THE MONTH OF YELLOW FLOWERS
[Illustration]
From valley after valley dies away the drowsy croon of the mowing
machine, leaving to the grasshoppers the fragrant drying hay. Now comes
July in many hues of yellow, spreading her gold beside dark, hidden
beaver backwaters and along the sun-warmed stubble, whose various,
singing life is loudest through these shimmering afternoons. Tawny
beauties are abroad in woodways and sea marshes. Where the hot air
shines and quivers over shallow pools yellow water lilies float sleepily
beneath curved canopies, while the lucent pallors of the white water
lily one by one are dimmed. Moving serenely toward its climax, the
season drinks the sun and takes the color of its slanting light.
The flame lily lifts a burnt-orange cup straight toward the sky. The
yellow meadow lily bends down over the damp mold it seeks. But both love
deep woods, and, blazing suddenly above a fern bed, the rich flowers
startle, like a butterfly of the Andes adrift in Canadian forests. They
are princesses of the tropics, incongruously banished to Northern
swamps, but scornfully at ease. The false Solomon's-seal in proud
assemblies wears with an oddly holiday air its freckled coral beads,
always a lure to the errant cow; and jack-in-the-pulpit, having been
invested with some churchly rank which demands the red robe, is ready to
cast off his cassock of lustrous striped green for one of scarlet. The
pendent-flowered jewelweed, plant with temperament and therefore called,
too, touch-me-not, droops its dew-lined leaves along the traveled lanes,
for it is making ready small surprise packages of seed that snap
ferociously open at a touch; and thus intriguing every passer-by into
sowing its crop, it earns the name unfairly borne by the innocent yellow
toadflax--snapdragon, which snaps only at bumblebees.
Gayly in possession of the fields, black-eyed Susan, known to the farmer
as "that confounded yellow bull's-eye," is holding her own, prepared to
resist to the utmost the onslaught of the goldenrod, which presumes to
unfurl in summer the banners of fall. The clear yellow evening primrose,
scion of one of our very best old English families, associates
democratically with a peasant mullein stalk, canary-flecked, since they
both fancy sun and sand. Magnificent sometimes upon the sand banks rises
a clump of that copper-in-the-sunshine flower, the butterfly weed, soon
to become as fugitive as our fair, lost trailing arbutus, the cardinal,
and the fringed gentian, if its lovers do not woo it less selfishly. All
beauty refuses captivity. In upland meadows the orange hawkweed is
afoot, waving its delirious-colored "paint brush" wantonly amid the
pasture grass in the light hours, but folding it at sunset, no sipper of
the dews. Brook sunflowers have come to the edge of the stream, but not
to look into the waters; their sunward-gazing petals are delicately
scented, surpassing their sisters of the fenced garden. The half-tamed
tiger lily, haunter of deserted dooryards and faithful even to abandoned
mountain farms long since given over to the wildcat and the owl,
wanderer by dusty roadsides, offers each morning new buds, and by
twilight they have bloomed and withered. Like the May rose, this is an
elegiac flower, clinging to lost gardens when all the rest have
vanished, though patches of tansy, herb of witchlore, will show pungent
golden buttons for long years untended, let the forgotten gardener but
plant it once. How many a little cabin, built in eagerness and hope, is
remembered at last only by the tiger lily, May rose, and chimney swift!
Yellow sweet clover, catching a roothold anywhere, declaring the gravel
bed a garden, makes it happiness to breathe the entranced air. The
yellow butterflies, like leaves of autumn, tremble and flurry where the
sun-steeped field meets the sweet dark wood. Among the rocks gleam ebony
seeds of the blackberry lily, whose star of orange and umber is about
to set.
Who knows, besides the birds, that embroidered on the moss new scarlet
partridge berries are ripe, hung from the vagrant vine of pale-veined
leaf that does not fear the snow? Only a month ago in this fairy
greenery lay the furry white partridge blossom, almost invisible, but
with a fragrance like that of just-opened water lilies, and now the
green fruit colors to the Christmas hue. There are no flowers like
these. The wood fairies wear them with their gowns of spangled cobweb
trimmed with moonlight.
Bough apples, with a sweetness like that of flowers distilled by the
intense sun, show the first brown seeds. From the high-piled loads of
hay journeying slowly to the mow fall the dried buttercups and daisies
that danced in the mowing grass. Ceaseless are locusts; heavy is the air
above the garden, where phlox and strawberry shrub tinge it
Persian-sweet. Clustered blueberries are drooped upon the mountains, and
in the swamps, sometimes over quicksands, shows the darkling sheen of
the high-bush huckleberry. The odor of the balsam fir is drawn out and
spread far by the heat. Now the pursued brambles become the blackberry
patch. The waste lands shine yellow with the blooms of the marching
hardhack. It is the triumph of the sun, and his priest, the white day
lily of the cloistral leaf, worships in fragrance.