Now is the time for
bright and breezy days blowing
off apple blossoms.
 |
| May 20, 2018 |
It is a fair but cool and windy day, a strong northwest wind, and the grass, to which the rain has given such a start, conspicuously waves, showing its lighter under side, and the buttercups toss in the wind. May 20, 1853
In this clear morning light and a strong wind from the northwest, the mountains in the horizon, seen against some low, thin clouds in the background, look darker and more like earth than usual. . . This in the clear, cool atmosphere in the morning after a rain-storm, with the wind northwest. They will grow more ethereal, melting into the sky, as the day advances. May 20, 1853
See the lightning, but can not hear the thunder. May 20, 1854
Rains a little. May 20, 1855
Was awaked and put into sounder sleep than ever early this morning by the distant crashing of thunder, and now , , , I hear it in mid-afternoon, muttering, crashing in the muggy air. . . and get a few sprinkles in the sun. May 20, 1856
Was awaked and put into sounder sleep than ever early this morning by the distant crashing of thunder, and now , , , I hear it in mid-afternoon, muttering, crashing in the muggy air. . . and get a few sprinkles in the sun. May 20, 1856
Nature has found her hoarse summer voice again,. . . Even as the birds sing tumultuously and glance by with fresh and brilliant plumage, so now is Nature’s grandest voice heard, and her sharpest flashes seen. The air has resumed its voice, and the lightning, like a yellow spring flower, illumines the dark banks of the clouds. May 20, 1856. . . .
Began to rain the latter part of yesterday, and rains all day against all desire and expectation. May 20, 1857
A cloudy afternoon, with a cool east wind, producing a mist. May 20, 1858
The season is more backward on account of the cloudy and rainy weather of the last four or five days and some preceding. May 20, 1858
A strong, cold west wind. 60° at 2 P. M. May 20, 1860
Last winter we had greater cold than has ever been generally observed here, and yet it is a remarkable spring for peach blossoms;. .the lowest limbs, which were covered by the drifts, have blossomed much the earliest and fullest, as usual, and this after-blow is quite unexpected. Peach trees are revealed along fences where they were quite unobserved before. May 20, 1857
Some apple trees in blossom; most are just ready to burst forth, the leaves being half formed. May 20, 1852
The peach bloom is now gone and the apple bloom come. May 20, 1853
Methinks we always have at this time those washing winds as now, when the choke-berry is in bloom, — bright and breezy days blowing off some apple blossoms. May 20, 1854
A lady’s-slipper well budded and now white. May 20, 1852
The geranium is just out, and the lady’s-slipper. May 20, 1853
The Viola ovata is of a deep purple blue, is darkest and has most of the red in it; the V. pedata is smooth and pale-blue, delicately tinged with purple reflections; the cucullata-is more decidedly blue, slatyblue, and darkly striated. May 20, 1852
The white violets by the spring are rather scarce now. May 20, 1852
The white violets by the spring are rather scarce now. May 20, 1852
Plucked to-day a bunch of Viola pedata, May 20, 1853
The Carex vulgaris is more glaucous than the stricta. May 20, 1860
Mouse-ear down at last. May 20, 1860
Mouse-ear down at last. May 20, 1860
Scirpus planifolius — how long? — apparently in prime in woods about the bottom of the long south bay of Walden, say two rods southwest. May 20, 1860
The white ashes are in full flower now, and how long ? May 20, 1853
Is that female ash by river at Lee's Hill a new kind? In bloom fully May 18th. May 20, 1853
White oak, swamp white, and chestnut oak probably will open by the 22d. May 20, 1853
The red oak is not out. May 20, 1858
The red oak leaves are very pretty and finely cut, about an inch and three quarters long. Like most young leaves, they are turned back around the twig, parasol-like. May 20, 1852
The pitch and white pines have grown from one to five inches. May 20, 1853
It is surprising by what leaps — two or three feet in a season — the pines stretch toward the sky, affording shelter also to various hardwoods which plant themselves in their midst. May 20, 1857
Hear the pepe. May 20, 1858
I now see distinctly the chestnut-sided warbler. May 20, 1856
I see, on a locust in the burying-ground, the Sylvia striata, or black-poll warbler, busily picking about the locust buds and twigs. May 20, 1856
A barn swallow accompanied me across the Depot Field. . .wheeling and tacking incessantly on all sides and repeatedly dashing within a rod of me. It is an agreeable sight to watch one. Nothing lives in the air but is in rapid motion. May 20, 1852
Bank swallows are very lively about the low sand—bank just beyond, in which are fifty holes. May 20, 1856
Hundreds of swallows are now skimming close over the river . . . There are bank, barn, cliff, and chimney swallows, all mingled together and continually scaling back and forth, – a very lively sight . . . Swallows are more confident and fly nearer to man than most birds. May 20, 1858
Probably a red-wing blackbird's nest, of grass, hung between two button-bushes; whitish eggs with irregular black marks. May 20, 1853
Saw a tanager in Sleepy Hollow. It most takes the eye of any bird. You here have the red-wing reversed,-the deepest scarlet of the red-wing spread over the whole body, not on the wing-coverts merely, while the wings are black. It flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the leaves. May 20, 1853
See tanagers, male and female, in the top of a pine, one red, other yellow, from below. We have got to these high colors among birds. May 20, 1858
How suddenly, after all, pines seem to shoot up and fill the pastures! May 20, 1857
No wonder that these small trees [aspens and willows] are so widely dispersed; their abundant fine and light seed, being buoyed up and wafted far through the atmosphere. May 20, 1860
What is that pretty, transparent moss in the brooks, which holds the rain or dewdrops so beautifully on the undersides of the leafets, through which they sparkle crystallinely? May 20, 1853
I see in the northwest first rise, in the rose-tinted horizon sky, a dark, narrow, craggy cloud, narrow and projecting as no cloud on earth, seen against the rose-tinged sky, — the crest of a thunder-storm, beautiful and grand. May 20, 1854
Postpone your journey till the May storm is over. May 20, 1857
Now is the season of the leafing of the trees . . . Perchance the beginning of summer may be dated from the fully formed leaves, when dense shade begins. I will see. May 20, 1852
All flowers are beautiful. May 20, 1852
All flowers are beautiful. May 20, 1852
*****
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Red-wing in Spring
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Lady Slipper
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Mouse-ear
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Apple Blossom Time
*****
February 14, 1856 ("I was struck to-day by the size and continuousness of the natural willow hedge on the east side of the rail road causeway, at the foot of the embankment, next to the fence. Some twelve years ago, when that causeway was built through the meadows, there were no willows there or near there, but now, just at the foot of the sand-bank, where it meets the meadow, and on the line of the fence, quite a dense willow hedge has planted itself. [T]he seeds have been blown hither from a distance, and lodged against the foot of the bank, just as the snow-drift accumulates there.")
