The small fruits of most plants are now generally ripe or ripening, and this is coincident with the flying in flocks of such young birds now grown as feed on them.
The Viburnum dentatum berries are now blue. Many leaves of the mountain sumach are red. The trillium berries, six-sided, one inch in diameter, like varnished and stained cherry wood, glossy red, crystalline and ingrained, concealed under its green leaves in shady swamps.
It is already fall in some of these shady, springy swamps, as at the Corner Spring.
Here is a little brook of very cold spring-water, rising a few rods distant, sometimes running underground, meandering exceedingly, with a gray sandy and pebbly bottom, flowing through this dense swampy thicket. The sun falls in here and there between the leaves and shines on its bottom. The water has the coldness it acquired in the bowels of the earth.
The clear dark-green leaves of the fever-bush overhang the stream. The trilliums on its brink have fallen into it and bathe their red berries in the water, waving in the stream.
I love the rank smells of the swamp, its decaying leaves. This few rods of primitive wood has a singular charm for me. Here is a recess apparently never frequented. Thus this rill flowed here a thousand years ago, and with exactly these environments.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 19, 1852
The small fruits of most plants are now generally ripe or ripening, and this is coincident with the flying in flocks of such young birds now grown as feed on them. See August 22, 1852 ("Perhaps fruits are colored like the trillium berry and the scarlet thorn to attract birds to them.”); July 26, 1854 ("Almost every bush now offers a wholesome and palatable diet to the wayfarer, — . . . The broods of birds just matured find thus plenty to eat.”); September 1, 1860 ("See how artfully the seed of a cherry is placed in order that a bird may be compelled to transport it.”); see also August 21, 1851 ("It is remarkable that animals are often obviously, manifestly, related to the plants which they feed upon or live among.”); July 29, 1853 (“The insect that comes after the honey or pollen of a plant is necessary to it and in one sense makes a part of it”); September 29, 1856 ("How surely . . .the bidens, on the edge of a pool, prophesy the coming of the traveller. . . that will transport their seeds on his coat."); May 16, 1860 (“Think how thoroughly the trees are thus explored by various birds.. . .The whole North American forest is being thus explored for insect food. Each is visited by many kinds and thus the equilibrium of the insect and vegetable kingdom is preserved.”)
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021
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