Right now, in mid-August, the roadsides and field edges around here are moving into that rangy late-summer stage. Mugwort's flower spikes — greenish-yellow and easy to miss unless you're looking — are pushing up on stalks that have climbed since June. In the wet ditches, boneset's flat white flower clusters are opening too, right on schedule for a bloom that runs through late September. It's a humid, cicada-loud stretch where the truly wild plants, the ones nobody planted, are having their best week of the year.
In the western USA, this season brings can be wet and those are the perfect conditions for globe mallow to have a serious bloom flush — apricot-orange flowers across desert shrubs from Arizona to the Great Basin.
Let’s get to it!