Summer’s End
Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”
Labor Day
When you’re young, the beginning and end of summer are clearly defined. Summer begins about 3pm on the last day of school and ends when you have to get up early, dress nicely, and go out to wait for the bus. Whether or not these definitions make any sense depends upon where you go to school. In Indiana, summer starts reasonably when school ends in early June, but 90-degree days may still be viewed as relatively cool when kids are forced back to school well before the end of August. The school calendar in NH is more closely aligned with what a rational person would consider to be summer. School lets out in early June, which still is spring, and by the end of August, when school opens up, we already have had to use extra blankets more than once, and the birches are showing some color. In neither place does the school calendar or common sense align with the meteorological definition of summer. June 22 to September 22 is too short an interval for summer in Terre Haute, but it is too long in Sugar Hill. I went to school in Rhode Island, where school ended on or about June 22nd, depending upon the number of snow days, and didn’t start up again until the week after Labor Day. I spent most of the next 45 years working to an academic calendar in Boston. Throughout this long period, summer for me began on Memorial Day and ended on Labor Day. After Labor Day, I was much too busy to worry about the changing seasons.
But all that is in the past. Labor Day no longer serves me as a convenient, consistent marker of the end of summer. Being retired, we’re no longer constrained by any calendar, whether defined by a school board or by the timing of the solstices and equinoxes. We simply notice nature’s signals that summer is coming to an end. There are many such signals, but I’ll just highlight the four Fs: “Flowers, Fruits, Flickers and Foliage.”
Flowers
In early spring, we find delicate flowers popping up in forest floors, taking advantage of the light available before the trees leaf out. In late spring, we’re astonished at how fast everything grows, and we’re delighted with the daisies, buttercups, hawkweed, lupine and so many other wildflowers that adorn our roadsides and fill our fields. As summer proceeds, we look for iris, turtlehead, black-eyed Susans and other beautiful, elegant flowers, each blossom calling for our attention and each plant worthy of closer inspection. These flowers have to standout to attract the bees and other insects seeking their nectar.
In August there is a change along the roadsides and in the fields that is impossible to miss or to ignore. The early summer flowers give way to the onslaught of goldenrods and asters, families of flowers noted for their diversity and their abundance of blossoms. By the end of August, banks of these flowers cover the fields and hang over the trails, as if these plants sense that time is short, that fall is on the way.
1 Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.
September 5, 2023. The wet summer has resulted in massive displays of asters. The New England asters form masses of color on the dam and in the Upper Meadow.
When I go out by the pond on Labor Day weekend, everywhere I look I see asters and goldenrod. Flat-topped white asters have grown to be more than five feet tall, and many have fallen under their own weight, as they are not designed to reach so high. New England and New York asters compete for my attention, the former being more common, but the latter being a deeper violet. A half dozen species of goldenrod may have quite distinct shapes, stems, and leaves, but it is their combined effort to color the landscape that attracts me and the butterflies.
September 4, 2023. A white admiral flits from one branch to another within an opening in a large patch of goldenrod.
Fruits
Blueberries start to ripen in the middle of July, a sure sign that summer is here. By the end of the month, I’m spending an hour or so every other morning just trying to pick the blueberries before the birds get them or bears find them. Then I have to wash them, figure out where to put them, decide whether or not to make jam, and wonder if there is still room in the freezer for more berries. By the end of the first week in August, the blueberries are pretty much done, and that is a sign that the ‘lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer” won’t last forever.
But that’s not the end of the fruits. Blackberries and raspberries may last through the end of August, prolonging the feeling of summer, even though the nighttime temperatures may have dipped into the 40s. Another week passes, and I’m happy to have more free time now that the blackberries have also been harvested. It may take a couple of days, but soon I will notice branches weighted down with apples suddenly grown to full size and beginning to turn color. We have a dozen or so wild apple trees, some of which need to be picked around Labor Day before they fall and attract the deer and bears that have been waiting for the chance to get a real meal from these large, tasty fruits. So that is a clear signal that summer is coming to an end. I now have to be ready to pick the apples, and I have to get the implements ready to make apple sauce, apple pies, or dried apples.
September 19, 2014: A massive crop of apples weighs down the upper branches of one of the wild apple trees in the Back 4.
Sometime in September, we also notice the rose hips, often obscured by the aster and goldenrod that have grown over the pasture roses whose pink flowers were so lovely a month earlier. Some of the neighbors make jelly out of these fruits, a task that I am happy to leave to them.
September 5, 2023. I didn’t at first notice the rose hips hidden amidst and below the overhanging goldenrod and asters.
