Closing up the year's accounts.

August 30.

I can be said to note the flower's fall only when I see in it the symbol of my own change. When I experience this, then the flower appears to me.


I perceive in the Norway cinquefoil (Potentilla Norvegica), now nearly out of blossom, that the alternate five leaves of the calyx are closing over the seeds to protect them.  There is one door closed, of the closing year. Thus all the Norway cinquefoils in the world have curled back their calyx leaves, their warm cloaks, when now their flowering season was past, over their progeny, from the time they were created! It is as good as if I saw the great globe go round.


I am not ashamed to be contemporary with the Norway cinquefoil. This plant acts not an obscure, but essential, part in the revolution of the seasons. May I perform my part as well!

The fall of each humblest flower marks the annual period of some phase of human life experience. There is so much done toward closing up the year's accounts. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 30, 1851

The fall of each humblest flower marks the annual period of some phase of human life, experience. I can be said to note the flower's fall only when I see in it the symbol of my own change. When I experience this, then the flower appears to me. See June 25, 1852.(" There is a flower for every mood of the mind."); May 23, 1853 . ("Every new flower that opens, no doubt, expresses a new mood of the human mind. "); August 7, 1853. (" [The poet] sees a flower or other object, and it is beautiful or affecting to him because it is a symbol of his thought");August 26, 1858 ("Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours. ")

The alternate five leaves of the calyx are closing over the seeds to protect them. See December 31, 1859 ("Potentilla Norvegica appears to have some sound seed in its closed heads.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Cinquefoil in Autumn