My sixth fall in southern Indiana, and the New England asters finally kept blooming long enough to meet up with a good hard frost. Every year I try for this shot, but either the asters have stopped blooming altogether, they're past their prime, the first frost is a weak little one and the sun has melted it by the time I get to the asters, or (last year) we had no frost at all until well into November and no wildflowers of any sort are still in bloom.

These asters were feeding butterflies--lots of them--well into last week, so I headed straight there as soon as I saw we had a good frost. Multiple other species were still in bloom, and beautiful, but these were my first priority, and they rewarded me.

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Halloween morning last year brought a beautiful heavy frost while leaves were still on the trees and multiple species of wildflowers still in full bloom. I posted a good number of photos then, but here are a few that didn't get posted or that largely got overlooked. I'm still watching for a heavy frost this year; whether the wildflowers will still be in bloom is the real question, but many species still are . . . we'll see.

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