Fireweed

You would have to live in the Northland to appreciate the bittersweet beauty of fireweed. This time of year it is everywhere--transforming empty fields, roadsides and river bars into scenes of astonishing beauty.

(This particular plant is growing up between the planks of the back deck to blossom beside my domesticated flowers and rival their beauty...)

But late-blooming fireweed is the harbinger of autumn. When I see it, my thought inevitably turn to the lengthening nights, the cooler mornings, the not-so-far-off first frost.

Before that happens, of course, fireweed puts on quite a show. From nothing in late April, the plants have grown to five-, six-, seven-foot tall spires crowned with dozens of the bright-colored flowers. Soon the blooms will be replaced by the seed-pods, which will burst with the frost to loose thousands of cotton-winged seeds to drift on the winds of autumn like fairy snow. The September temperatures will turn the rest of the plant scarlet--our hills and mountain-side flame into October with the ghosts of the fireweed.

We don't have the colorful deciduous trees here as they do in the Northeast--maple or oak. Our birches and alders wear autumn leaves in shades of yellow and gold--no oranges or reds.

But the fireweed lends the late summer and autumn of Alaska a certain glory.