September in Los Angeles doesn't announce itself. The heat stays a while longer, the jacarandas are long finished, and then one afternoon the light goes low and amber an hour earlier than it did the week before, and you notice. The September birth flower is, fittingly, not one flower but two — the aster and the morning glory — as though the month couldn't settle on a single answer either. One is a star that waits until the end of the season to bloom. The other opens at dawn and is finished by lunch.
The Aster: A Star That Waits Until the End
Aster is Greek for star, and you only have to look down into one to understand the name — a ring of narrow rays around a yellow eye, the shape a child draws when you ask them for a star. Most of the North American species long filed under the genus Aster have since been reclassified as Symphyotrichum, which is a mouthful and no help to anyone standing at a market stall, so nearly everyone still says aster.
The old Greek story gives them to Astraea, goddess of justice, who left the earth and wept from the sky; where her tears fell as stardust, asters came up. It's legend, not botany, but it explains the meanings that have clung to the flower for centuries — patience, wisdom, faith, and a kind of love that doesn't need to prove itself. Purple for wisdom, white for innocence, red for devotion, pink for kindness.
Worth knowing if you're buying for someone born this month: the lists don't agree. British florists usually name the aster on its own. American lists almost always give September two flowers, aster and morning glory both. Neither tradition is wrong, and I've never met anyone who minded receiving the extra one. In England the aster picked up a second name entirely — the Michaelmas daisy, because it's among the last things still at full color around September 29, the Feast of St. Michael. A flower named for being late.
The Morning Glory Keeps Its Own Hours
Morning glories (Ipomoea) are the opposite temperament: fast, climbing, trumpet-shaped, and entirely uninterested in your schedule. They open in the morning and close by afternoon, then do it again the next day with a new set of flowers. Blue for enduring love, purple for grace, pink for gratitude — and running underneath all of it, a strain of longing. Love that went unreturned. Love that lasted anyway. A reminder that the day is short.
They were an obsession in Edo Japan. Two waves of it, roughly 1804 to 1830 and again from 1848 into the early 1860s, when growers bred henka asagao — variant morning glories — into shapes and colors nobody had seen before, competed at judged shows, and published illustrated books of their finest plants. A vine that holds its flower for half a day, and people gave it decades.
You see the plain ones all over this city, climbing chain-link in the alleys, blooming without being asked. They are also, for the record, a hopeless cut flower. Anything that closes by noon belongs on the fence it chose.
The September Birth Flower in a Vase
In the studio, asters do the quiet work. They're small and many-headed, which makes them the thing I reach for when an arrangement has a beautiful center and no connective tissue — they fill the space between larger blooms without competing for it, and they hold on well after the showier stems have gone over. Dry them and they keep their shape, which is more than most flowers will do for you.
For a September birthday I tend to build low and wide rather than tall, in that faded, late-season register the month keeps outside the window anyway. Purple and rust and a bruised pink. Nothing that looks like summer trying too hard.
And if you want the morning glory in the gift, plant it. A packet of seed against a fence is a slower present than a bouquet, and a better joke — you're giving someone a flower that will make them get up early to see it.
If you're marking a September birthday, come find us at the studio or catch the van on Abbot Kinney. We'll put something together that looks like this month actually looks.
