Every summer in these little essays goldenrod transpires as a dominant image, and if anyone has happened to notice the repetition and feels like it’s just turning into clutter, I ask them to forgive me. The goldenrods spellbind my eye, which leads inevitably to wanting to talk about them. To try to reproduce or mirror them in words as accurately as possible. Which is never accurate enough, and I start to feel like the sculptor Giacometti who tried again and again to make a nose out of clay that seemed accurate to the spirit of the human form but, in his eyes at least, never quite succeeded. So he just kept trying.
So it is with me for goldenrod. It appears every summer, like all the wildflowers of July and August really, as an apparition in fields and along roadsides. Spraying clusters of tiny bright-yellow flowers, some bent gently over as if weighed down by a breeze, others in sort of sky-pointing arrowheads, and still others flat, almost like their cousin the tansy.
Goldenrod is diverse upon diverse. In the family Asteracea (a word built from the ancient Greek for star) and the genus Solidago (from a Latin root meaning roughly to make whole or solid), there are 125 or more species in North America. How many species populate Maine I haven’t found out, but it’s more than you can identify confidently working only part-time. Their blossoms express five general forms, according to one field guide: plumelike, elm-branched, clublike, wandlike and flat-topped. Most common in my parlance are the rough-stemmed, Canada and lance-leaved goldenrods. Also in our range are tall, early, late and slender-fragrant goldenrods; sweet, stout, showy, downy, gray and hairy; large-leaved, rough-leaved, elm-leaved, blue-stemmed and zigzag; Alpine (on mountains), silverrod, northern bog and seaside; Rand’s and Elliott’s.
No doubt there are more — they have the unusual capacity to cross-breed, some with each other and some even with other Asteraceas. In herb lore, decoctions of their leaves and flowers are said to ease a sore throat.
Goldenrod flowers express energies that feel simultaneously heavy and light, as though they were tough — which they clearly are, as they seem to root practically anywhere sunlight pours down freely and no one hays or mows — but also ethereal, suspended on the air at the tops of their stalks in astounding pyramids and angularities.
They fascinate me more than any sculpture or poetry. Every summer they stream together in fields or grow alone as if wandering toward a new group. Year in and year out they unceasingly form and re-form living breathing vitalities of unbelievable complexity. So every summer up pop these perennial verbal weeds, trying to reproduce the totality of this life.
Dana Wilde’s new collection of Amateur Naturalist writings, “The Other End of the Driveway,” is available from www.booklocker.com and the Amateur Naturalist website, as well as from online and local book sellers.