Alpine Aster Shawlette

ALPINE ASTER (Aster alpinus) is a flowering plant that grows in open spaces and rocky, well-drained soils. In Estes Park, Colorado, it can often be found in the company of big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) and its vibrant, purple-rayed flowers dot the subalpine landscape in May and June.

I have always loved these harbingers of high-country summer, but I’ve gained even more appreciation for them after reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s musings on why we are drawn to the combination of its purple petals and golden-orange center:

“Why are they beautiful together? It is a phenomenon simultaneously material and spiritual, for which we need all wavelengths, for which we need depth perception. When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be purple and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters? We see the world more fully when we use both.

The question of goldenrod and asters was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know. It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.”

–Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

May you, like Kimmerer, find small scraps of beauty that rock you back on your heels in awe.