If you’ve been following this series of blog posts featuring the wildflowers blooming in our part of Colorado this July, you may have noticed a relative dearth of the classic and recognizable form commonly referred to as sunflowers.
The local sunflower types tend to come out later in the summer; at our altitude, many are just beginning to bloom now. Fortunately, that’s just in time to close out my project with a cheery blast.
Identification, you might not be surprised to learn, is complicated; the plant family we’re talking about here (composites, or Asteraceae) includes not only the common sunflower and other disc-and-ray plants such as Black-eyed Susans, Blanketflowers and Coneflowers, but also goldenrods, thistles, nettles, artemisias, dandelions, and, as you might expect, asters.
Following my post on groundsels early on in this project, a friend commented, “You know, you could just call them DYCs, Damn Yellow Composites.”
Duly noted.
Thank you for these messengers of cheer, Andrea, and congratulations on your once-a-day flower posts. Well done. I hope you enjoyed creating them. 🌻
Oh, Tanja, you put it perfectly: messengers of cheer. I enjoyed them no end, and the project only seems more worthwhile as I look at it from this retrospective angle.
Bravo! A fine finish to your month of blooms. I thought you’d have a hard time finding enough of them and instead, there were too many. An amazing year in the high country, lovely photos and well-researched and written descriptions. And here I thought you were taking a vacation from writing.
Pat, the abundance has been humbling. The vacation from writing has been entirely fulfilled, and I can’t make any complaints about the world offering rationales for paying attention and putting a little effort into researching some names: all that only connects the wild world to the one you and I live in.
Thank goodness for the sunny-faced flowers of all sizes and colors! Thank you for this month of wildflower enlightenment. Amazing what fancies extra rain will bring!
Oh goodness–“enlightenment” is no doubt beyond me. I hope my shamelessly biased observations are interesting and that those more knowledgeable than me will be forgiving of my errors. It’s been fun for me, albeit exhausting at times. I’m ready to just wander around and ogle for a while.