Bog Laurel!

January 9.

 January 9, 2015

A cloudy day, threatening snow; wet under foot. 

How pretty the evergreen radical shoots of the St. John’s-wort now exposed, partly red or lake, various species of it. Have they not grown since fall? I put a stone at the end of one to try it. A little wreath of green and red lying along on the muddy ground amid the melting snows. 

I am attracted at this season by the fine bright-red buds of the privet andromeda, sleeping couchant along the slender light-brown twigs. They look brightest against a dark ground.

Walk up on the river a piece above the Holden Swamp, though there are very few places where I can get on to it, it has so melted along the shore and on the meadows. The ice over the channel looks dangerously dark and rotten in spots.

This winter I hear the axe in almost every wood of any consequence left standing in the township.

Make a splendid discovery this afternoon. Walking through Holden’s white spruce swamp, I see peeping above the snow-crust some slender delicate evergreen shoots very much like the Andromeda Polifolia, amid sphagnum, lambkill, Andromeda calyculata, blueberry bushes, etc., though there is very little to be seen above the snow. It is, I have little doubt, the Kalmia glauca var. rosmarinifolia.

Very delicate evergreen opposite linear leaves, strongly revolute, somewhat reddish-green above, the blossom-buds quite conspicuous. The whole aspect more tender and yellowish than the Andromeda Polifolia. The pretty little blossom-buds arranged crosswise in the axils of the leaves as you look down on them.

(Sometimes a lost man will be so beside himself that he will not have sense enough to trace back his own tracks in the snow.)

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 9, 1855


Andromeda calyculata is the leather-leaf or dwarf Cassandra (Chamaedaphne calculata). The Kalmia glauca var. rosmarinifolia is known as rosemary-leaf laurel  or alpine bog laurel (Andromeda Polifolia) H. Peter Loewer, Thoreau's Garden: Native Plants for the American Landscape 32-33

Make a splendid discovery this afternoon. Walking through Holden’s white spruce swamp, I see peeping above the snow-crust . . ., I have little doubt, the Kalmia glauca var. rosmarinifolia. See  July 14, 1853 (“Saw something blue, or glaucous, in Beck Stow's Swamp to-day; approached and discovered the Andromeda Polifolia, in the midst of the swamp at the north end, not long since out of bloom. "); February 4, 1858 ("Discover the Ledum latifolium, quite abundant over a space about six rods in diameter just east of the small pond-hole, growing with the Andromeda calyculata, Polifolia, Kalmia glauca, etc")

This winter I hear the axe in almost every wood of any consequence left standing in the township. See December 19, 1851 ("In all woods is heard now far and near the sound of the woodchopper's axe, a twilight sound, now in the night of the year, men having come out for fuel to the forests, as if men had stolen forth in the arctic night to get fuel to keep their fires a-going.") January 8, 1852 ("Even as early as 3 o'clock these winter afternoons the axes in the woods sound like nightfall, like the sound of a twilight labor."); January 21, 1852 ("This winter they are cutting down our woods more seriously than ever. . . Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds!"); February 17, 1852 ("The shortness of the days, when we naturally look to the heavens and make the most of the little light, when we live an arctic life, when the woodchopper's axe reminds us of twilight at 3 o'clock p. m., when the morning and the evening literally make the whole day"); March 11, 1852 (The woods I walked in in my youth are cut off. Is it not time that I ceased to sing?").