One of the hazards of working in a school is the annual reunion of large numbers of people in small, confined spaces. The students get antsy and the adults get antsy, but this is just a temporary annoyance. The bigger problem is the confinement of people in an environment that promotes the sharing of germs. People might be a little crabby the first week, but (inevitably) they start to actually feel bad the second week. This impacted me personally in the fourth week of school with a nice case of COVID.

I did not feel well at all and going to school was out of the question. The last thing I wanted to be was a “typhoid Mary” walking around the school, so I stayed home. Fortunately, the weather was amazing and I was able to socially distance in a place that offered warm sun, gentle breezes and all sorts of wonderful things to watch and listen to. Trips were made to the Thinking Chair, but I also made an effort to visit other parts of my yard that required a little less walking. I was exhausted most of the time.

Up until just last week there had been so little rainfall in the month of September that there had been no urgent need to mow the lawn and this allowed some interesting plants to rally their resources and put on one last push to flower and produce seeds. Hawkweeds and trefoils offered splashes of yellow to the green lawn and I even found a lone maiden pink flower in bloom, but by far the most uncommon flower I saw was that of the common chicory (Cichorium intybus). This was welcome news indeed because chicory flowers are so beautiful.

A native species of the Old World, chicory was brought to North America by European colonists. It quickly escaped from wherever it had been planted and became a naturalized wildflower species. Today, you can find chicory growing in all sorts of odd places, but most of them have the element of human disturbance in common. You find these plants in lawns and gardens, at the edges of parking lots, along roadsides and even in the cracks of concrete median dividers at traffic lights. The plant can grow up to 5 feet tall and it will cover itself with gorgeous blue flowers that are roughly the size of a half dollar coin.

Chicory is a resilient species that can tolerate drought. It is also somewhat impervious to mowing because it will sprout again and again from is basal leaves. As a result, a mowed lawn can have some very short and stunted chicory plants that put out their normal flowers below the level of the mower blades. And because the plant will continue to put out flowers well into October, they represent a wonderful source of food for many insect species late in the year.

I just so happened to find one of these stunted flowers growing in my lawn because I had elected to leave the lawn unmowed for the month of September. The grass remained short, but all sorts of flowering plants took advantage of the situation and there were flowers all over the place. One particular chicory flower caught my attention and when I trained my camera lens onto this splendid target I noticed that I was not the only creature admiring the flower.

One admirer was a small native bee that was clearly not a honeybee. It turns out that there are dozens of species of bees that can be found in our area. Many are small, solitary species and when I started diving into the world of the hymenoptera I was a little star-struck. Cuckoo bees, leafcutter bees, resin bees and mason bees are just a few of the groups I discovered. I am not going to embarrass myself by attempting an identification at this point, but admiring the loveliness of this little insect doesn’t require an identification. Covered with blue pollen, this little bee (the size of a grain of rice) was clearly enjoying the chicory flower.

Even more interesting was the fact that the flower had also attracted the attention of a hoverfly, which had the adaptation of looking something like a bee or a wasp. Completely harmless, the horverfly had decorated itself in the colors of a yellowjacket hornet and it too was very interested in the flower as a source of food. The presence of a bee, however, made the fly nervous enough that it kept circling the flower, but it was never willing to land on it. Perhaps it eventually had better luck on a nearby flower that wasn’t occupied.

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September has come to a close, but the world of flowering plants still has a few treats left in store for us. Many species will continue to bloom until we have several hard frosts. I have seen dandelions blooming in November, though I am not sure if there are many insects still around to visit them. As we are tempted to look upwards and outwards at the fall foliage there is also a potential reward for looking down at the ground in the quiet corners of our yards. The next time you walk out to the mailbox, see if you can find a little late-season holdout that is offering one of the few final flowers of the year.

Bill Danielson has been a professional writer and nature photographer for 27 years. He has worked for the National Park Service, the US Forest Service, the Nature Conservancy and the Massachusetts State Parks and he currently teaches high school biology and physics. For more in formation visit his website at www.speakingofnature.com, or go to Speaking of Nature on Facebook.