The short, steep bank beside the road presents an ever-changing picture.

In spring, pink lady’s slipper orchids hide among the woods along its top. Later, leaves and white flowers, visited by bees, adorn the raspberry bushes along its base. Next, who will pick or snatch the berries from the bushes: humans or birds?

But first, ragged robins and ox-eye daisies are among our early summer pleasures.

At the end of July, the early goldenrods appear, reminding us that summer is passing. Because there are many kinds, each may have its season. But those yellow-gold topped stems are almost August’s trademark.

(A reminder: goldenrod pollen is too heavy to float on the wind, and so, will not cause hay fever. Close cousin ragweed, without flamboyant color, flings its much-lighter pollen onto the breezes.)

Evening primroses send up tall, single stalks with small garlands of pale flowers on their tips. Elsewhere, mullein stems shoot upward from rosettes of giant leaves. Usually, their yellow flowers dot those stems here and there, rather than fully clothing them. It must have been breeders’ ambition to see every floret in bloom at the same time that produced the variety of mulleins now available for civilized gardens.

Black-eyed Susans are part of the August scenery. Here, again, plant breeders took up the challenge to produce more, better, bigger flowers, and so most of them are now more formally known as Rudbeckias.

The original black-eyed Susans are strictly native, still found on the American plains. But they like it in Maine, and so, are found on that steep bank in August — and on, sometimes into October.

At the end of August, however, the goldenrods began to straggle off into autumn dormancy, no longer part of the golden August picture on that steep little bank.

By the way, wherever I go on this peninsula, at this time of year there are flowers and berries and flourishing greenery. Yet everyone says that growing gardens is hard because of all the rock. If it were really that barren, why are our summers so beautiful? Why does the Garden Club flourish? Why do we have those burgeoning Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens? Your answer?