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Midsummer Flowers |
Now that the dandelions are over their adolescent outburst, an amazing thing is about to happen in the fields and roadsides in Maine. Not quite yet - but it's coming. Midsummer will arrive, 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. 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 has 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. 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. |