To Smith's Hickory Hillside.

December 2.

I come via Britton's to see if I can find a seedling hickory under half a dozen years old. After searching long amid the very numerous young hickories at Britton's shanty and Smith's Hill I fail to find one so recently planted. I do not think that a single hickory has been planted in either of these places for some years at least.

I find many at the last place only one or two feet, but they invariably have great roots, and old stubs which have died down are visible at or beneath the surface of the ground.  They seem to be able to resist fire, cultivation, and frost. The last is apparently their great enemy at present . It is astonishing how many efforts they make, how persistent they are.

It may be that when pine and oaks and hickories, young and old, are cut off and the land cleared, the two former are exterminated but the hickories are tough and stubborn and do not give up the ground. I cannot as yet account for their existence in these two localities otherwise.

Yet I still think that some must have been planted within a dozen years on Fair Haven Hill without the pines in a manner in which oaks are not.

H. D. Thoreau,  Journal, December 2, 1860

I do not think that a single hickory has been planted in either of these places for some years at least. See December 1, 1860 (“What is most remarkable is that they should be planted so often in open land, on a bare hillside, where oaks rarely are.”); December 3, 1860 (“Under and about the hickory that stands near the white oak (under the north side of the hill), there are many small hickories two to four feet high amid the birches and pines. Yet, I find no young hickories springing up on the open hillside.”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau. The Hickory