Observing blooms on the Rose Kennedy Greenway from mid-August to Labor Day weekend had me paraphrasing Frederick Douglass: What to a volunteer is Labor Day? Actually, the change of seasons evident on the Greenway during the period had me feeling as if I were headed back to school. And realizing fall has its own blessings in the garden.

On one visit, I notice for the first time shelf fungus of some kind on the tree snag across from International Place (not one of “my parcels” but a regular spot of interest). Not sure if I just missed the conks on earlier visits nor if their appearance helps clear up my confusion of how much of the tree snag is natural and how much fabricated.

I watch a rabbit stand on hind legs to munch on tall phlox. In my yard, I hurl expletives and small rocks at their brazen cousins, try to spray them with the garden hose and threaten to skin and roast them with mustard sauce. The neighbors think I’m crazy. On the Greenway, the rabbits are more of a marvel. By what grassy conduits do they find their way get to the middle of an overdeveloped metropolis? In another part of the parcel, irises look live their leaves have been sheered off by rabbits if not by a gardening machine.

Another day, I visit with a friend who works as a volunteer observing butterflies on the Greenway. He points out three cabbage whites (always very common, he tells me), nine pearl crescents (a first-time siting this year), one orange sulphur and one unidentified long tail.

Some of the Greenway’s hydrangeas that wilted so noticeably during July’s heatwaves have recovered in a dirtier blue and pink. But the a stand of white hydrangeas that looked particularly sad one previous visit have now been cut down.

Anemones have been impressive. Most recently, anemone x hybrida ‘Pamina’ (windflower) shows scattered brilliant pink flowers with yellow centers along Pearl Street in Parcel 21. Meanwhile, white anemones are no longer flowering along Pearl in stark contrast to their lush carpets of white a month earlier. Now just a few of their white flowers poke out along Congress.

Parcel 21’s beds along Congress Street look especially dried out and barren. But the stalk of the pea-like fruit of the dracunculus still impresses me though it’s now laying flat on the ground. And now its fruits are turning from green to orange.

In Parcel 22, I happen upon the changing of the Greenway mural on the vent building near Dewey Square. The next featured mural will be by Jeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent.

Along the vent, signs explain in English and Chinese the experimentation the Greenway is doing on the grassy area near the vent. It’s a combination of clover and three turf grasses: fescue, ryegrass and bluegrass, which don’t need fertilizer or much water and can withstand heavy foot traffic. It’s a noble cause but I still miss the towering sunflowers that grew here last year.

In Parcel 22, the elderberry that was blooming white, now shows clusters of reddish tendrils that remind me of grape stems. In the raised bed next to little library, zinnias flower yellow-green (but seem to have some kind of white scale like the Joe Pye weed in Parcel 21). The cucumber near the tunnel shows a few yellow flowers, but also seems to have some kind of white scale on its leaves.

Near the Red Line plaza on Parcel 22, flowering calamint swarms with bees, Russian sage sands strong with its purplish blooms, broken by occasional roses flowering pink and fleabane’s yellow and white. It’s one of the most resilient spots on the Greenway.

A bit about me: For more than 30 years, I was the executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education. In 2023, I left the editorship and began volunteering in phenology at the Rose Kennedy Greenway and in English language teaching at the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Mass. Also see A Volunteer Life and Back to Green and Witnessing Beauty but Wilting in Empathy.