09/04/2026
End of Summer
Late summer has its own soft song. The buzz of crickets has a quality – sleepy perhaps. And rather than muffle the sound, the sticky air holds it. There are at least three discernable cricket choruses coming from the ferns, bush clovers and goldenrods in NEECA’s field, but one has that especial late summer sound. It is lulling and soothing. I recall a similar sound - that of soft rainfall outside my bedroom window. They are the stuff that made me stretch and wriggle my toes under the covers for the sheer feeling of contentment.
The colors of late summer have softened as well. Humid air will mute colors, and the haze blurs and filters them. This year the White Wood Asters have, overnight it seems, blown up into pale blurs along trail edges. A few summers ago, it was the Calico Asters that grew in large numbers around the barn and at the horse park. I often crouch to see how both species lose their yellow centers, changing after pollination to reddish purple or brown. Whether this color change is a purposeful signaling to bees and others, which of the aster flowers are young and full of pollen, or normal aging, is not clear. But the patchwork or calico effect is there.
Walking on the barn’s hot gravelly trail, then through NEECA’s sunny field and into the cool of the hemlocks and pines, it becomes clear that, save the goldenrods, white is the predominate color of fall flowers. A little patch of Pearly Everlasting has small flowers with nearly translucent flower rays, and slender wooly leaves and branches. You might miss it among the sedges and ferns except for its silver glow. Also, there is Boneset, so tall now it flops over in places into the sedges and grasses. Fall flowers such as these are extremely important; they are the pollinators’ last call for nectar and pollen. It is thought that the color white, offering brightness more than color, is what the late feeding bees, beetles, moths and butterflies are attracted to. Even when the sun goes down the flowers are visible to the insects.
In NEECA’s thick forest, the color white was still there in the disheveled flowers of Whorled Wood Aster, but the pristine white present earlier under the hemlocks and pines – Goldthread and Starflower, Trailing Arbutus, Partridgeberry, Teaberry and of course Mountain Laurel and Hobblebush - is gone for now. These spring flowers may be small and sparse, but they stand out in such low-light environments. White reflects all visible light. I particularly remember seeing a few Painted Trillium a distance off the Native Plant Trail; they appeared as glowing orbs floating above the forest floor.
Late summer is one of our “inter-seasons”. It is for short duration, a little unsubstantial and hard to describe. Perhaps that ineffable quality arises from a feeling. That when you walk the trail, you are walking between the ghost of summer, and the dream of fall.
