The Call Of The Aster
Saturday, October 31st, 2009“Europe has no asters at which an American would look twice.”
Those words by Donald Culross Peattie startled and then shocked me. I put the book down and looked out across the autumn borders in an English garden, massed with superlatively lovely aster bloom.
Then I read on: “In this our Western world”, Peattie continued, “the asters stand all through autumn, shoulder to shoulder in forest, on prairie, from the Atlantic to California, climbing up to the snows of Shasta, creeping out upon the salt marshes of Delaware. Here some call the white ones frost flower, for they come as the silver rime of chill flowering in the old age of the year. In the southern mountains they are hailed as ‘farewell summer’.”
Asters are one of my favorite flowers. Sometime, I resolved, I should have to go to America to see for myself what Peattie there described. Eventually I came.
As my first year in Pennsylvania turned toward the fall, I began to ask anxiously where I could best see the asters in bloom. The answer was always the same: “You will see them everywhere.”
Asters Everywhere