A September Roadside 
It was Saturday the twenty-fourth of September, and the 
day was as beautiful as blue sky and sunshine could make it. 
Our road led north for some twenty miles through open fields, 
filled with lovely things of many kinds. "Wherever the growth 
by the roadsides had been spared, the color of Asters and an 
occasional scarlet patch of Woodbine or other brilliant leaf gave 
even the travelled highway a touch of beauty. The Asters were 
at their height, great deep purple ones and lavender and white. 
The Joe-Pye weed had faded to a soft brown and stood among 
the grasses and the low shrubs, a perfect foil for the Goldenrod, 
which was still brilliant. Wherever the fields were damp, the 
ferns, osmundas largely, had turned the golden bronzy color 
that September brings to them, and they were as good to look 
at as in their greenness of midsummer. The little and big 
Junipers, which grow happily everywhere among the bare rocks 
and fields, suggest a planting scheme so satisfying that any 
landscape architect might envy. 
Those who drive in September should look for the field or 
roadside where the Fringed Gentian has alighted; all at once 
something makes you know that over that fence and in that 
pasture you will find it, and it is a fresh and delightful 
experience each time. I think I have never seen Fringed 
Gentian in just this company before, growing in happy prox- 
imity to Asters, Joe Pye, Goldenrod, Everlasting, and, stranger 
still, the Closed Gentian side by side with its cousin, the great 
blue Lobelia. We walked for a long way through that pasture 
lot in sheer enjoyment of those blue flowers. The travels of this 
plant are a mystery; I cannot find that it follows any law 
whatever. The most magnificent growth of it I ever saw was in 
a low damp field of several acres, so full that I think it is safe 
to say there were a million flowers. I thought that I should find 
them there every September. I visited this field later in that 
season, and saw that the seeds had apparently set on a thousand 
plants. Everything promised well. The next year I went again 
to find my Gentian, and though I walked up and down and across 
and across there was not a blue cup in that field, or anywhere 
near by. 
After leaving the Gentian our road ran through a lovely 
valley with brilliant Ilex berries, with Spice bush and poison- 
Sumach, gloriously beautiful in rose and carmine, the gray- 
green berries suspended from its branches. The dark green 
masses of the Alders that follow the brooks, with white Birch 
and black Birch and swamp Maple, scarlet Pepperidge and dark 
Oaks, lined the roadway. What a garden ! Miles of it ! We 
drove for six hours, and more, and the panorama of woods and 
fields, trees, vines, rocks and flowers, was a feast of beauty not 
soon to be forgotten. Alice G. B. Lockwood. 
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