April 10.
Saxifrage flowers –
pure, trustful, white – amid its
reddish cup of leaves.
Earliest flowers
bloom when most have not begun
to think of flowers.
April 10, 1855
April 10, 2017
At Lee’s the early sedge; one only sheds pollen. The saxifrage there to-morrow; one flower is partly expanded . . . As for the early sedge, who would think of looking for a flower of any kind in those dry tufts whose withered blades almost entirely conceal the springing green ones? I patiently examined one tuft after another, higher and higher up the rocky hill, till at last I found one little yellow spike low in the grass which shed its pollen on my finger. As for the saxifrage, when I had given it up for to-day, having, after a long search in the warmest clefts and recesses, found only three or four buds which showed some white, I at length, on a still warmer shelf, found one flower partly expanded, and its common peduncle had shot up an inch. These few earliest flowers in these situations have the same sort of interest with the arctic flora, for they are remote and unobserved and often surrounded with snow, and most have not begun to think of flowers yet. Early on the morning of the 8th I paddled up the' Assabet looking for the first flowers of the white maple and alder. I held on to the low curving twigs of the maple where the stream ran swiftly, the round clusters of its bursting flower-buds spotting the sky above me, and on a close inspection found a few which (as I have said) must have blossomed the day before. I also paddled slowly along the riverside looking closely at the alder catkins and shaking the most loose, till at length I came to a bush which had been weighed down by the ice and whose stem curved downward, passing through the water. and on this was one looser and more yellowish catkin, which, as I have said, on a close examination showed some effete anthers near the peduncle. The morning of the 6th, when I found the skunk cabbage out, it was so cold I suffered from numbed fingers, having left my gloves behind. Since April came in, however, you have needed gloves only in the morning. Under some high bare bank sloping to the south on the edge of a meadow, where many springs, issuing from the bank, melt the snow early, — there you find the first skunk-cabbage in bloom. April 10, 1855
*****
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Earliest Flower
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 © 2009-2016
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