The male red maple buds.

April 10. 

A cold and windy day . . . The male red maple buds now show eight or ten (ten counting everything) scales, alternately crosswise, and the pairs successively brighter red or scarlet, which will account for the gradual reddening of their tops. They are about ready to open . . . 

Two crowfoots out on the Cliff. A very warm and dry exposure but no further sheltered were they. Pale yellow offering of spring. 

The saxifrage is beginning to be abundant, elevating its flowers somewhat, pure, trustful, white amid its pretty notched and reddish cup of leaves. 

The white saxifrage is a response from earth to the increased light of the year; the yellow crowfoot, to the increased heat of the sun.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 10, 1853

Red maple buds. SeeApril 1, 1860 ("The red maple buds are considerably expanded, and no doubt make a greater impression of redness.")

Two crowfoots out on the Cliff.   See April 8, 1854 ("Am surprised to find two crowfoot blossoms withered. They undoubtedly opened the 5th or 6th; say the last. They must be earlier here than at the Cliffs, where I have observed them the last two years."); April 8,1856 ("On the Fair Haven Cliff, crowfoot and saxifrage are very backward");  April 11, 1858 ("Crowfoot (Ranunculus fascicularis) at Lee's since the 6th, apparently a day or two before this"); April 13, 1854 ("One or two crowfoots Lee's Cliff, fully out, surprise me like a flame bursting from the russet ground. The saxifrage is pretty common, ahead of the crowfoot now, and its peduncles have shot up.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Crowfoot (Ranunculus fascicularis)

The white saxifrage is a response from earth to the increased light of the year. See April 10, 1855 (“As for the saxifrage, when I had given it up for to-day, having, after a long search in the warmest clefts and recesses, found only three or four buds which showed some white, I at length, on a still warmer shelf, found one flower partly expanded, and its common peduncle had shot up an inch”). See also April 8, 1854 ("They [Crowfoot] are a little earlier than the saxifrage around them here, of which last I find one specimen at last, in a favorable angle of the rock, just opening. I have not allowed enough for the difference of localities."); April 8, 1858 ("At Lee's Cliff I find no saxifrage in bloom above the rock, on account of the ground having been so exposed the past exceedingly mild winter, and no Ranunculus fascicularis anywhere there, but on a few small warm shelves under the rocks the saxifrage makes already a pretty white edging along the edge of the grass sod [?] on the rocks; has got up three or four inches, and may have been out four or five days.") And A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Saxifrage in Spring (Saxifraga vernalis); A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Earliest Flower