The Ephemeral Meadow

 Arrgh. It's all going so fast, so fast...the greens are leaving, the browns are coming. We haven't really had a proper fall here in southern Ohio, just a whole bunch of rain and wind and trees dropping their still-green leaves, and other trees that should be riotously colorful just standing around buck naked.

So I'm looking through my photo archives for things to share and it all looks impossibly bright and colorful and fresh and late-summery.

 I could just smell my neighbor winding up to mow this incredible meadow of mistflower (Eupatorium coelestinum.) I like to call it "wild ageratum" because that's what it is. It's one of my favorite flowers for the way it can paint a meadow sky-lavender.

I'd drive by the meadow and think, "I have GOT to get in there with the camera before he mows it!" Because when things are at their most beautiful, that's when he gets the bug to mow. You may remember the monarch rescue two years ago, when we saved 67 caterpillars as the tractor was grinding through. To his credit, he helped us gather them--once we told him they were there!

Wonderful guy. Just a different ethos about beauty, that's all. Mowed close is his beautiful. 

Mistflower and butterflies is mine. Here's a pearl crescent.

a clouded sulfur

A leatherwing or soldier beetle, possibly Pennsylvania Leatherwing (Chauliognathus pennsylvanicus) . You usually see these all over goldenrod.

 I kept stepping back, marveling at the beauty of the biggest stand of mistflower I'd ever seen. Knowing its days were numbered. Thankful it had been left this long.

Common buckeyes, a fall migrant around here, and one of my favorite butterflies. Those white wingbars flash in flight, and I can almost always identify this one on the wing before it alights. That's saying something for a butterfly.

And of course there were monarchs, but they preferred the more vividly colored tall ironweed.

On the leeward side, where he'd already mowed, mistflower still grows in the  uncut shadow of the hayrolls. There's a painting in there somewhere.

You know how I feel about hayrolls...

Not a week later, it was all gone. I guess you have to mow if you're going to make hayrolls.

 But he didn't even take hay this time. Just cleaned it up, made for an early frost.