Asters start appearing everywhere in August hereabouts and go well into fall.

The biggest and brightest are the sunflowers, leaning east to west from morning to night and soaking up sunlight with big yellow-gold wheels that look for all the world like stars, which is the source of the family name, Asteraceae. Latin aster, which comes from Greek aster, means “star.” By September fields of stars are growing everywhere. Daisies, hawkweed, black-eyed Susans, powder blue chicory, violet blue New York asters, panicled asters, bushy fleabane, and small-flowered white asters.

And then there’s the goldenrod, at least 130 different kinds, cascades of yellow among bushes and tangles of blue and violet stars. Rough-stemmed goldenrod grows in every field from July to October, and also seaside goldenrod, blue-stemmed, stiff, downy, tall. The flowers are close-packed on the stems and seem to be overflowing rather than sunning. But goldenrods are asters too – the cascades are made of tiny yellow blossoms that themselves are stars.

Long ago goldenrod got badmouthed for causing hay fever, but it doesn’t – ragweed’s the culprit. Its green flowers spill pollen the same time goldenrod blossoms. In fact, by age-old tradition goldenrod leaves make a tea you can drink for medicinal purposes, sore throat and such.

Every autumn, in the gold September light, they seem more and more gorgeous to me. At a certain point they become intoxicating. It’s just me, I guess, my own taste in flowers. But they seem to march in ragged clusters up and down hillsides, bright yellow in the sun and ageless. Whole sections of fields get flooded with gold, like sprays of the Milky Way washing through late-summer constellations. The goldenrod blossoms are close-packed stars, and it’s hard not to think of them as small galaxies growing on the edge of the woods by the house. They cascade into the sunlit dry grass and asters. Like the galaxies spiraling outward in the great, dark star fields.

The astronomer Johannes Kepler noticed around 1600 that flower parts grow in spirals, too. Botanists call it spiral phyllotaxis, and have shown that leaves on a stem or the structures inside a seed tend to form at a particular angle to each other, which is about 137.5 degrees. That angle was well-known to ancient mathematicians and artists. Whether anyone noticed it in flowers before Kepler is uncertain, but it had a name: the golden ratio. It was understood to be a fundamental pattern of beauty in nature and art.

The golden ratio underlies the structure of pine cones, sunflower seeds and shellfish, Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings and the Parthenon. It’s in the spiral arms of distant collections of stars, too. Somehow your eye imbibes it, and in late summer it wheels and dances in your mind like a kaleidoscope of goldenrod, sunflowers and other asters.

Dana Wilde may be reached at naturalist@dwildepress.net. More Amateur Naturalist observations are available at www.bangornews.com or www.dwildepress.net/naturalist.