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Poor Will's Almanack: August 2 - 9, 2022

Lion silhouette at sunset.

Poor Will’s Almanack for the last week of Deep Summer, the second week of the Soaring Swallow Moon, the third week of the Sun in Leo.

I watch the story of Deep Summer unfolding and approaching its climax: yellowing locust and buckeye, reddening maples and Virginia creeper leaves, the berries forming on boxwood, greenbrier, and poison ivy wild cherries turning deep purple.

Asiatic lilies and day lilies gradually disappear in the garden as white, red, and purple phlox come in. Lizard's tail and wood nettle go to seed along the riverbanks. Blueweed, white vervain, and white sweet clover end their seasons. Petals of the hobblebush hydrangea darken. Parsnip heads, honewort pods and sweet cicely pods are dry enough to split and spill their seeds. Hickory nuts drop into the undergrowth.

Middle summer raspberries are gone, and blackberries are ready to eat , and the season’s second-last wave of wildflowers---- the Joe Pye weed, monkey flower, clearweed, horseweed, white snakeroot, jumpseed, virgin's bower, white boneset, field thistle and Japanese knotweed -- bloom in the open fields and along the fence rows.

Rusty dodder spreads across the tattered black raspberry bushes. Milkweed flowers turn to pods. Round galls swell on the goldenrod.

When the mornings are cool, fog hangs in the hollows before dawn.

This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for first week of Late Summer. In the meantime, all the world is a story, a series with endless seasons and episodes. Start watching now. The plot thickens every year.

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Bill Felker has been writing nature columns and almanacs for regional and national publications since 1984. His Poor Will’s Almanack has appeared as an annual publication since 2003. His organization of weather patterns and phenology (what happens when in nature) offers a unique structure for understanding the repeating rhythms of the year.