July 30

Thinking more on nature’s evolution and the maturity of the season. It is a wondrous thing really, all that is contrived to achieve the possibility of reproduction. All the energy and intricacies in every living thing, and there are abundant examples now, in the backyard or garden or fence row.

We have a single golden rod clone which has been an interloper to the front knot garden. It poked its way up through the coreopsis within the past month, survived being pulled by the gardener’s hand, and now is displaying its plumes of newly emergent flowers. They are tiny yellow things, though under a 30x lens they appear as detailed and large as a mustard flower.

The wonder is to consider that this single clone had 9 sub stalks, and each of these had approximately 9 stems where the flowers reside. I counted 56 yellow flowers on one of these stems. Conservatively, an estimate is 9 x 9 x 56 = 4536 flowers in this rather diminutive clone, each bearing the possibility of reproduction, if conditions favor.