The summer blooms fade by mid-August and the plants produce seeds, nuts and berries that last into the autumn. However, there are the late summer and autumn blooms that are just starting now and asters and goldenrods give us wonderful flora displays in fall. This year, I decided to track the blooms of asters and goldenrods in Copeland Forest through the blooming season into early November.
It’s a journey down memory lane of the botanical studies of asters and goldenrods, one of the most difficult groups of plants to study, in some cases, more difficult than willows and hawthorns. This made me remember a quote from Asa Gray (1810-1888), the most important American botanist of the 19th century. “I am half dead with Aster.
I got on very fairly until I got to the thick of the genus, around what I call the Dumosi and Salicifolia. Here I work and work, but make no headway at all. I can’t tell what are species and how to define any of them.
I was never so boggled. If you hear of my breaking down utterly, and being sent to an asylum, you may lay it to Aster, which is a slow and fatal poison.” I started to study asters and goldenrods back in the 1990s.
Since that time many species have changed names and even some asters have become goldenrods. I dug out my old copy of “A checklist of the Flora of Ontario Vascular Plants” by Morton and Venn, University of Waterloo Biology Series #34 1990. Then No.
36 from that same series, “Goldenrods of Ontario” by John C. Semple, Revi.