The Goldenrod Grove is in its end stages for this year. Most of the flowers have finished releasing their seeds, and the few left are teeming with them, ready for a gust of wind strong enough to carry them away.
It’s reached the stage in the season where everything is really starting to die off until the spring. Winter hasn’t kicked into full gear yet, so everything is dead, but it’s also still really wet, and things are starting to decompose. My guess is that in a year where the freeze sets in earlier, everything would get frozen in time and not really decompose as significantly until the spring.
I was thinking, that perhaps the Goldenrods don’t release some seeds because it gives them a competitive advantage the next year. As everything has decomposed in the spring and the old stems turn into fresh organic nutrients, seeds left behind that germinate will have great success growing in the compost pile that results from all this decomposition.
