To White Pond and neighborhood.

October 16. 

Our wood-lots have a history, and we may often recover it for a hundred years back.

Looking from a hilltop, I distinguish exclusive and regular communities of pine, a dozen or more rods wide, within a distant old woods of mixed pine and oak. I observe that pines, white birches, red maples, alders, etc., often grow in more or less regular rounded or oval or conical patches, while oaks, chestnuts, hickories, etc., simply form woods of greater or less extent, whether by themselves or mixed, and do not naturally spring up in an oval form. This is a consequence of the different manner in which trees which have winged seeds and those which have not are planted, - the former being blown together in one direction by the wind, the latter being dispersed irregularly by animals.

Looking round, I observe at a distance an oak wood-lot some twenty years old, with a dense narrow edging of pitch pines about a rod and a half wide and twenty-five or thirty years old along its whole southern side, which is straight and thirty or forty rods long, and, next to it, an open field or pasture. It presents a very singular appearance, because the oak wood is broad and has no pines within it, while the narrow edging is perfectly straight and dense, and pure pine. It is the more remarkable at this season because the oak is all red and yellow and the pine all green.

I understand it and read its history easily before I get to it. ...

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 16, 1860