Its blossoms are the color of claret stains on white linen, and it is about as welcome in formal gardens as a clumsy tippler at the dinner table. But mark my words: the joe-pye weed will have its day even in the snootier precincts of horticulture.
For the next two months, its sunset pink cumulus blooms will overspread almost every sodden meadow, and butterflies everywhere will forsake their namesake bushes for the humble scrub weed named Joe. Taller than the surrounding milkweeds and ragweeds on their tiptoes, it graciously receives these winged courtiers in their fluttering finery. Even Monarchs come to pay homage. They know the joe-pye weed’s place, even if we don’t.
This plant, which fills late summer with new color when other perennials begin to fade, would be a great addition to gardens in difficult damp and sunny areas. When cultivated, they rise to six, seven, or eight feet or more on a whorl of saw-toothed leaves, providing backbone and structure to borders and attracting not just butterflies, but nectar-starved pollinators of every stripe. But there is something about the name that prevents people from taking it seriously as a garden plant. They think of it more as, well… a weed.
August opens up the steam valves and pokes the coals of summer so that even the shady knoll where we live becomes an incubator at this time of year. Life teems at every level from the stink bugs in the leaf litter to the turkey vultures circling ominously overhead. Uncounted millions of living things move restlessly and alternately between night and day, predator and prey, damp and dry, boil and fry. In humans, the heat and humidity induce an ennui-infused stupor, perceptions blur, and it is hard to focus on anything but the lemonade pitcher. But what a show we are missing.
One sure way to regain our focus and fascination with the world in such times would be to radically change the scale of things. Imagine, for example, having a fully functioning Manhattan — with all its buildings, streets, trains, traffic, people, and pigeons — shrunk to a size that would fit on an ironing board. People would line up for miles to see it — even in the middle of August. The same would be true of a cow that fit in the palm of your hand or a ladybug the size of a Volkswagen. We see these things at normal scale every day, but we don’t look at them, really, because they are… well, quotidian — something we see every day.
