MID-AUTUMN ROADSIDE COLORS

      One hour a week, from mid-September to almost mid-October, 2026, I patrolled a half-mile stretch of rural roadside in a deciduous, bottomland woods in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to enjoy nature.  The vegetation on both sides of the road is mowed at least once a year, about ten feet back from the road to the woodland edges, making the beautiful, vivid colors of autumn leaves, berries and late-blooming flowers along those wooded borders quite visible from the road. 

     Colored foliage dominates deciduous woods during the latter part of October, locally.  But some bottomland trees' foliage turns colors before that time, including many strikingly-red leaves on red maples and black gums, and soft yellow on black walnuts.  I see those lovely leaves peeking out beautifully along that half-mile section of woodland edges I visit weekly from the country road.     

     The strikingly-red berries of spicebushes, multiflora rose shrubbery and Tatarian honeysuckle bushes are nestled in foliage by early October, where they may be hard to spot.  But those ripe berries also help decorate bottomland woods.  The color on those berries, however, is overlooked by many people because those fruits are small, half-hidden in foliage and overwhelmed by colored leaves.  However, mice, squirrels and berry-eating birds, including American robins and cedar waxwings, find those berries, and ingest many of them.  

     The berries grow to be red so the birds can find them.  The birds, having no teeth, digest the soft pulp of berries, but pass the hard seeds whole in their droppings, often some miles from the parent plants.  And the seeds that survive the appetites of  rodents, may sprout the following spring.

     A variety of flowering plants blooms abundantly late in September and into the middle of October, locally.  The attractive Canada goldenrod blossoms dominate certain meadows and roadsides at that time.  Each goldenrod stalk has a few golden"fingers" pointing out from the top of it, and each digit is covered with tiny, yellow flowers.  At this time, too, some beautiful, orange, cornucopia-shaped spotted  jewelweed flowers are still blooming. 

     The lovely, bright-blue of Asiatic dayflower blossoms and the pretty and tiny, pink blooms of smartweeds, enmasse, close to the ground, add more beauty to the roadside I visit, and other roadsides, during October.  Masses of lovely, pink smartweed blooms along mowed roadsides can be spotted at a bit of a distance.

     Ah, but thee flowers of October are asters, particularly asters with masses of small, white flowers, and the lovely, pale-lavender blooms of heart-leafed asters, my favorite fall flowers.  Both these kinds of asters bloom on the edges of the woods along the road I visit weekly, and along many other roadsides, and fields, in Lancaster County.  Sometimes, in October, I see a field that is totally white with white aster blooms, as if snow fell on that one field. 

     Asters are the last hurrah of fall flowers, locally.  And they are the last great nectar source for a variety of bees, butterflies and other kinds of pollinating insects.  Faring best in moist soil and full sun, they grow and bloom in pastures, abandoned fields, and rural roadsides, sometimes in the company of Canada goldenrods.  And, sometimes, when viewing those beautiful aster blossoms, I hear the gentle, melancholy trilling of tree crickets stridulating from nearby bushes and trees, and feel the chill of the October air, all that together in God's wonderful natural world.      

    

            

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