Orange hawkweed, or devil’s paintbrush. Photo by Dana Wilde
“Early August and the phlox start coming out,” former Maine poet laureate Baron Wormser wrote online a couple of weeks ago, “whites and various pinks. My wife and I have been flower gardening for decades but marvel each year at their poise and colors.”
Well, I’ve never flower gardened, but he speaks for me and the wildflowers. Mirror image: August, and the goldenrod are out, with racemes of asterous and saturnine yellow-gold blossoms bubbling over like fountains. They’re so brilliant they’re practically impossible to photograph accurately. I once asked a professional photographer if she could reproduce goldenrod because I couldn’t, and she had trouble too.
It’s the kind of beauty so pure you can’t reflect it clearly. Try as you inexplicably might.
Mouse ear hawkweed. Photo by Dana Wilde
The meadowsweet and dust-pink steeplebush are easier to catch, and then release, as it were. This summer, the hawkweed has smitten me. Little yellow faces you can mistake for dandelions until your eye adapts to the delicacy of the petals — square at the tips with four or five little serrations. They start in June and don’t give up. They’re everywhere sunny and stay that way right into November if the weather lets them.
And like everything else they come not only in numbers but in numbers of kinds. Asteraceae is the family — with cousins like sunflowers, dandelions, tansy (“for all of us”), black-eyed Susan, Jerusalem artichoke, sow thistle, yellow goatsbeard and goldenrod (again), just to name some yellow ones you still might be seeing — and Hieracium is the genus. They’re mostly hard to tell apart, but common hereabouts is mouse ear hawkweed (H. pilosella), and in our backyard are wall hawkweed (H. murorum).
In early summer there is orange hawkweed (H. aurantiacum), sometimes called tawny hawkweed, devil’s paintbrush and by common mistake Indian paintbrush (which is the accepted common name of the snapdragon Castilleja coccinea, with pointed, red-tipped leaves). Common hawkweed (H. lachenalii) seems uncommon west of Down East. Rattlesnake weed (H. venosum) is used in snake-bite remedies. There is also rough (or sticky) hawkweed (H. praealtum), tall hawkweed (H. scabrum), Kalm’s (or Canada) hawkweed (H. kalmii), New England (or Savoy) hawkweed (H. sabaudum), and the one with multiple flower heads, meadow (or field, or yellow, or king devil) hawkweed (H. caespitosum).
I can’t remember the rest, to paraphrase Mark Twain.
They grow like weeds! But weed is in the eye of the beholder, and hawkweed to my eye are the faces of small summer children. Without feet, they dance. Hawkweed joy is so unbelievable it’s as if it can’t be firsthand information. You take it in at the eye and for some ineffable reason want to pour it back out. Like all of nature, frankly.
Suddenly, it all comes clear, not only what the hawkweed blossoms are doing, but the goldenrod. If the hawkweeds are dancing, the goldenrods are solemnly overflowing, like fountains. The fullness of the universe, it has been observed since time immemorial, is a fountain of some kind that pours like a brook across, around and over and maybe even through the rocks and boulders of your mind and out your mouth, or pen, or paintbrush. For some reason the whole aim and mission of summer every year is to collect the wildflowers in mind and somehow reflect them back. To mirror the full-faced dancing joy of the hawkweed and the overflowing goldenrod.
It can strike you into silence. “The Earth is this time-immemorial miracle,” Baron the poet says, and I can’t say it any better, so here it is in his words, “that we blunder into and typically blunder out of, none the wiser for the experience. I am too harsh but how much one wants to say, ‘Look at the phlox and let their silence become yours.’ … Hard to say how precious they are, how they minister to me, how much I am affected by the human ‘news’ and of how little consequence that news is.”
Instead there are the flowers.
Dana Wilde lives in Troy. You can contact him at naturalist1@dwildepress.net. His book “A Backyard Book of Spiders in Maine” is available from North Country Press. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.
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