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| October 16, 2015 |
What has got all the cones? How evenly the freshly fallen pine-needles are spread on the ground! quite like a carpet. Throughout this grove no square foot is left bare.
I dig down with a stick and find that the layers of three or four years can be distinguished with considerable ease, and much deeper the old needles are raised in flakes or layers still. The topmost, or this year’s, are fawn-colored; last year’s, dark dull reddish; and so they go on, growing darker and more decayed, til, at the depth of three inches, where, perhaps, the needles were fifteen or twenty years old, they begin to have the aspect of a dark loose-lying virgin mould, mixed with roots (pine cones and sticks a little higher).
The freshly fallen needles lie as evenly strewn as if sifted over the whole surface, giving it a uniform neat fawn-color, tempting one to stretch himself on it. They rest alike on the few green leaves of weeds and the fallen cones and the cobwebs between them, in every direction across one another like joggle-sticks.
In course of years they are beaten by rain and snow into a coarse, thick matting or felt to cover the roots of the trees with.
I look at a grass-bird on a wall in the dry Great Fields. There is a dirty-white or cream-colored line above the eye and another from the angle of the mouth beneath it and a white ring close about the eye. The breast is streaked with this creamy white and dark brown in streams, as on the cover of a book.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 16, 1855
The white pine grove beyond Beck Stow’s. See September 24, 1857 ("that very dense and handsome white pine grove east of Beck Stow’s Swamp. It is about fifteen rods square, the trees large, ten to twenty inches in diameter. It is separated by a wall from another pine wood with a few oaks in it on the south east, and about thirty rods north and west are other pine and oak woods.”)
The freshly fallen needles . . .See The October Pine Fall
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