The quarter-grown red oak leaves between you and the sun, how yellow-green!

May 23.

Canada Warbler

(Audubon)

Now on the sunny side of the woods, the sun just bursting forth in the morning after the rain, I get sight for a moment of a large warbler on a young oak, - only the under side, which is a clear bright lemon-yellow, all beneath, with a sort of crescent of black spots on the breast.

Critchicrotches some two or three days; now tender to eat.

How agreeable and surprising the peculiar fragrance of the sweet flag when bruised! That this plant alone should have extracted this odor surely for so many ages each summer from the moist earth!

The quarter-grown red oak leaves between you and the sun, how yellow-green!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 23, 1860

The under side . . . a clear bright lemon-yellow, all beneath, with a sort of crescent of black spots on the breast. See June 4, 1855 ("It is all bright yellow or ochreous orange (?) below except vent, and a dark or black crescent on breast, with a white line about eye. Above it appears a nearly uniform dark blue slate, legs light, bill dark (?), tail long and forked. I think it must be the Canada warbler, seen in ’37.”); May 28, 1860 ("Sylvia pardalina. It is a bright yellow beneath, with a broad black stripe along each side of the throat, becoming longish black marks crescent-wise on the fore part of the breast, leaving a distinct clear bright-yellow throat, and all the rest beneath bright-yellow; a distinct bright-yellow ring around eye; a dark bluish brown apparently all above; yellowish legs. ")

Critchicrotches now tender to eat. See May 27, 1852 ("The fruit of the sweet flag is now just fit to eat, and reminds me of childhood, — the critchicrotches. They would help sustain a famished traveller. The inmost tender leaf, also, near the base, is quite palatable, as children know. I love it as well as muskrats (?)."); May 29 1854 (Critchicrotches have been edible some time in some places."); and note to June 12, 1852 ("The critchicrotches are going to seed. I love the sweet-flag as well as the muskrat (?). Its tender inmost leaf is very palatable below.")

The quarter-grown red oak leaves between you and the sun, how yellow-green! See May 11, 1859 ("Young, or fresh-expanding, oak leaves are very handsome now, showing their colors. It is a leafy mist throughout the forest."); See May 15, 1854 ("The aspect of oak and other woods at a distance is somewhat like that of a very thick and reddish or yellowish mist about the evergreens. . . . Oak leaves are as big as a mouse's ear.”); May 15, 1860 ("Looking from the Cliffs through the haze, the deciduous trees are a mist of leaflets.”); May 18, 1851 ("The oak leaves of all colors are just expanding, and are more beautiful than most flowers");   May 25, 1860 ("Red and white oak leafets handsome now"); May 26, 1857 ("Very interesting now are the red tents of expanding- oak leaves, as you go through sprout-lands, — the crimson velvet of the black oak and the more pinkish white oak. The salmon and pinkish-red canopies or umbrellas of the white oak") 

See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau May 23

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau\

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021