Wet Meadow Flowers

     By late July and through August, low, wet spots in many sunny meadows in southeastern Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in the eastern United States, are made more lovely and interesting because of the pretty flowers of blue vervains, swamp milkweeds, ironweeds and Joe-Pye weeds.  These native, blooming plants have much in common, including sharing sunny, damp habitats, and blossoming about the same time.   All these tall plants have multitudes of colorful, small blossoms that are well worth seeing in sunny, bottomland meadows in the heat of late summer. 
     Blue vervains and swamp milkweeds bloom together in many of the same damper spots in some of the same meadows.  They are often lovely, floral neighbors.  Each blue vervain plant has a handsome, candalabra-shaped stalk and several tiny, bluish-purple blooms at the top of each stem.  Swamp milkweed plants have pink flowers.  The attractive flower colors of vervains and milkweeds are a pretty combination in certain low, moist meadows.
     Bees, small, but colorful butterflies and other kinds of insects sip sugary nectar from the diminutive blooms of vervains and milkweeds, pollinating those blossoms as they fly from one to another and another.  Meanwhile, caterpillars of monarch butterflies consume the juicy leaves of  milkweeds, grow, pupate, and later each one emerges from a green chrysalis as a striking butterfly.
     The purple-pink blossoms on clumps of ironweed plants in the damper parts of pastures are also beautiful, and attract many bees, pretty butterflies and other types of insects to their nectar.  While sipping nectar, those insects pollinate the ironweed blooms.  And several each of yellow and black tiger swallowtail butterflies, black and orange monarch butterflies, painted ladies, a variety of skippers and other kinds of colorful butterflies add more beauty to those flowers and the moist, sunny meadows that contain them.
     Joe-Pye-weeds, like ironweeds, usually grow in stands of their own in damp spots in pastures, and along moist roadsides in the case of the present species.  Joe-Pye is the tallest of these July and August, wet meadow plants, often growing up to twelve feet high.  This common plant is named after a Native American medicine man called Joe-Pye.
     Each striking Joe-Pye stalk has whorls of lance-shaped leaves at regular intervals along the stem, and bunches of tiny, dusty-pink flowers at the top of each stalk.  Those lovely flowers attract lots of butterflies and other insects to their nectar, again helping make the blooms and the pastures they live in more attractive and interesting.    
     These wet pasture plants' flowers, and the insects they attract, offer more beauty and intrigue to the habitat they inhabit.  The blossoms benefit insects with their ample supplies of nectar and pollen.  The plants are benefitted by the insects' spreading pollen as they fly from bloom to bloom.  And we gain lots of inspiration and joy from seeing the lovely flowers and the pretty, interesting butterflies that visit those various kinds of blossoms.