Brrrr? Achoo?

The temperature might be 95 degrees on a July day, but the sight of its yellow blossoms can offer a chill that’s autumnal.

New Englanders used to say Early Goldenrod’s appearance presaged an early winter, but as its name suggests, this species always blooms in July.

Early Goldenrod is just one of nearly 50 kinds of goldenrods found in the Northeast, most blooming in late summer and fall. All are subject of another, more serious misconception: They are said to cause hay fever.

It’s simply not true. Goldenrods bear colorful flowers that attract insects. Their pollen grains, designed to be carried by bees, are too big to become airborne and to end up in the noses of allergy sufferers.

The real villains are grasses, plantains and ragweeds, which bear green flowers and dispatch their tiny pollen into the air. In fact, any time you see a colorful flower, you can bet the display is aimed at attracting bees and that the pollen is too big to bug you.

It’s the unnoticed, dull, green flowers that create the season for sneezin’.

Scent of summer

There’s nothing elegant about the look of milkweed. In fact, to most people, it is what its name suggests: A weed. But get close to a cluster of its unusual flowers and you may be charmed.

Few native wildflowers smell as sweet as common milkweed. The plant uses its powerful scent to attract bees, which provide pollination like Pony Express riders. As they crawl across the blossoms, their legs unwittingly pick up tiny saddlebag-shaped pollen packages to deliver from one flower to another.

The result of pollination are those late-summer packages of fluff that delight children and which the Navy once used to fill life vests.

For us, however, milkweed is a room freshener. Somewhat drab and droopy, the flowers are not the stuff of fancy bouquets. But pick a stalk – don’t mind the sticky juice, from which Thomas Edison once tried to make rubber – put it in water, and place it in a dark corner of a room where it will stand unseen but not unnoticed as it sweetens the air with its fresh summery scent.

Backyard gold

All that glitters may not be gold, but if you run across Metriona bicolor, you wouldn’t mind at all. At least, not if it’s an adult.

Like a drop of molten gold, the Golden Tortoise Beetle clings to and munches on the leaves of morning glories – or, on the wild side, the closely related bindweeds. The golden shell glows with iridescence. Put one in your hand, however, and watch the color change to mother of pearl, and then dull orange as the insect manipulates the moisture content in its shell.

Seen on a leaf, the lustrous beetle is hard to believe. Perhaps even more amazing is the fact that the beautiful adult sprang from a “filthy” kid. The black, fork-tailed larvae of the tortoise beetle camouflage themselves by collecting excrement, attaching it to their backs, and walking around under a load of, well, crap.

This tiny Jekyll and Hyde is yet another example of the wonders of nature right outside your back door.

Season’s greetings

Summer arrived Wednesday at 8:26 a.m. That was the solstice – “sun stop” in Latin – when Old Sol halts its northern movement and starts heading south again.

For those who love light and believe night is good only for sleeping, it is a joyful time, with 16 hours of sunlight. The dreary days of seasonal affective disorder are long gone, and the world is bright – and warm.

For lovers of the outdoors, June 21 is a lot more significant and worthy of holiday status than Jan. 1, a dismal and silly celebration, signifying little more than taking down one calendar and hanging another, or watching Windows do it for you. It’s not a new school year, it’s not a new fiscal year, it’s not even an astronomical event – it’s just the changing of numbers, arranged by long-forgotten Roman emperors.

The longest day, on the other hand, is a real event, a more than symbolic day on which we welcome the most enjoyable time of the year, when we can relax more, play more, and generally recharge our lives.

So, a day late, we wish you a Happy New Solstice.

Two twitchers

It’s the season of the twitchers, the fledgling birds that seem to get so excited at the prospect of food that their bodies shimmy and shake with excitement.

Most of our songbirds are altricial – like humans, they are born helpless and need to be waited on, break and foot, by their parents. To be fed, the youngest simply hold open mouths so wide, they seem to dwarf their bodies. As they grow older, they add voices to their food demands. And by the time they leave the nest, they twitch for attention – standing on a branch, wildly wiggling their bodies and their slightly open wings as a parent approaches with dinner.

This behavior may have inspired the British word, twitcher, which means a fanatic bird-watcher: It is said that true twitchers go into uncontrollable spasms of excitement at the sighting of a new species. So the next time you see a young sparrow or robin twitching for its lunch, think of an otherwise staid Englishman in his tweeds, binoculars raised, posterior all a-wiggle at the joy of spotting a Long-tailed Tit.

June snow

The air in parts of town has been full of fluff, white fuzzies drifting in the breezes like impossible June snowflakes. It’s the season for the cottonwood to cast its future to the wind and, like the lowly dandelion, to set countless cotton-covered seeds adrift to find new home sites, often covering the ground with white.

The Eastern Cottonwood is a wetland-loving poplar, a group of trees with more than usual ties to the wind. The leaves and their stems are shaped in a way that makes them move in even the slightest breeze. They shake – or quake, as in the Quaking Aspen, another poplar.

No one is quite sure why they wiggle, but the creative minds of the past devised reasons. Legend has it, for instance, that Christ’s cross was hewn from a poplar and that ever after, the tree has trembled with fear at the awful deed to which it was a party. Perhaps that explains why today, its lumber is considered so poor that it is used mostly for packing crates and pallets.

The weed wars

The airwaves have been bursting with commercials warning of ugly invaders called dandelion, chickweed, and crabgrass. Chemical answers are offered, and Americans will spend billions in the war against weeds.

Why bother? What's so bad about having a few wildflowers mixed in with your grass? Why must all the lawn's greens looking monotonously alike? Why shouldn't a lawn, like a garden, have variety of color and shape?

Think of the advantages of a natural lawn: Less expensive (no chemicals to buy), less work (no weeding), fewer worries (buttercups won't bug you), fewer potential health hazards (that's poison you're pouring on those dandelions), more color and form (natural lawns are interesting, have variety, offer surprises), and more wildlife (songbirds love weed seeds).

The disadvantages? Well, you’ll still have to mow every week or two. And maybe it's a little tougher to practice your putting.