These are the colors of the earth now

December 23.

A very bright and pleasant day with remarkably soft wind from a little north of west. The frost has come out so in the rain of yesterday that I avoid the muddy plowed fields and keep on the grass ground, which shines with moisture. I think I do not remember such and so much pleasant, springlike weather as this and some other days of this month. 

I admire those old root fences which have almost entirely disappeared from tidy fields, -- White pine roots got out when the neighboring meadow was a swamp, -- the monuments of many a revolution. These roots have not penetrated into the ground, but spread over the surface, and, having been cut off four or five feet from the stump, were hauled off and set up on their edges for a fence. The roots are not merely interwoven, but grown together into solid frames, full of loopholes like Gothic windows of various sizes and all shapes, triangular and oval and harp-like, and the slenderer parts are dry and resonant like harp-strings. They are rough and unapproachable, with a hundred snags and horns which bewilder and balk the calculation of the walker who would surmount them. The part of the trees above ground presents no such fantastic forms. Here is one seven paces, or more than a rod, long, six feet high in the middle, and yet only one foot thick, and two men could turn it up, and in this case the roots were six or nine inches thick at the extremities. 

The roots of pines growing in swamps grow thus in the form of solid frames or rackets, and those of different trees are interwoven with all so that they stand on a very broad foot and stand or fall together to some extent before the blasts, as herds meet the assault of beasts of prey with serried front. You have thus only to dig into the swamp a little way to find your fence, -- post, rails, and slats already solidly grown together and of material more durable than any timber. 

How pleasing a thought that a field should be fenced with the roots of the trees got out in clearing the land a century before! I regard them as mementoes of the primitive forest. The tops of the same trees made into fencing-stuff would have decayed generations ago. These roots are singularly unobnoxious to the effects of moisture. 

The swamp is thus covered with a complete web of roots. Wild trees, such as are fitted to grow in the uncultivated swamps.

 

I sit on the hillside near the wall corner, in the further Conantum field, as I might in an Indian summer day in November or October. 

These are the colors of the earth now: 

• all land that has been some time cleared, except it is subject to the plow, is russet;

•  the color of withered herbage and the ground finely commixed, a lighter straw-color where are rank grasses next water;

•  sprout-lands, the pale leather-color of dry oak leaves; 

• pine woods, green; 

• deciduous woods (bare twigs and stems and withered leaves commingled), a brownish or reddish gray; 

• maple swamps, smoke-color; 

• land just cleared, dark brown and earthy; 

• plowed land, dark brown or blackish;

• ice and water, slate-color or blue; 

• andromeda swamps, dull red and dark gray;

• rocks, gray. 

At Lee’s Cliff I notice these radical(?) leaves quite fresh: saxifrage, sorrel, polypody, mullein, columbine, veronica, thyme-leaved sandwort, spleenwort, strawberry, buttercup, radical johnswort, mouse-ear, radical pinweeds, cinquefoils, checkerberry, Wintergreen, thistles, catnip, Turritis stricta especially fresh and bright. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 23, 1855

These are the colors of the earth now. See December 23, 1851 ("A pure and trackless white napkin covers the ground,"); December 23, 1859 ("Patches of bare ice . . . already reflect a green light which advertises me of the lateness of the hour"); December 23, 1859 ("How red [the sun's]light at this hour! its rays light up the fine woollen fibres of my glove. They were a dazzling rose-color")  See also November 25, 1853 ("The landscape, seen from the side of the hill looking westward to the horizon . . . There is first the clean light-reflecting russet earth, the dark-blue water, the dark or dingy green evergreens, the dull reddish-brown of young oaks and shrub oaks, the gray of maples and other leafless trees, and the white of birch stems."); December 20, 1851 ("Red, white, green, and, in the distance, dark brown are the colors of the winter landscape."); December 21, 1855 ("A few simple colors now prevail.”);  December 21, 1854 ("The last rays of the sun falling on the Baker Farm reflect a clear pink color. "); January 14, 1860 ("A warm reddish color revealed by the snow."); January 31, 1859 ("When I look westward now to the flat snow-crusted shore, it reflects a strong violet color."); February 12, 1860 ("just before sunset, I see the ice beginning to be green, and a rose-color to be reflected from the low snow-patches.")  Compare February 13, 1860 ("The principal charm of a winter walk over ice is perhaps the peculiar and pure colors exhibited. There is the red of the sunset sky, and of the snow at evening, and in rainbow flocks during the day, and in sun-dogs. The blue of the sky, and of the ice and water reflected, and of shadows on snow. The yellow of the sun and the morning and evening sky, and of the sedge (or straw-color, bright when lit on edge of ice at evening), and all three in hoar frost crystals. . . .the purple of the snow in drifts or on hills, of the mountains, and clouds at evening. The green of evergreen woods, of the sky, and of the ice and water toward evening. The orange of the sky at evening. The white of snow and clouds, and the black of clouds, of water agitated, and water saturating thin snow on ice. ") See also Winter Colors (The solstice) (posted December 21, 2020)