A Message

Take Notice.

That seems to be the message our new roadside color palette is broadcasting in the ditches and culverts, the spendthrift fields and meadows ablaze with saffron and gold. Gone is the green wonder of June, and the pale lavenders and purples of early summer’s wild phlox and lupine. Even the white and rosy-pinks of the rugosas are behind us. Now it’s about dazzle. As though it were possible for the eye to store all this brightness.  Just as it seems possible that when we stretch out on a beach in August, our bodies, like solar panels, can recall such heat when winter winds howl.

This is the boil-before-the-simmer palette. When key players are goldenrod and tansy, those “rumpy bunches,” says poet Mary Oliver, and “little towers soft as mash… full of bees and yellow beads and perfect flowerlets.” They’re also what, in my first years on the island, long before we had our own house and garden, I walked the roadsides for, filling whatever pitcher or Mason jar the cupboards of a rental cottage offered. Punctuated with a few stems of Queen’s Anne Lace and meadowsweet, those bouquets seemed to me just about perfect.

Now I know these roadside beauties are too often brushed off as weeds and sneeze-bringers, as invasive bullies banished from our yards. Goldenrod seems especially unloved, except by bees somersaulting among its wands, their bodies furred with pollen, and by butterflies – monarchs, yes, but also clouded sulfurs and small coppers, chosen, it seems, for their suitably monochromatic hues alone – and by, says Oliver, “the rocky voids filled by its dumb dazzle.” Maybe goldenrod, no longer touted as a wound-healer, diuretic or treatment for gout, is merely misunderstood. No weed, it’s a member of the aster family, cousin to that more refined, decidedly more welcome golden beauty, Black-eyed Susan. And please, allergy-sufferers take note. This is a case of bumping shoulders with the wrong crowd. Pin the blame where it belongs – on ragweed, a bullying opportunist that arrives on stage just as goldenroad takes its seasonal cue.  

Certainly a more benign and worthy companion is tansy with its flat-topped button blooms (think yellow oxeye minus its white fringed collar). Once prized as a medieval medical treatment for expelling intestinal worms and, oddly, not much later as a perennial herb essential to the kitchen, tansy was brought to our shores in the 1600s. Declared a necessary plant for the colonial garden, it’s now achieved the dubious status as one of the most invasive plants in North America. Best then, gardeners, to roll up the welcome mat and let tansy dwell in fields and roadsides, the bright follow-up to loosestrife, an equally land-grabbing sidekick that this time of year has lost most of its purple punch.

If I were a painter in late August (a lack of talent against which I still chafe), I’d not reach for citron or butter yellow. What’s demanded are cadmium and sulfur. To depict what, on their airy backbones, toss with exuberance, and a time in the season when even the waxing moon in its slow ascent, as ripe and full as an apricot, ambers. We’ve come full cycle from the paler yellows of forsythias and daffodils, of marsh marigolds and butter-and-eggs, those cheerful messengers even in the coldest, wettest spring such as this year’s when August’s tomatoes and cicadas seemed but an unimaginable dream.

Soon, our eyes will shift upward to the trees, the color wheel tilting again, this time toward the reds and russets. Toward leaves turning scarlet and orange before falling away. To the kindling that signals more obvious changes are about to take place. The endings that such shifts seem to say are near. Of things deepening into brown collapse, into what can never be ours forever.

Now though, these freely offered, no Midas-with-his-gold gifts of goldenrod and tansy may be meant to help us forget all that, regardless late August’s pulse of urgency, like that of the stopping-over migratory shorebirds fueling up in the marsh or whatever’s begun to stir the fields like incipient panic in a crowd. Another season, its projects, trips and good intentions, almost done. Another notch in the belt our calloused thumbs rub against.

In this less than perfect world, important messages are often simple. These past two weeks, as I’ve been walking or driving our island’s roads, my radar has been picking up: Enjoy this roadside beauty. These bright beacons in fog, these plumed torches beneath a darkening sky. Enjoy it now, the tansy and goldenrod as unstinting with their gold as the fragrant roses their sweetness. Never does it occur to them they might be something else. They never expect to be asked about happiness, or loss. Nor do they ever question what comes next.