April snow

April 26.

Hear the ruby-crowned wren in the morning, near George Heywood's.

We have had no snow for a long long while, and have about forgotten it. Dr. Bartlett, therefore, surprises us by telling us that a man came from Lincoln after him last night on the wheels of whose carriage was an inch of snow, for it snowed there a little, but not here. This is connected with the cold weather of yesterday; the chilling wind came from a snow-clad country. 

As the saying is, the cold was in the air and had got to come down.

To-day it is 53° at 2 P. M., yet cold, such a difference is there in our feelings. What we should have called a warm day in March is a cold one at this date in April. It is the northwest wind makes it cold. Out of the wind it is warm. It is not, methinks, the same air at rest in one place and in motion in another, but the cold that is brought by the wind seems not to affect sheltered and sunny nooks.

P. M. – To Cliffs and Well Meadow.

Comptonia.

There are now very few leaves indeed left on the young oaks below the Cliffs. Sweet-briar, thimble-berry, and blackberry on warm rocks leaf early.

Red maples are past prime. I have noticed their handsome crescents over distant swamps commonly for some ten days. At height, then, say the 21st. They are especially handsome when seen between you and the sunlit trees.

The Amelanchier Botryapium is leafing; will apparently bloom tomorrow or next day.

Sweet-fern (that does not flower) leafing.

The forward-rank sedge of Well Meadow which is so generally eaten (by rabbits, or possibly woodchucks), cropped close, is allied to that at Lee's Cliff, which is also extensively browsed now. I have found it difficult to get whole specimens. Certain tender early greens are thus extensively browsed now, in warm swamp-edges and under cliffs, — the bitter cress, the Carex varia (?) at Lee's, even skunk-cabbage. \

The hellebore now makes a great garden of green under the alders and maples there, five or six rods long and a foot or more high.

False Hellebore. April 28, 2019

It grows thus before these trees have begun to leaf, while their numerous stems serve only to break the wind but not to keep out the sun. It is the greatest growth, the most massive, of any plant's; now ahead of the cabbage. Before the earliest tree has begun to leaf it makes conspicuous green patches a foot high.

The river is exactly at summer level.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 26, 1860

Hear the ruby-crowned wren in the morning.  See May 6, 1855 (“Dark bill and legs, apparently dark olivaceous ashy head, a little whitish before and behind the full black eyes, ash breast, olive-yellow on primaries, with a white bar, dark tail and ends of wings, white belly and vent. Did not notice vermilion spot on hindhead. It darts off from apple tree for insects like a pewee, and returns to within ten feet of me as if curious. I think this the only Regulus I have ever seen.”). See also note to April 20, 1859 ("My ruby-crowned or crested wren”). See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau: the ruby-crowned or crested wren.

It snowed there a little, but not here. The chilling wind came from a snow-clad country. See April 4, 1859 ("When I look with my glass, I see the cold and sheeny snow still glazing the mountains. This it is which makes the wind so piercing cold."); April 12, 1855 ("The mountains are again thickly clad with snow, and, the wind being northwest, this coldness is accounted for.")

Chilling wind came from a snow-clad country. As the saying is, the cold was in the air and had got to come down. See April 2, 2019, overheard in the hospital waiting room ("the air won’t be warm, my father slways said, until they get the snow out of the mountains")

What we should have called a warm day in March is a cold one at this date in April. See February 8, 1860 (40° and upward may be called a warm day in the winter"):  March 20, 1855 (“It is remarkable by what a gradation of days which we call pleasant and warm, beginning in the last of February, we come at last to real summer warmth. At first a sunny, calm, serene winter day is pronounced spring, or reminds us of it; and then the first pleasant spring day perhaps we walk with our greatcoat buttoned up and gloves on.”); April 25 1860 ("A cold day, so that the people you meet remark upon it, yet the thermometer is 47° at 2 P. M. We should not have remarked upon it in March. It is cold for April, being windy withal.")

I have noticed their handsome crescents over distant swamps commonly for some ten days. They are especially handsome when seen between you and the sunlit trees. See April 26, 1855 ("The blossoms of the red maple (some a yellowish green) are now most generally conspicuous and handsome scarlet crescents over the swamps"). See also April 24, 1854 ("The first red maple blossoms — so very red over the water — are very interesting. ");April 24, 1857 ("I see the now red crescents of the red maples in their prime . . . above the gray stems."); April 28, 1855 ("The red maples, now in bloom, are quite handsome at a distance over the flooded meadow beyond Peter’s. The abundant wholesome gray of the trunks and stems beneath surmounted by the red or scarlet crescents.”); April 29, 1856 ("How pretty a red maple in bloom (they are now in prime), seen in the sun against a pine wood") and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Red Maple


The hellebore now makes a great garden of green under the alders and maples there, five or six rods long and a foot or more high. Before the earliest tree has begun to leaf it makes conspicuous green patches a foot high. See Journal, March 25, 1860 (“The skunk-cabbage leaf-buds have just begun to appear, but not yet any hellebore.”); April 2, 1856 (“The plaited buds of the hellebore are four or five inches high.”); Journal, April 10, 1859 (“The hellebore buds are quite conspicuous and interesting to-day, but not at all unrolled, though six or eight inches high. ”); April 17, 1852 (" The leaves of the Veratrum viride, American hellebore, now just pushing up.") Journal, April 22, 1856 (“Some hellebore leaves are opened in the Cliff Brook Swamp.”); May 13, 1855 (" The brook in Yellow Birch Swamp is very handsome now — broad and full, with the light-green hellebore eighteen inches high and the small two-leaved Solomon’s-seal about it, in the open wood.”); June 12, 1853 ("Visited the great [purple fringed] orchis which I am waiting to have open completely. . . .  Its great spike, six inches by two, of delicate pale-purple flowers, which begin to expand at bottom, rises above and contrasts with the green leaves of the hellebore and skunk-cabbage and ferns (by which its own leaves are concealed) in the cool shade of an alder swamp."); Journal, August 23, 1858 (“I see . . . in swamps, the withering and blackened skunk-cabbage and hellebore, and, by the river, the already blackening pontederias and pipes. There is no plateau on which Nature rests at midsummer, but she instantly commences the descent to winter.”); August 30, 1859 (“The plants now decayed and decaying and withering are those early ones which grow in wet or shady places, as hellebore, skunk-cabbage, . . . and how is it with trilliums and arums? ”);