Spring fog.

March 6.

Sunday. Last Sunday I plucked some alder twigs, some aspen, and some swamp willow, and put them in water in a warm room, Immediately the alder catkins were relaxed and began to lengthen and open, and by the second day to drop their pollen; like handsome pendants they hung round the pitcher, and at the same time the smaller female flower expanded and brightened. In about four days the aspens began to show their red anthers and feathery scales, being an inch in length and still extending. March 2d, I added the andromeda; March 3d, the rhodora.

This morning, the ground being still covered with snow, there was quite a fog over the river and meadows, which I think owing to a warm atmosphere over the cold snow.

The hemlock cones have shed their seeds, but there are some closed yet on the ground. 

Part of the pitch pine cones are yet closed.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 6, 1853

See : A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, I Have Seen Signs of the Spring

• Catkins expanding

 

Part of the pitch pine cones are yet closed. See April 19, 1856 (“As dryness will open the pitch pine cone, so moisture closes it up again. “); March 3, 1855 ("I find a cone which was probably dropped by a squirrel in the fall, [and] buried by the snow till now, for it has apparently just opened, and I shake its seeds out.”); March 1, 1856 ("I see a pitch pine seed with its wing, far out on Walden.”); February 27, 1853 (“ Each scale, which is very elaborately and perfectly constructed, is armed with a short spine, pointing downward, as if to protect its seed from squirrels and birds. That hard closed cone, which defied all violent attempts to open it has thus yielded to the gentle persuasion of warmth and dryness. The expanding of the pine cones, that, too, is a season.”); February 22, 1855 (“Pitch pine cones must be taken from the tree at the right season, else they will not open or “blossom” in a chamber.” ); February 1, 1856 ("I see a pitch pine seed, blown thirty rods from J. Hosmer’s little grove.”); January 25, 1856 (“A closed pitch pine cone gathered January 22d opened last night in my chamber.”); January 22, 1856 ("I find that many of those young pines are now full of unopened cones, which apparently will be two years old next summer, and these the squirrel now eats. “); January 8, 1856 ("All of the pitch pine cones that I see, but one, are open.”); November 20, 1855 ("the whole cone opens its scales with a smart crackling."); November 14, 1855 (“ . . . It is a general and sudden bursting or expanding of all the scales with a sharp crackling sound and motion of the whole cone, as by a force pent up within it. I suppose the strain only needed to be relieved in one point for the whole to go off..”); October 24, 1854 (" he chickadees are picking the seeds out of pitch pine cones.”) and Seasons of the Pitch Pine