The path by the wood-side is red with the effete staminiferous flowers of the white pine..

July 1.

A cloudy and slightly showery morning. 

One object to see the white lilies in blossom. 


I wish to breathe the atmosphere of lilies, and get the full impression which lilies are fitted to make.

From the bridge I see a bream's nest in soft sand on the edge of deeper water, scooped out quite deep, with very sharp edges sloping both ways. 

Some peetweets, which probably have eggs in Conant's corn-field, make a great ado twittering and circling about the dog. 

The path by the wood-side is red with the effete staminiferous flowers of the white pine. 

July 1, 2012

Roses are in their prime now, growing amid huckle-berry bushes, ferns, and sweet-ferns, especially about some dry pond-hole; some paler, some more red.

It is more agreeable walking this cloudy day, with a few harmless sun-showers, than it would be in a glaring sunny day. It is pleasant to behold so much of the landscape in the shadow of the clouds, especially to look off from the top of Conantum, under shady walnut boughs, to larger shades in valleys,- all Nine-Acre Corner in the cool shade of a cloud.

Borrow Brigham the wheelwright's boat at the Corner Bridge. 

The white lilies are in all their splendor, fully open, sometimes their lower petals lying flat on the surface. The largest appeared to grow in the shallower water, where some stand five or six inches out of water, and are five inches in diameter. Two which I examine have twenty-nine petals each. We push our boat into the midst of some shallow bays covered with pads and spotted white with many hundreds of lilies just expanded. The freshly opened lilies are a pearly white, and though the water amid the pads is quite unrippled, the passing air gives a slight oscillating, boat-like motion to and fro to the flowers, like boats held fast by their cables.

After eating our luncheon at Rice's landing, I can not find one open anywhere for the rest of the day.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 1, 1852

The path by the wood-side is red with the effete staminiferous flowers of the white pine. See note to  June 25, 1858 ("The ground under the white pines is now strewn with the effete flowers, like an excrement.”)

Roses are in their prime now . . .The white lilies are in all their splendor. See June 30, 1852 ("Is not this period more than any distinguished for flowers, when roses, swamp-pinks, morning-glories, arethusas, pogonias, orchises, blue flags, epilobiums, mountain laurel, and white lilies are all in blossom at once?")


It is pleasant to behold so much of the landscape in the shadow of the clouds See July 1,1854 ("I see from this hill their great shadows pass slowly here and there over the top of the green forest."); See also June 3, 1858 ("It was interesting to watch from that height the shadows of fair-weather clouds passing over the landscape."); July 27, 1852 ("It is pleasing to behold at this season contrasted shade and sunshine on the side of neighboring hills.")

 After eating our luncheon . . . I can not find one open anywhere for the rest of the day. See July 17, 1854 (“I watch them for an hour and a half. By about 1.30 they are all shut up, and no petal is to be seen up and down the river . . .I think that I could tell when it was 12 o'clock within half an hour by the lilies.”)