Walking in the rain.

May 13.

A May storm, yesterday and to-day; rather cold. The fields are green now, and all the expanding leaves and flower-buds are much more beautiful in the rain, - covered with clear drops.   

The amelanchiers are now the prevailing flowers in the woods and swamps and sprout-lands, a very beautiful flower, with its purplish stipules and delicate drooping white blossoms. The shad-blossom days in the woods.

The low early blue-berry is just in blossom, and the dwarf choke-cherry.

The white birch with its golden tassels three inches long, hanging directly down, amid the just expanding yellowish-green leaves, their perpendicularity contrasting with the direction of the branches.   Geometry mixed with nature. The catkins, beaten down by the rain, strew the ground.

The Viola pedata and ovata now begin to be abundant on warm, sandy slopes. The leaves of the lupine, six inches high, are handsome, covered with rain-drops.

They who do not walk in the woods in the rain never behold them in their freshest, most radiant and blooming beauty.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 13, 1852

The shad-blossom days in the woods.  See May 13, 1856 (“Downy amelanchier just out at Lupine Bank”); May 13, 1855 ("Saw an amelanchier with downy leaf (apparently oblongifolia) on the southeast edge of Yellow Birch Swamp, about eighteen feet high and five or six inches in diameter, —a clump of them about as big as an apple tree); May 15, 1858 ("The shad-bush in bloom is now conspicuous, its white flags on all sides. Is it not the most massy and conspicuous of any wild plant now in bloom?");May 12, 1855 ("I now begin to distinguish where at a distance the Amelanchier Botryapium, with its white against the russet, is waving in the wind."); May 10, 1854 ("The shad-bush in blossom is the first to show like a fruit tree on the hill sides . . .before even its own leaves are much expanded. "); May 9, 1852 ("The first shad-bush, Juneberry, or service-berry (Amclanchier canadensis), in blossom.").