What flower is this, I aster!

The other day, the Better Half observed that roadside asters had come into bloom. What she was referring to were shorter, with smaller flowers, than the asters I recall seeing along that particular road. I didn’t get out to check at the time, but neither did I take the photos I wanted of the wetland across the  road. Either I’ve been busy or it’s been cloudy enough that I’ve not bothered to grab the camera that wasn’t in the jeep to return to the scene. Maybe tomorrow? 

Sky-blue Aster (Symphyotrichum oolentangiense)

Photo by J. Harrington

The scene in reference is another wetland full of the yellow wildflowers we reported on a week or ten days ago. This one is about as far north of the house as the other one is south of us. I think a combination of later bloom and different travel patterns kept us from noticing the northern outburst until a week or ten days after the southern location’s bloom burst. 

I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that this summer’s drought has dried the wetlands enough to allow for the explosion of yellow flowers. We’ve been trying to identify them and believe they’re some variant of sunflower. The Better Half has been leaning toward Woodland Sunflower (Helianthus strumosus) while I’ve been pondering the possibility they’re Jerusalem Artichokes. Then we came across this information on the woodland sunflower page in Minnesota Willdflowers: "Woodland Sunflower hybridizes with both Hairy Sunflower and Jerusalem Artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus), which makes an ID even more challenging.” So, we’ve settled on some sort of sunflower hybrids. That’s an improvement over “pretty yellow flower on a tall stalk.”

Joy

By Stuart Kestenbaum

The asters shake from stem to flower

waiting for the monarchs to alight.

Every butterfly knows that the end

is different from the beginning

and that it is always a part

of a longer story, in which we are always

transformed. When it's time to fly,

you know how, just the way you knew

how to breathe, just the way the air

knew to find its way into your lungs,

the way the geese know when to depart,

the way their wings know how to

speak to the wind, a partnership of feather

and glide, lifting into the blue dream.

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