Where Giants Thrive!

There's a trail along the Kayaderosseras Creek near Ballston Spa where the wildflowers grow pretty big.  REALLY big! The goldenrods and sunflowers grow head-high along here, but  Eutrochium fistulosum, also called Trumpetweed or Hollow Joe-Pye Weed, is the champion! 

Maybe it's not obvious from the first photo just how enormous these flowering stalks and their gigantic floral clusters really are.  So I got in the picture (my friend Sue Pierce took the photo) to illustrate just how big. (I'm about 5'7" tall.)

One of the reasons many plants grow to prodigious size along this trail is that the banks were beveled some years ago to allow the creek's spring floodwaters to surge onto a level floodplain instead of charging with destructive road-undermining force between steep banks.  (See my post from 12/11/2012 for details about this project.) As a result, the silt-rich floodwaters enrich the soil in the resultant floodplain, which is where these floral giants now thrive.

This species of Eutrochium is considered to be a "demonstrably secure" native of this and many other parts of New York State, but I must confess that I rarely see these giants growing in the wild, although I have seen them often in cultivated gardens.  But even in rich garden soil, I have never seen them grow to this humongous size.  Here's a cluster I've seen in a garden not far from the Kayaderosseras's banks: over-my-head tall, sure, but not twice my height. 

Perhaps this population was the source of the seeds that ended up on that Kayaderosseras floodplain, where the silt-enriched environment super-charged their growth.