Yellow River, early September

 We found a thick stand of beebalm, Monarda punctata, on the banks of the Yellow River on Labor Day.

The plant reminds me of those tiered trays that English people used to serve sandwiches on at teatime, at least in the movies. With beebalm, you have layers of yellow flowers with pink, purple and green bracts in between.

All those flowers attract pollinators, hence the common name. You can see plenty of bees in a stand of beebalm — but also hummingbirds, butterflies, moths and wasps.

Another common name, allegedly, is horsemint. The plant is in the mint family. If in doubt, crush a leaf and smell.

Also blooming in early September:

• Camphorweed is putting out scraggly yellow flowers. Talk about smell. Break a stem of Heterotheca subaxillaris and you’re in the medicine cabinet.

• The crownbeards in genus Verbesina are also have yellow flowers.

• Kudzu vines are putting out showy blossoms. I’d say the blooms are magenta, oxblood or purple, but I’m not good with colors. I wish I knew more about the variations within genus Pueraria.

• We also saw some fuzzybeans, in genus Strophostyles, which put out lovely soft purple flowers that remind me of pigeonwings, Clitoria mariana. Fuzzybeans are legumes and were used as food and medicine by the ancient peoples.

When you get to know a place, you have a sense of when it’s time to see a blossom of a peculiar shape or color. You start looking, and you might notice, as at the poet Franz Wright put it, “the unnoticed miracle of things precisely as they are.”