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Updated: June 22, 2025
Higher up on the dry rocky banks is the gray or field golden-rod, whose small leaves are covered with grayish down and whose rather short stem is topped by a flattish pyramid of brilliant yellow flowers. This is one of the early golden-rods, but it lasts well into the fall.
For the golden-rods are like elm-trees in their forms: some grow in one single, tall plume, bending over a little at the top; some in a double or triple plume, so that the nodding heads may bend on each side; but the largest are like the great Etruscan elms, many branches rising gracefully from the main stem and curving over on every side, like those tall glass vases which, I dare say, you have all seen.
The azaleas succeeded to the anemones, the orchis and trillium followed, then the yellow gerardias and the feathery purple pogonias, and finally the growing gleam of the golden-rods along the wood-side and the red umbels of the tall eupatoriums in the meadow announced the close of summer.
Mingled with these grow, lower, the spiraeas, white and pink, yellow touch-me-not, fresh white arrowhead, bright blue vervain and skullcap, dull snakehead, gay monkey-flower, coarse eupatoriums, milk-weeds, golden-rods, asters, thistles, and a host beside.
After the golden-rods and asters have had their day, late in October or well into November, when witch-hazel, yarrow, and clover are almost the only blossoms left us, you will stumble here and there upon a solitary dandelion reflecting the sun, or a violet giving back the color of the sky.
Bramble-bushes seem to thrive on the bodies below, and there is no flower in the little yard, save a few golden-rods, which flaunt their gaudy inodorous color under the lee of the northern wall. New England country-livers have as yet been very little inoculated with the sentiment of beauty; even the doorstep to the church is a wide flat stone, that shows not a single stroke of the hammer.
A piece of "waste ground," as it is called, an untidy garden, a wayside thicket of golden-rods and asters, pig-weed and evening primrose, these come to be almost as attractive a sight to him as a thrifty field of wheat is to an agriculturalist.
In the foreground were blue Raspberry-stems, yet bearing greenish leaves, pale-yellow Witch-Hazel, almost leafless, purple Viburnum-berries, the silky cocoons of the Milkweed, and, amid the underbrush, a few lingering Asters and Golden-Rods, Ferns still green, and Maidenhair bleached white.
Then came the important Friday, hazy with "the smoke of burning summer," and softly colored with the drifts of golden-rods and crimson sumac leaves along the edges of the yet green forests.
It is not hard to climb in respect to steepness, but it is so tangled with bushes and vines, that one can scarce break through them. The open places were yellow with golden-rods, and the pale asters were plenty in the shade, and by the side of the brooks, that with pleasing noise did leap down the hill.
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