Furnace-like heats are beginning

July 19.

In Moore's Swamp I pluck cool, though not very sweet, large red raspberries in the shade. Wild holly berries, a day or two. Black choke-berry, several days. High blueberries scarce.   

Apparently a catbird's nest in a shrub oak, lined with root-fibres, with three green- blue eggs. Erigeron annuus perhaps fifteen rods or more beyond the Hawthorn Bridge on right hand - a new plant.

The white cotton-grass now (and how long ?) at Beck Stow's appears to be the Eriophorum gracile (?). I see no rusty ones.

In the maple swamp at Hubbard's Close, the great cinnamon ferns are very handsome now in tufts, falling over in handsome curves on every side. Some are a foot wide and raised up six feet long. Clintonia berries in a day or two. 

I am surprised to see at Walden a single Aster patens with a dozen flowers fully open a day or more.

The more smothering, furnace-like heats are beginning, and the locust days.

 A wood thrush to - night . Veery within two or three days . 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 19, 1854


The white cotton-grass at Beck Stow's appears to be the Eriophorum gracile (?). I see no rusty ones. See October 14, 1852 (" 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.");July 4, 1853 (“The cotton-grass at Beck Stow's. Is it different from the early one?”) Compare August 23, 1854 ("Next comes [at Gowings Swamp], half a dozen rods wide, a dense bed of Andromeda calyculata , — the A. Polifolia mingled with it, — the rusty cotton grass, cranberries , — the common and also V . Oxyoccus , — pitcher-plants, sedges, and a few young spruce and larch here and there, — all on sphagnum" ) See also July 23, 1856 ("Russsell says] that the two white cotton-grasses (Eriophorum) were probably but one species, taller and shorter,") Note:. a third cotton-grass,  Eriophorum vaginatum, was known to HDT after  May 28, 1858 only  at Ledum Swamp See .. Vascular Flora of Concord, Massachusetts compiled by Ray Angelo

I am surprised to see at Walden a single Aster patens . . . See July 27, 1853 ("I notice to-day the first purplish aster... The afternoon of the year.”); see also August 12, 1856 ("The Aster patens is very handsome by the side of Moore's Swamp on the bank, — large flowers, more or less purplish or violet, each commonly (four or five) at the end of a long peduncle, three to six inches long, at right angles with the stem, giving it an open look.”)

The more smothering, furnace-like heats are beginning.  See July 18, 1854 ("Methinks the asters and goldenrods begin, like the early ripening leaves, with midsummer heats.")