Queen Anne's Lace collars
roadside Goldenrod, sweeps of
Jewelweed crown the fade
of Morning Glory's while the
Joe-Pye Weed vies for Yarrow.
Mid-August flowers
call out my name in golds and
fuschias while my heart
calls theirs in return-bowed and
listening to their green song.
Forty years ago this summer my mother and I made a summertime scrapbook of pressed flowers we collected together. She helped me label them all, teaching me the names of each one as we picked and pressed them, which I then wrote in pencil in my childish printing in big letters on each page beside the pressed sample of plant.
I remember feeling so proud of my collection as I loved to collect things--even living things like caterpillars- and so this summer project was right up my alley. Besides wildflowers kept better than creepy crawlies whose untimely deaths in my grass-lined ice cream buckets I was always devastated by yet never felt incriminated in.
When I think back to that summer of scrapbooking with my busy young mom I can still feel the sensation of rubbing my tiny seven year old fingers over the raised ridges of the scrapbook pages and the feeling of smoothing out the plastic film back onto the sticky page after arranging the flowers where I wanted them to be. It was so difficult to get all the air bubbles out and smooth the page back with the stem, leaves and petals of each different plant bumping up from the page yet so very satisfying when it mostly worked out.
Mom had become interested in learning the names of common roadside flowers during her early summers as a young mom mothering her little growing family. She did so to save her sanity and preserve a sense of self while she spent long days at home without her driver's license when my dad was on the road inspecting new highway construction for too many hours a day to make any sense.
And thank goodness she did. Her love of wildflowers and nature learning still blooms beautifully today in mom and dad and in me and my three children too! Thank you dear ma!
Happily I spent part of the afternoon of my 47th birthday today driving around southeastern PEI with my dear husband and kids. My parents joined us in their vehicle. Along several of our stops mom and I looked at different plants to see what we could see.
Bright orange Jewelweed positively lined the roadsides along the Waterside Rd. We called them spotted touch-me-nots when I was little and they brimmed from the ditch by Moore’s Pond in Stratford, their little seed pods bursting excitedly when you touched the swollen seed heads. As kids we had so much fun pinching them until they exploded into little curly tendrils of shiny green. Mom taught us that they were good for healing insect stings.
This afternoon mom had me peeking on and inside the flower parts to see if there were any spots but there were none that I could see-but they certainly were of the impatiens species if not the spotted ones.
A little further down the same road I pulled over to show her and my dad the nice patch of fuschia plants which I had first noticed several nights ago and later looked up in an old flower identification book called Atlantic Wildflowers only to remember they are called Joe-Pye Weed. The book which mom gave me (a second hand find) a few years back interestingly was authored by Diane Griffin and published in 1984 by Oxford University Press (Canadian Branch). It is a most lovely book to read and look at still with photographs by Wayne Barrett and Anne MacKay.
Joe-Pye Weed was a household name when I was growing up but it had fallen off my radar somehow in the years hence. Noticing it again was like seeing an old friend from that scrapbook forty years ago. Spending time with mom and dad and my crew looking at Beach Pea and Canada Thistle at Point Prim was so much fun on this strange Pandemic birthday. Always so much to be grateful for, even, especially, in difficult times.
Be well,
Jill
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