It’s midsummer again and it’s not going to last any longer than it did before.

But while it’s here it’s as real as a living being, and its emblems are the flowers, which grow practically everywhere from roadside to woods. Since mid-June the mouse-ear hawkweed and the orange and yellow hawkweed with two or three blossoms to a stalk have replaced the dandelions in my so-called lawn.

Daisies and black-eyed susans have filled in fields and embankments, among tangles of purple vetch and the last of the day lilies. The Queen Anne’s lace, or wild carrot, looks like white moons suspended in outer space, and among them rise here and there subdued pink steeplebush, and their cousins by cone shape and height, the meadowsweet.

Different kinds of clover carpet roadsides: rabbit-foot clover, yellow hop clover, white and red cow clover, and the tall, gangly white sweet clover with blossoms like little furled flags, not to be mistaken for the grass-colored tangles of wild mustard.

In the gravel, the stubborn chamomile plants with greenish-yellow nubs have sprung up, and the buttonlike blossoms of tansy, escaped from captivity, look like their kin. The white, hairy-stemmed yarrow, also known as milfoil, pokes up in the tanning grass. The ragweed, with deep-cleft leaves, has small green blossoms almost unrecognizable as flowers. It’s the ragweed, not the goldenrod, that makes you sneeze.

Goldenrod’s bad reputation is puzzling. In fact, to my eye, the goldenrods are for all impractical purposes the season itself, from midsummer to finish. Their yellows are subtle and various, and the tail-like clusters of tiny flowers sway outward and down in gorgeous cascades, by themselves and in yellow-green patches. In the blue-black dark of a thunderstorm they look wild and tough, but in the high summer sun the gold is so bright it almost hurts to see. They march across fields like disorganized imperial parades from eons past. They’re ageless and aged, robust and at ease. They look like colonnades on the way to the cosmos.

Midsummer in Maine is the cattail-shaped inflorescence of timothy shooting up sweet to be chewed, the dust-blue chicory, the cinquefoils with perfect pale-yellow petals, growing secluded under red-osier bushes, and the tangles of wild madder, its tiny white blossoms more like clouds or nebulae. The purple heal-all is turning up in every unmowed patch of grass this summer.

Or is it just that I’m paying attention for the first time?

It’s hard to tell. But it’s here again, living in the meadowsweet and loosestrife, and especially in the goldenrod, which will last you some four months or five – a seaside goldenrod will last you to November.

And it’ll go on like this for a short time through August, and then turn into sunflowers, asters, ripe apples and the swallows gathering for southern skies. As always.

dwilde@bangordailynews.net