Marie Curie said, “I am among those who think that science has great beauty.” Science can simply be a matter of stating the obvious. Goldenrod and asters are essential to summer. In their presence we concede to the science of beauty.
Two sides of the same plant family: one fizzling with showy yellow flowers, the second a small radial purple disc of petals. Asteraceae plants are among the most common in the world: daisies, dandelions, sunflowers, marigolds, mugwort, and sage. Asteraceae look more like asters, which are of course stars. Goldenrod is also related.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer cited the mysterious relationship between asters and goldenrod as what led her to become a botanist and brought her to the deeper question of why they grow next to one another. She alludes to the color spectrum, what draws our eyes to them. They contrast with one another. To the cones in our eyes, the afterimage of purple is yellow and vice versa. This allows more pollinators to visit them. Purples and yellows seem to represent the heat of summer, and the slow approach of autumn’s shadow.
The brilliant gold and velvety purple blooms overlap. Goldenrod begins early August and aster blooms late August into October. Asters are also known as Michaelmas daisies. Their small purple blooms appear on the ancient quarter feast of St. Michael, Sept. 29th. (Quarter feasts refers were four annual festivals celebrated by the ancient Celts midway between the solstices of summer and winter and equinoxes of spring and fall.) The two blooms meet around the Labor Day sweet spot.
The herbaceous aster and goldenrod are prevalent because they reproduce quickly, usually laterally on rhizomes. Yet they are also companions in scale, growing no more than six feet, bending on narrow stalks in a delicate late summer dance.
There are many varieties native to the Hudson Valley. The Farmscape Ecology Program guide, From the Hudson to the Taconics, describes the occasion of goldenrod and asters as an indicative encounter. For most of the last 200 years, the Hudson Valley was largely agricultural. The swaths of forest prominent now used to be rolling hills of crops and livestock.
Goldenrod and aster love the sun and relatively flat ground that opens up to sky where soil is full of grasses and wildflowers, rather than shrubs or trees. Likely, when goldenrod and aster are companions in the Hudson Valley, you are looking at an old field. These fields were once farmland. Possibly old fields existed before colonization, which allowed seed banks to emerge once they transitioned away from agricultural land. With the erasure of Indigenous stories and practices, it’s hard to know.
Old fields are transitional ecosystems. Either they are managed by humans in order to keep space open, or they will succumb to shrub and tree cover. Despite their impermanence, they are valuable ecosystems. Standing sentinel, aster and goldenrod work with fleabane and wild carrot to give food and shelter to more than 241 species of insects, including newly metamorphosed monarchs tripping from nearby milkweed. Their tall bodies provide food and homes for songbirds and small mammals like groundhogs, mice, voles, and rabbits in the winter and summer. This leads to the occasional visit by a red-tailed hawk or owl. Aster is home to the orange-dappled pearl crescent butterfly, and goldenrod stems get a fat gall from midges or gall flies that burrow larvae into the fibers.
Uses of aster and goldenrod by different human cultures have varied. Both, however, have sometimes been used as a diaphoretic, with the aim of reducing fevers. Talk about cooling summer’s heat.
The end of August has a long legacy of fairs that springs up throughout the Hudson Valley, celebrating crops from the long year. There is joy in the season and also a call to wake up from summer, to let go of its haze and remember our responsibilities. The fields, the land call us to remember them. The goldenrod and aster, brilliant symbols of revelation, ask us to open our eyes.
