The soapwort gentian out abundantly in Flint's Bridge Lane, apparently for a week; a surprisingly deep, faintly purplish blue. Crowded bunches of ten or a dozen sessile and closed narrow or oblong diamond or sharp dome shape flowers. The whole bunch like many sharp domes of an Oriental city crowded together. I have here actually drawn my pen round one.
It is the flowering of the sky. The sky has descended and kissed the earth. In (at top) a whorl of clear, smooth, rich green leaves. Why come these blue flowers thus late in the year? A dome-like crowd of domelets.
Now is the season for those comparatively rare but beautiful wild berries which are not food for man.
If we so industriously collect those berries which are sweet to the palate, it is strange that we do not devote an hour in the year to gathering those which are beautiful to the eye. It behooves me to go a-berrying in this sense once a year at least. To fill my basket with the neglected but beautiful fruit of the various species of cornels and viburnums, poke, arum, medeola, thorns, etc. Berries which are as beautiful as flowers, but far less known, the fruit of the flower.
H.
D. Thoreau, Journal, September 3, 1853
It behooves me to go a-berrying in this sense once a year at least. To fill my basket with the neglected but beautiful fruit of the various species of cornels and viburnums, poke, arum, medeola, thorns, etc. See September 3, 1856 ("Gather four or five quarts of Viburnum nudum berries, now in their prime, attracted more by the beauty of the cymes than the flavor of the fruit."); See also September 11, 1859 ('September is the month when various small, and commonly inedible, berries in cymes and clusters hang over the roadsides and along the walls and fences, or spot the forest floor").; September 18, 1859 ("How little observed are the fruits which we do not use!")
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