Naturally Speaking

Autumn comes in many colors, but yellows tend to predominate in most plants that use September as their blooming anniversary. Most of the yellows are in the sunflower family, too, with an eccentric thistle, ragweed and daisy choosing other colors.
Goldenrods number more than a half dozen species here, covering field after field, marsh after marsh and prairie as well as forest edges.
It is not surprising that one goldenrod's common name is old-field goldenrod.
These many blooms follow a scheme followed by the bigger sunflowers, with the individual flowers so small they are nearly unrecognized as flowers.
Instead of seeing individual flowers, the saw-tooth sunflower and rough sunflower, like many of the rest, have flowers that resemble flower parts found in bigger blooms.
We tend to refer to some of these flowers as flower petals, when in fact each is its own flower, albeit tiny. No wonder, then, that each sunflower head has hundreds, even thousands of fruits, not just one containing many seeds.
So it goes in autumn, with other plants trying, but failing, to keep up with the billions of yellow blooms.
The purples, blues and an occasional white appear as mere dreamers in the fields of gold.