Naturalist midsummer

Midsummer flowers

When by mid-July the dandelions have gotten over their
adolescent outburst, an amazing thing happens in the fields
and roadsides in Maine. Midsummer arrives, like a hiker
cresting a steep hill and pausing to take in the view.
Wildflowers and grasses of subtle but extraordinarily rich
colors are about to appear, and generate Maine's midsummer
texture. And the first hint that spring's furious passion is
subsiding is the mouse-ear hawkweed. They look like
dandelions at first, but the carved yellow rays on their single
blossom are finer and more perfectly starlike, and they settle
cheerfully in the lawn rather than invade it. The orange
hawkweed, or devil's paintbrushes, and yellow hawkweed
follow like taller brothers with two or three clustered
blossoms.

Meanwhile, the shape of summer heat will appear in the
grass-colored tangles of mustard and white clover. Stubby
chamomile with greenish-yellow nubs springs up in the
driveway, and the buttonlike clustered blossoms of
tansy,escaped from captivity, look like chamomile cousins.
Pineapple clover pops up, and the white, hairy-stemmed
yarrow, also known as milfoil, pokes up in the tanning grass.
The ragweed, with deep-dissected leaves, has small green
blossoms almost unrecognizable as flowers. It's the ragweed,
not the goldenrod, that triggers allergies.
Goldenrod's bad reputation is puzzling. In fact, to my
seasoned Maine eye, the goldenrods are the emblem of
summer. Their yellows are subtle and various, and their
tail-like clusters of tiny flowers sway outward and down in
cascades that are gorgeous to see, by themselves and in
yellow-green patches. In a squall they look wild and tough, but
in the high summer sun the gold is so bright it almost hurts to
see. They march over fields like disorganized imperial parades
from eons past, showy and discreet at the same time. They're
ageless and aged, robust and at ease. They look like
colonnades along the way to the cosmos.
High summer in Maine is the cattail-shaped timothy shooting
up sweet to be chewed in contemplation. And big seedy rye
grasses, and redtop throwing rusty streaks across sunburnt
fields and blueberry barrens, and the scent of dust-blue juniper
needles.
July is different from the slam-dance of May and June when
the dandelions and lupines are rushing to make up for lost
time. Midsummer is quiet, hot and subtle, like the breather
you take after your crazy 20s and in your 30s discover there
are things to reflect on. It's a whole time of life, it lives in the
meadowsweet and steeplebush, and especially in the
goldenrod which will last you some four months or five - a
seaside goldenrod will last you to November. Midsummer
flowers themselves are preparations for sunflowers and
lavender asters, the ripe apples, and the swallows gathering for
southern skies.

© Dana Wilde 2007
Naturalist home

But the hawkweeds are just precursors. Like practically
everything in nature, they're signs. They and the ribbed
meshes of purple cow vetch, unlike the apple blossoms' and
lilacs' rush through May's sudden warmth, point coolly to
summer. Buttercups, daisies and black-eyed susans start filling
in fields. Queen Anne's lace, or wild carrot, umbels rise like
white moons suspended in outer space, and among them rise
here and there subdued pink steeplebush, and their cousins by
cone shape and height, the meadowsweet.
None of them have the spectacular vibrancy of spring bluet
sheets and lupines splashing up and down embankments, but
together they signal the season is maturing, and hint at the
coming mists and mellow fruitfulness of fall that here in Maine
we love above all else.