Flat-topped white aster grows in moist thickets, wet meadows, fens, seeps, swamp edges and wooded openings from Alberta to Newfoundland and south to Georgia and Alabama. It is one of the first asters to bloom each year and is the main host plant of Harris's checkerspot butterfly. In Quebec it is native.
The English botanist Philip Miller first described it as Aster umbellatus, and the German botanist Nees von Esenbeck later moved it to the genus Doellingeria, named for the German physician Ignaz Döllinger (1770–1841). The species name umbellata refers to the umbrella-like flower clusters. Botanists in the late 1800s and early 1900s kept Doellingeria separate, many later folded it back into Aster, and DNA studies now support it again as its own North American genus.