How ever unexpected are these later flowers!

September 14. 

cheered by the sight of
an Aster Novae-Angliae

P. M. — To Hubbard's Close and Cardinal Ditch. 

Now for the Aster Tradescanti along low roads, like the Turnpike, swarming with butterflies and bees. Some of them are pink. 

How ever unexpected are these later flowers! 

You thought that Nature had about wound up her affairs. You had seen what she could do this year, and had not noticed a few weeds by the roadside, or mistook them for the remains of summer flowers now hastening to their fall; you thought you knew every twig and leaf by the roadside, and no thing more was to be looked for there; and now, to your surprise, these ditches are crowded with millions of little stars. They suddenly spring up and face you, with their legions on each side the way, as if they had lain in ambuscade there. The flowering of the ditches. 

Call them travellers' thoughts, numerous though small, worth a penny at least, which, sown in spring and summer, in the fall spring up unobserved at first, successively dusted and washed, mingled with nettles and beggar-ticks as a highway harvest. A starry meteoric shower, a milky way, in the flowery kingdom in whose aisles we travel. 

Let the traveller bethink himself, elevate and expand his thoughts somewhat, that his successors may oftener hereafter be cheered by the sight of an Aster Novae-Angliae or spectabilis here and there, to remind him that a poet or philosopher has passed this way. 

The gardener with all his assiduity does not raise such a variety, nor so many successive crops on the same space, as Nature in the very roadside ditches. There they have stood, begrimed with dust and the wash of the road so long, and made acquaintance with passing sheep and cattle and swine, gathering a trivial experience, and now at last the fall rains have come to wash off some of that dust, and even they exhibit these dense flowery panicles as the result of all that experience, as pure for an hour as if they grew by some wild brook-side. Successor to Mayweed & Co. 

Is not mayweed, by the way, the flower furthest advanced into the road rut or mid-channel, like the kalmiana lily in the river? The mid- channel, where the stream of travel flows deep and strong, unless it is far up the stream toward its fountainhead, no flower invades. Mayweed! what a misnomer! Call it rut-weed rather. 

Goodyera pubescens apparently just done. 

Fringed gentian well out (and some withered or frost-bitten?), say a week, though there was none to be seen here August 27th. 

I see the fruit and flowers of Polygonum Careyi affected with smut like corn.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 14, 1856

Let the traveller bethink himself, elevate and expand his thoughts somewhat, that his successors may oftener hereafter be cheered by the sight of an Aster . . . to remind him that a poet or philosopher has passed this way. See August 30, 1856 "The more thrilling, wonderful, divine objects I behold in a day, the more expanded and immortal I become. If a stone appeals to me and elevates me, tells me how many miles I have come, how many remain to travel, — and the more, the better, — reveals the future to me in some measure, it is a matter of private rejoicing.")

Fringed gentian well out . . . See September 14, 1855 ("To Hubbard's Close. . . .  I see no fringed gentian yet.. ")