March 2, 1856 ("How unwearied Nature is, spreading her seeds.")
April 29, 1857 (“I am surprised to see how some blackberry pastures and other fields are filling up with pines, trees which I thought the cows had almost killed two or three years ago; so that what was then a pasture is now a young wood-lot.”)
May 10, 1860 ("A sedge darker than the stricta and not in tufts, quite short. Is it the C. vulgaris? Its leading spikes are effete.")
May 11, 1859 ("Scirpus planifolius in bloom on Smith's wooded hill, side of Saw Mill Brook.")
May 13, 1852 (" They who do not walk in the woods in the rain never behold them in their freshest, most radiant and blooming beauty.”)
May 16, 1854 ("Look into several red-wing blackbirds' nests which are now being built, but no eggs yet. They are generally hung between two twigs, say of button-bush.")
May 17, 1853 ("Does not summer begin after the May storm?”)
. May 17, 1860 ("Early aspen down has just begun (before mouse ear)")
May 18, 1857 ("Hear the pepe, how long?”)
May 18, 1851 ("Lady's-slipper almost fully blossomed”)
May 18, 1851 ("The scarlet tanagers are come.")
. May 18, 1857 ("Pratt has found perfectly white Viola pedata behind Easterbrook place, and cultivated them, but now lost them")
May 19, 1856 ("The tanager is now heard plainly and frequently. ")
May 19, 1860 (“At the Ministerial Swamp I see a white lady's-slipper almost out, fully grown, with red ones.”)
May 19, 1854 ("The white pine shoots are now two or three inches long generally, — upright light marks on the body of dark green.”) May 19, 1860 ("The grass, especially the meadow-grasses, are seen to wave distinctly, and the shadows of the bright fair-weather cumuli are sweeping over them.")
May 21, 1852 ("Viola pedata along the woodland paths, in high land. ")
May 21, 1854 ("A tanager, — the surprising red bird, — against the darkening green leaves.")
May 23, 1853 ("I hear and see a tanager. How he enhances the wildness and wealth of the woods! That contrast of a red bird with the green pines and the blue sky! ...”)
May 24, 1854 ("As I return down the hill, my eyes are cast toward the very dark mountains in the northwest horizon.")
May 24, 1854 ("The mouse-ear down begins to blow in fields.")
May 24, 1860 ("You can hardly believe that a living creature can wear such colors.”)
May 25, 1855 ("Red-wing’s nest with four eggs. . .curiously and neatly marked with brown-black spots and lines on the large end.”)
May 26, 1855 ("Already the mouse-ear down begins to blow in the fields and whiten the grass.")
May 26, 1857 ("Some of the earliest willows about warm edges of woods are gone to seed and downy")
May 28, 1855 (" I see a tanager, the most brilliant and tropical-looking bird we have, bright-scarlet with black wings, the scarlet appearing on the rump again between wing-tips. . . .A remarkable contrast with the green pines.”)
May 30, 1858 ("Hear of lady's-slipper seen the 23d; how long?")
June 1, 1857 ("A red-wing's nest, four eggs, . . the hieroglyphics on these eggs . . ..who determines the style of the marking?")
June 6, 1857 ("As I sit on Lee's Cliff, I see a pe-pe on the topmost dead branch of a hickory eight or ten rods off. . . . mouse-colored above and head (which is perhaps darker), white throat, and narrow white beneath, with no white on tail.”)
June 10, 1855 ("Nest of the Muscicapa Cooperi, or pe pe, on a white spruce in the Holden Swamp”)
July 4, 1860 ("The white pine shoot which on the 19th of June had grown sixteen and a quarter inches and on the 27th twenty and three quarters is now twenty-three and an eighth inches long.”)
July 9, 1857 ("I think I see how this [willow]tree is propagated by its seeds. Its countless minute brown seeds, just perceptible to the naked eye in the midst of their cotton, are wafted with the cotton to the water, — most abundantly about a fortnight ago, — and there they drift")
October 16, 1860 (Looking from a hilltop, I observe that pines, white birches, red maples, alders, etc., often grow in more or less regular rounded or oval or conical patches, while oaks, chestnuts, hickories, etc., simply form woods of greater or less extent, whether by themselves or mixed, and do not naturally spring up in an oval form. This is a consequence of the different manner in which trees which have winged seeds and those which have not are planted")
December 30, 1855 ("For a few days I have noticed the snow sprinkled with alder and birch scales. . . .The high wind is scattering them over the snow there.")
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
No comments:
Post a Comment