The weedy ground near my office is now in high summer. Along the edge, there are deep orange rows of butterfly weed, sometimes called pleurisy root, filled with yellow butterflies like truckers at a favourite roadside cafe, swirling in and out. They are surrounded by mulleins, now in unfurled yellow, covered this morning with delirious ladybugs. Alongside, bladder campions, true to their name, which sounds like a Renaissance poet, are out in their puffed white shirts. Nearby, harebells (with my favourite Latin name, campanula rotundifolia) in blue jostle the yellow black-eyed susans and the slightly less forthright wild sunflowers. Throughout and now beginning to overshadow this riot of colour, every kind of green from the bluestblue green to greenyellow, from graygreen to green tinged with red, proliferates in weed, vine, and thistle. And if you look really closely, as I did this morning, you find sprinkles of tiny purplish red flowers, virtually magenta, as if the painter of it all said, oh, here's a colour I haven't used yet. And the whole panoply of colour -- deft, an accent here, a sprinkle there -- the despair of any artist.