Two ladies in a boat and a profusion of berries

August 4. 

P. M. — Carried party a-berrying to Conantum in boat. 

Lespedeza violacea, perhaps the largest-leafed variety, leafets one inch by one third inch, petioled, well out on side of Blackberry Steep. 

Scare up a young apparently summer duck, floating amid the pads, and the same again, coming within gunshot. I think it young because it is not very shy. 

Have heard the alder cricket some days. The turning-point is reached. 

Conantum hillside is now literally black with berries. What a profusion of this kind of food Nature provides, as if to compensate for the scarcity last year!

Fortunate that these cows in their pasture do not love them, but pass them by. The blackberries are already softening, and of all kinds there are many, many more than any or all creatures can gather. They are literally five or six species deep. 

First, away down in the shade under all you find, still fresh, the great very light blue (i. e. with a very thick blue bloom) Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum in heavy clusters, that early ambrosial fruit, delicate-flavored, thin-skinned, and cool, — Olympian fruit; then, next above, the still denser bunches and clusters of V. vacillans, of various varieties, firm and sweet, solid food; and, rising above these, large blue and also shining black huckleberries (Gaylussacia resinosa) of various flavors and qualities; and over all runs rampant the low blackberry (Rubus Canadensis), weighing down the thicket with its wreaths of black fruit. Also here and there the high blackberry, just beginning, towers over all. 

You go daintily wading through this thicket, picking, perchance, only the biggest of the blackberries — as big as your thumb — and clutching here and there a handful of huckleberries or blueberries, but never, perchance, suspecting the delicious cool blue-bloomed ones under all.  This favorable moist weather has expanded some of the huckleberries to the size of bullets. 

Each patch, each bush, seems fuller and blacker than the last. Such a profusion, yet you see neither birds nor beasts eating them, unless ants and the huckleberry-bug! 

I carried my hands full of bushes to the boat, and, returning, the two ladies picked fully three pints from these alone, casting the bare bushes into the stream.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 4, 1856

Carried party a-berrying to Conantum in boat. See August 12, 1853 ("To Conantum by boat, berrying, with three ladies."); September 25, 1858 Go a-graping up Assabet with some young ladies. See also September 16, 1859 ("Ask me for a certain number of dollars if you will, but do not ask me for my afternoons."); September 26, 1859 ("How feeble women, or rather ladies, are! They can not bear to be shined on, but generally carry a parasol to keep off the sun.")

Lespedeza violacea, perhaps the largest-leafed variety, . . . well out . . . See August 5, 1855 ("The common small violet lespedeza out, elliptic leaved, one inch long.”); August 13, 1856 (“In Bittern Cliff Woods that (apparently) very oblong elliptical leafed Lespedeza violacea, growing very loose and open on a few long petioles, one foot high by four or five inches wide.")

. . .the scarcity last year. .See August 7, 1855 ("To Tarbell Hill again with the Emersons, a-berrying. Very few berries this year.")

Have heard the alder cricket some days. The turning-point is reached. See August 4, 1851 ("I hear the note of a cricket, and am penetrated with the sense of autumn. . . ."); August 4, 1852 (“I hear the cricket. He seems to chirp from a new depth toward autumn, new lieferungs of the fall.”); August 15, 1852 ("That clear ring like an alder locust (is it a cricket ?) for some time past is a sound which belongs to the season.")

Conantum hillside is now literally black with berries. See August 4, 1852 (“Most huckleberries and blueberries and low blackberries are in their prime now.”); August 4, 1854 ("On this hill (Smith's) the bushes are black with huckleberries. ...Now in their prime. Some glossy black, some dull black, some blue; and patches of Vaccinium vacillans intermixed.") Compare July 26, 1854 ("Almost every bush now offers a wholesome and palatable diet to the wayfarer, — large and dense clusters of Vaccinium vacillans, largest in most moist ground, sprinkled with the red ones not ripe; great high blueberries, some nearly as big as cranberries, of an agreeable acid; huckleberries of various kinds, some shining black, some dull-black, some blue; and low blackberries of two or more varieties. The broods of birds just matured find thus plenty to eat.")