When berries begin

July 13.

July 13, 2013

To Bare Hill, Lincoln, by railroad.

In the midst of July heat and drought. The season is trivial as noon. 

I hear the hot-weather and noonday birds, -- red eye, tanager, wood pewee, etc. Plants are curled and withered. The leaves dry, ripe like the berries.

Vaccinium vacillans on Bare Hill ripe enough to pick, now considerably in advance of huckleberries; sweeter than last and grow in dense clusters. 

The V. Pennsylvanicum is soft and rather thin and tasteless, mountain and spring like, with its fine light-blue bloom, very handsome, simple and ambrosial. This vacillans is more earthy, like solid food. 

Many of the huckleberries here on the hilltop have dried black and shrivelled before ripening.

If there is an interregnum in the flowers, it is when berries begin. 

Scent the bruised leaves of the fragrant goldenrod along the Lincoln road now.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 13, 1854

In the midst of July heat and drought. See July 13, 1857 ("The grass by the roadside is burnt yellow and is quite dusty. This, with the sultry air, the parched fields, and the languid inhabitants, marks the season."); July 13, 1852 ("The weather has been remarkably warm for a week or ten days, the thermometer at ninety-five degrees, more or less; and we have had no rain.")

If there is an interregnum in the flowers, it is when berries begin. See July 7, 1852 ("And now that there is an interregnum in the blossoming of flowers, so is there in the singing of the birds."); July 6, 1851 ("June, the month for grass and flowers, is now past. . . . Now grass is turning to hay, and flowers to fruits.").

July 13. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 13.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality." 

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021