With my granddaughter back home after spending most of the summer vacation with us, I had the strangest problem this morning: I could get up and go anywhere for a hike—I didn't have to wait for Her Majesty to awaken and have a royal pancake breakfast made for her—but I was now so out of practice in the first-thing trekking department that I was having a lot of trouble deciding where to go. I finally settled on the Blue-blazed trail I hadn't walked in a couple of months, and, once there, I took a side trip to the beaver pond to check on anything interesting in the morning chill. The water was, of course, down since the June floods, and passage over the outflow brook was easy and dry. There were no beavers active, nor were there any birds calling, save one still-singing Red-eyed Vireo. The formerly ubiquitous dragonflies were still too cool to be flying. But as I hugged the edge of the pond, I heard plenty of bumblebees, and when I got close to their buzzing, I saw what had made them get out of bed. Swamp Loosestrife is a gorgeous, late-summer-blooming, native wildflower that looks a bit like a wild azalea but is in a different plant family. Decodon vertillatus, which is also known as "Water Willow," is a cousin to the much-maligned and highly invasive Purple Loosestrife, but this delightful plant belongs here and should be welcomed. The bees make it easy to see why.