The Plant World 



A MONTHLY JOURNAL OF POPULAR BOTANY. 



VoL IV. AUGUST, 1901. No. 8. 



AUGUST DAYS. 

 By John Burroughs. 



ONE of our well-known poets, in personifying August, represents 

 lier as coming with daisies in her hair. But an August daisy is 

 a sorry affair; it is little more than an empty, or partly empty, 

 seed-vessel. The daisy is in her girlhood and maidenhood in June (in 

 the Northern States); she becomes very matronly early in July — fat, 

 faded, prosaic — and by or before August she is practically defunct. I 

 recall no flower whose career is more typical of the life, say, of the 

 average European peasant woman, or the women of barbarous tribes, 

 its grace and youthfulness pass so quickly into stoutness, obesity, and 

 withered old age. How positively girlish and taking is the daisy dur- 

 ing the first few days of its blooming, while its snow-white rays yet 

 stand straight up and shield its tender centre somewhat as a hood 

 shields a girl's face! Presently it becomes a perfect disc and bares its 

 face to the sun; this is the stage of its young womanhood. Then its 

 yellow centre — its body — begins to swell and become gross, the rays 

 slowly turn brown, and finally wither up and drop, and it is a flower 

 no longer, but a receptacle packed with ripening seeds. 



A relative of the daisy, the orange-colored hawkweed {Hieracium 

 aurantiacum) which within the past twenty years has spread far and 

 wide over New York and New England, is often at the height of its 

 beauty in August, when its deep vivid orange is a delight to the eye. 

 It repeats in our meadows and upon our hill-tops the flame of the col- 

 umbine of May, intensified. The personified August with these flowers 

 in her hair would challenge our admiration and not our criticism. Un- 

 like the daisy, it quickly sprouts again when cut down with the grass 

 in the meadows, and renews its bloom. Parts of New England, at least, 



