The wind exposes the red under sides of the white lily pads

June 29.

P. M. — On North River.

Leonurus Cardiaca, motherwort, a nettle-like plant by the street-side. 

The Rana halecina (?), shad frog, is our handsomest frog, bronze striped, with brown spots, edged and inter mixed with bright green; does not regard the fly that sits on him. 

The frogs and tortoises are striped and spotted for their concealment.  The painted tortoise's throat held up above the pads, streaked with yellowish, makes it the less obvious. The mud turtle is the color of the mud, the wood frog and the hylodes of the dead leaves, the bullfrogs of the pads, the toad of the earth. The tree-toad of the bark.

In my experience nothing is so opposed to poetry — not crime — as business. It is a negation of life.

The wind exposes the red under sides of the white lily pads. This is one of the aspects of the river now.

The bud-bearing stem of this plant is a little larger, but otherwise like the leaf-stem, and coming like it directly from the long, large root. It is interesting to pull up the lily root with flowers and leaves attached and see how it sends its buds upward to the light and air to expand and flower in another element.

How interesting the bud's progress from the water to the air! So many of these stems are leaf-bearing, and so many flower-bearing.

Then consider how defended these plants against drought, at the bottom of the water, at most their leaves and flowers floating on its surface. How much mud and water are required to support their vitality!

It is pleasant to remember those quiet Sabbath mornings by remote stagnant rivers and ponds, when pure white water-lilies, just expanded, not yet infested by insects, float on the waveless water and perfume the atmosphere.

Nature never appears more serene and innocent and fragrant.

A hundred white lilies, open to the sun, rest on the surface smooth as oil amid their pads, while devil's-needles are glancing over them.

It requires some skill so to pull a lily as to get a long stem.

The great yellow lily, the spatter-dock, expresses well the fertility of the river.

The Sparganium ramosum, or bur-reed, amid the flags now. It is associated with the reed-mace by sys- tematists. 

One flower on a spike of the Pontederia cordata just ready to expand.

Children bring you the early blueberry to sell now. It is considerably earlier on the tops of hills which have been recently cut off than on the plains or invales.

The girl that has Indian blood in her veins and picks berries for a living will find them out as soon as they turn.

The yellow water ranunculus is hardly to be seen in the river now.

The Anemone Virginiana, tall anemone, looking like a white buttercup, on Egg Rock, cannot have been long in bloom.

I see the columbine lingering still.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 29, 1852

The wind exposes the red under sides of the white lily pads. This is one of the aspects of the river now. See June 24, 1853 ("remarkably windy this afternoon, showing the under sides of the leaves and the pads, the white now red beneath and all green above."); June 30, 1859 ("The pads blown up by it already show crimson, it is so strong, but this not a fall phenomenon yet."); July 30, 1856 ("I am struck with the splendid crimson-red under sides of the white lily pads where my boat has turned them, at my bath place near the Hemlocks.”); August 24,1854 ("The bright crimson-red under sides of the great white lily pads, turned up by the wind in broad fields on the sides of the stream, are a great ornament to the stream. It is not till August, methinks, that they are turned up conspicuously.”)