Pocono Parade

Dandelion, hawkweed, daisies, clover, milkweed, brown-eyed Susan, butter’n’eggs, goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace.

This, as near as I can call to mind, is the seasonal procession of wildflowers here on our Plateau.
We’re already at the last stage! The fields are egg-yolk yellow with goldenrod (but it’s beginning to brown), and dotted with the greeny-white celadon color of the Queen Anne’s lace, which is absolutely flourishing this year.

I left out the earliest, the blue or indigo flowers which come even before the dandelion! I don’t know their names, but there are blue blossoms on grass stalks, and a hairy plant with a cone-shaped blue cluster of colour at the tip, and tiny violets. Frost wrote “Nature’s first green is gold:/Her hardest hue to hold”, but I think the natural blue is even more ephemeral.

They went by so fast this year! I had hardly noticed the daisies were blowing than I saw the first Brown-eyed Susan.
I love all seasons here. But high summer is the briefest and so necessarily one of the most beloved. As a poet native to this area, Elinor Wylie, put it: “Summer, much too beautiful to stay..”

Estivation: breeding season is over, even the insects are less insistent. Vegetation of all kinds has reached its apogee, it hovers, waiting for the Fall.
I hope all our dear Readers are estivating in contentment!