This of course is coreopsis, also known as tickseed, also my favorite flower, for a million reasons. One is the yellow. There is no yellow quite like coreopsis yellow. Another is that their appearance is among the most reliable signs of fall I know. They appear suddenly around the last week of August--this is the first I have seen this year. If you lost your calendar and had no Stonehenge, the appearance of the first tickseed would tell you September is about a week away. You would not be off by more than a day or two. They are gone by mid-September. They go about the business of being beautiful without being anything else, other than a reminder that nothing gold can stay. They take over the fields and meadows where I am fortunate enough to live, which become, almost overnight, seas of yellow. They are loved by bees, yellow jackets, hornets, butterflies...and me. They perform a kind of ballet in the wind. It is hard to imagine a species more determined to be who and what they are. They are like sharks, actually, utterly relentless in what they do, except that unlike sharks, what they do is take to possession of the earth for two weeks, paint it yellow, and dance in the wind. Then, as suddenly as they appeared, they leave, at which point you can begin to count the days until the following August, when, if you are like me, you will begin to scout the fields for yellow, safe in the knowledge that you (and they) have made it through another year