I don’t know who first invented this gold and yellow thing we’ve got going on in September and October.

But boy, did it ever catch on in Alabama. The roads are lined with it. And though we try hard every year – we mow it, we bulldoze it, we herbicide it – we can never fully suppress it. It just explodes again, in yellow plumes and golden wands and sunny domes of flowers.

It would be a shame if you just saw it all as a bunch of old yaller flowers. It’s not just one type of plant that flaunts its gold. There are hundreds of types, not even particularly closely related. There are 40 kinds of native goldenrod blooming now, more than two dozen different kinds of native sunflowers, a dozen species of coreopsis high and low, show-stopping fields and wet meadows of tick-seed bidens, pineywoods ox eyes, yellow crownsbeards, yellow-flowered silk grass, gajillions of golden asters and St. John’s worts, and maybe the greatest concentration of black-eyed Susan species in eastern North America. You can’t get free of it even in the woods. Golden false foxgloves are wrapped around their host trees and goldenrod fireworks light up the darkest places.

You could get weary trying to name them all.

So let’s just start to appreciate them on a basic level: There are many, many kinds of plants, more than would happen by accident, that have made yellow their emblem color this time of year. It’s like a great salute to the sun’s decline and the end of long days, the last flash of summer brightness before the deeper shades of fall.