Center's growing facts [3–7] and Audubon's case for natives ².

American goldfinch on a coneflower seed head — plants for goldfinches are seed plants — Photo: Cephas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Plants for goldfinches: composite seed flowers

Goldfinches balance on the seedheads of thistles and dandelions to pluck seeds ¹, and the garden composites do the same job: common sunflower, whose seeds are sought by many wild birds ³; purple coneflower, with spiny seed heads on 2–4 foot stems ⁴; and black-eyed susan, listed for seeds for granivorous birds ⁵. Leave every head standing until spring.

Thistle, milkweed and the late nest

Goldfinches breed later than almost any other North American bird, waiting until June or July when milkweed, thistle and other plants have produced the fibrous seeds they weave into nests and feed to their young ¹. Native thistles and milkweed are therefore nest material as much as food. Among trees, goldfinches eat birch seed ¹ — paper birch, used by songbirds and ground birds ⁶ — and the seed of red cedars; eastern red cedar also gives dense cover ⁷.

At the feeder they prefer nyjer and sunflower and use almost any feeder type, even ones that sway ¹.

Why native plants first

Native plants are those that occur naturally in the region where they evolved, and Audubon calls them the ecological basis on which birds depend: without them and the insects that co-evolved with them, local birds cannot survive ². The scale matters — a native oak supports over 500 species of caterpillars where a ginkgo hosts five, and it takes more than 6,000 caterpillars to raise one brood of chickadees ². Most nursery landscaping plants are alien species, so choosing natives is the single landscaping decision with the clearest effect on bird populations ².

The alternative is what most yards already have. Audubon notes that manicured lawn now covers over 40 million acres of the United States as a green monoculture, that the traditional suburban lawn carries on average ten times more chemical pesticide per acre than farmland, and that the continental U.S. has lost 150 million acres of habitat and farmland to sprawl ². Every bed of natives that replaces turf is habitat that lawn cannot be, and long-lived native trees such as oaks and maples also store carbon ².

Check the native range before buying: the Wildflower Center record for this species lists the states and provinces where it occurs naturally ³, and Audubon's zip-code native plant database narrows that to your area and the bird groups each plant attracts ². Once established, native plants generally need little maintenance and far less water than lawn, and they do not need the pesticides that make a yard poor bird habitat ².

More plant guides

Common Sunflower →Purple Coneflower →Black-eyed Susan →Common Buttonbush →Paper Birch →Cardinal Flower →Trumpet Honeysuckle →American Elderberry →Native plants for birds →Berry plants for birds →Seed plants for birds →Nectar plants for birds →Shelter plants for birds →

Frequently asked questions

What plants attract goldfinches?

Native thistles, milkweed and composites — sunflower, coneflower, black-eyed susan — plus birch and cedar for seed ¹³⁴.

Why do goldfinches nest so late?

They wait for thistle and milkweed to set the fibrous seed they line nests with and feed their young — June or July ¹.