Signs of the season.

October 14.

That coarse yellowish fungus is very common in the paths in woods of late, for a month, often picked by birds, often decayed, often mashed by the foot like a piece of pumpkin, defiling and yellowing the grass, as if a liquor (or dust) distilled from them. 

The pines are now two-colored, green and yellow, — the latter just below the ends of the boughs. 

The woods have lost so many leaves they begin to look bare, — maples, poplars, etc., chestnuts. Flowers are fast disappearing. Winter may be anticipated. 

But few crickets are heard. Jays and chickadees are oftener heard in the fall than in summer. 

It is apparently the Eriophorum Virginicum, Virginian cotton-grass, now nodding or waving with its white woolly heads over the greenish andromeda and amid the red isolated blueberry bushes in Beck Stow's Swamp. A thousand white woolly heads, one to two inches in diameter, suggesting winter. 

The lower or older leaves of the andromeda begin to redden. This plant forms extensive solid beds with a definite surface, level or undulating, like a moss bed. Not, like the huckleberry, irregular and independent each of the other, but regular and in community, as if covered by a film.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 14, 1852

The pines are now two-colored, green and yellow. See October 14, 1857 ("They are regularly parti-colored. The last year's leaves, about a foot beneath the extremities of the twigs on all sides, now changed and ready to fall, have their period of brightness as well as broader leaves. They are a clear yellow, contrasting with the fresh and liquid green of the terminal plumes, or this year's leaves. These two quite distinct colors are thus regularly and equally distributed over the whole tree. You have the warmth of the yellow and the coolness of the green.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Pine Fall

The lower or older leaves of the andromeda begin to redden. See October 7, 1857 ("I see some panicled andromeda dark red or crimson."); October 24, 1852 ("The andromeda is already browned, has a grayish-brown speckled look."); October 23, 1858 ("Panicled andromeda reddish-brown and half fallen. ); October 23, 1858 ("I detect but few Andromeda Polifolia and Kalmia glauca leaves turned a light red or scarlet."); November 3, 1858 ("The lower leaves of the water andromeda are now red, and the lambkill leaves are drooping (is it more than before?) and purplish from the effect of frost in low swamps like this."); November 17, 1859 (“How fair and memorable this prospect when you stand opposite to the sun, these November afternoons, and look over the red andromeda swamp”) See also February 17, 1854 (" In these swamps, then, you have three kinds of andromeda. The main swamp is crowded with high blueberry, panicled andromeda, prinos, swamp-pink, etc.. . . and then in the middle or deepest part will be an open space not yet quite given up to water, where the Andromeda calyculata and a few A. Polifolia reign almost alone. These are pleasing gardens.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Andromeda Phenomenon