October Flowers

There have been several hard freezes here now, and there aren’t too many flowers still open, but some plants don’t mind the cold. Asters, wild arugula, chrysanthemums, and even a little left over goldenrod are all in bloom right now.

The chrysanthemums are only just starting to open, although it seems that the variety growing here is a particularly late flowering variety. As nice as they are, chrysanthemums are not a favorite of the pollinators. So the chrysanthemums sit there looking pretty when not much else is flowering, but it is the other plants that are still flowering that are offering the last sources of food for the pollinators that aren’t already hibernating or otherwise dormant for the winter.

The wild arugula has already been flowering for several months and won’t be done soon either. In one particularly warm year, I was able to photograph a honey bee getting pollen from wild arugula flowers on December 15th! It isn’t so much the cold that marks the end of the flowering season for the wild arugula, instead it just ends when the whole plant gets buried in snow. I have noticed that the flowers only open on days that are warm enough for the pollinators to come out to forage. As the weather gets really cold, it waits for the warmest parts of the warmest days to open and make itself available for whatever comes.

Asters don’t mind the cold, but they only flower for so long after they first open, so on warmer years they may be done before it really gets that cold. There are a few different varieties of asters around. New England aster is large and purple flowered. Then there are the smaller white ones which all look very similar. I have not been able to identify any of them down to the species. Although I can tell them apart well enough, figuring out which of the many small, white flowered aster species they are would entail looking up all of them to compare. And then there is a rarer light purple one that I would like to figure out how to propagate. It is low growing, so it doesn’t take up as much space as other asters, and the flowers are clustered extra thickly, which makes it especially nice looking. It may also be, since I am mostly going by one plant, that that plant is especially healthy (I have noticed that asters in the chicken yard are especially large and have thickly clustered flowers; the actions of the chickens and their droppings seem to favor the asters). If that is the case, I would still like to collect the seeds of that especially healthy plant and see if I can figure out a place to plant them where they would do equally well.

What’s flowering where you live right now? Do you have a favorite? Let me know!