Flickers
Migrating birds start coming through in the latter half of August. Some of these, the robins and redwings that gather on our lawn or by the pond most likely have been living nearby. Their arrival at best sparks a mild statement such as “Hey, did you notice the robins on the lawn? They’re the first I’ve seen in a week or two.” The same goes for any merganser that shows up at the pond about this time; we wonder if it is one that was raised on our pond, but after watching a family of them in July, seeing one or two in September is hardly a remarkable sight.
Sparrows and warblers trickle in, but they are of greater interest to real birders than they are to the casual observer sitting on the porch enjoying a morning coffee. A creature that requires a special effort to see and identify doesn’t qualify as one of nature’s best signs of summer’s end.
No, a true signal that fall is on the way is when a bird well-known for its size, colors and habits returns to amuse itself on the lawn right in front of your picture window. For us, that bird is the flicker, because these birds arrive, sometimes in small flocks, and spend hours hunting for insects in the lawn. I first observed this behavior more than twenty years ago:
July 15, 2002. There were two flickers in the front yard this morning and another below the power lines in the Lower 40. At 3pm, one was in the front yard digging a hole with its bill and getting ants. It would have its head down for 10-15 seconds at a time, then look up quickly and just as quickly return to the feast. I went over to have a look: the hole was a perfect cone, about a half inch in diameter at the top and about two feet deep, with three ants scurrying around the sides. I also saw a pair by the pond about 630pm. [I didn’t see any on the 17th, but saw one on the 18th; I then didn’t note any more until I saw four or five in Pearl Lake Road when we drove up at dusk.]
Most years, we only see flickers when they are migrating, which is why we’re excited to see them when they return in the fall. They typically show up some time in mid-September, and they are a sure sign that the season is changing.
September 9, 2020. A flicker foraged freely on the front lawn
Flickers, of course, are only one of the many species of birds that migrate through our region at the end of summer. The first year that we were in Sugar Hill in mid-September, I was excited to see so many migrating birds:
September 16-18, 2007. On the 16th, we saw flickers on Hadley Road. Yesterday, chickadees, blue jays, crows, and phoebes were active in our yard. Today, bluebirds were scavenging in the driveway, the first time we’ve seen them this fall. We also saw a phoebe, a red-breasted merganser, mourning doves and grouse in or around the Pond.
I could have added one of these migrants to the title of this section, but I was worried that some readers would react with a groan. However, I can’t resist at least mentioning this bird. Although it lacks the distinctive size and colors that I just emphasized as important criteria, its tail-wagging is always interesting, and its name certainly fits in with the alliterative theme to my list of summer-ending signals. Phoebe’s often nest in one of the nooks under the eaves of our house, so we frequently seen them in the summer posing and wagging their tails as they sit on one of their favorite perches on the patio or by the pond.
September 25, 2019. A phoebe landed in one of the trees next to the pond. Was it one of the ones the nested under our eaves?
Foliage
The title of this section is simply “Foliage,” not “Fall Foliage,” because this section refers to the first glimpses of reds and yellows that signal the approaching end of summer. Young maples often turn bright red in August, as do certain vines. In swamps and around swamps, maples and birches turn colors before any reds or yellows are visible in the forests. So, when we take a walk in August or early September, we take notice of any bits of color and remark “fall is on the way.”
September 5, 2023. Sure signs that summer is coming to an end: the bird house by the blueberry patch is empty; the asters and goldenrod are in full bloom; apples have ripened on one tree in the Upper Meadow, and many vines have turned a bright red.
An Alternative Title for this Essay
The idea of writing about the end of summer came to me as we chatted with Chuck and Betsey before going in to see Mama Mia! at the Weathervane Theatre. Nancy and Betsey were both proud to be wearing white pants on Labor Day, and they had to remind Chuck and me that “One cannot wear white after Labor Day!” I thought about the similar dictum whereby the US Army required me to wear my winter dress uniform one 90-degree day in early May back in 1971, because the approved date for switching to summer uniforms was still a week or two away. Using specific dates to mark the season for certain types of clothes reminded me of the foolishness of using specific dates to mark the beginning or end of any season.
I therefore began thinking about what to put it his essay. I asked Nancy what she thought of “Flowers, Fruits, Flickers, and Foliage” as a title. She expressed some interest, especially my highlighting of one of her favorite birds. But then her background as a gardener took over, and she remarked quite happily about the garden flower that flourishes at the end of the summer. She therefore suggested another title:
“Mum’s the Word.”
