The navel of the universe

May 31. 

Gowing's Swamp
August 23, 1854

P. M. — To Gowing's Swamp and to Pinus resinosa.

In the ditches in Moore's Swamp on the new Bedford road, the myriads of pollywogs, now three quarters of an inch long, crowding close to the edge, make a continuous black edging to the pool a foot wide. I see where thousands have been left high and dry and are now trodden into the sand, yet preserving their forms, spotting it with black. The water looks too full of yellowish sediment to support them. 

That central meadow and pool in Gowing's Swamp is its very navel, omphalos, where the umbilical cord was cut that bound it to creation's womb. Methinks every swamp tends to have or suggests such an interior tender spot. The sphagnous crust that surrounds the pool is pliant and quaking, like the skin or muscles of the abdomen; you seem to be slumping into the very bowels of the swamp. 

Some seem to have been here to collect sphagnum, either for wells, or to wrap plants in. 

There grow the white spruce and the larch. The spruce cones, though now erect, at length turn down. The sterile flowers on lower twigs around stand up now three quarters of an inch long, open and reddish-brown. 

Andromeda Polifolia, much past its prime. 

I detect no hairy huckleberry. 

The Vaccinium Oxycoccus is almost in bloom! and has grown three inches; is much in advance of the common. 

The Pinus resinosa not yet out; will be apparently with the rigida. It has no fertile flowers or cones. The sterile flower-buds are dark-purple, while those of the rigida there are light-green. The largest tree is about ten inches in diameter. It is distinguished, at a distance even, by its lighter-colored and smoother or flatter bark. It is also very straight and perpendicular, with its branches in regular whorls, and its needles are very long. 

Rhodora now in its prime. 

I see in open land a hollow circle of Lycopodium dendroideum, ten feet in diameter; some of the inner portion is dead. This too, then, like the flowering fern, grows or spreads in circles. 

Also the cinnamon fern grows in circles. 

See an ants' nest, just begun, which covers the grass with sand for more than ten feet in one direction and seven in the other and is thickly pierced with holes.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 31, 1857


In the ditches in Moore's Swamp on the new Bedford road, the myriads of pollywogs, now three quarters of an inch long . . . See note to May 19, 1857 ("See myriads of minute pollywogs, recently hatched, in the water of Moore's Swamp.")

That central meadow and pool in Gowing's Swamp . . . See  August 23, 1854 ("There is in the middle an open pool, twenty or thirty feet in diameter,. . .an abrupt edge next the water, this on a dense bed of quaking sphagnum, in which I sink eighteen inches in water, upheld by its matted roots, where I fear to break through. On this the spatulate sundew abounds."); August 30, 1856 ("Consider how remote and novel that swamp. Beneath it is a quaking bed of sphagnum, and in it grow Andromeda Polifolia, Kalmia glauca, menyanthes (or buck -bean), Gaylussacia dumosa, Vaccinium Oxycoccus, — plants which scarcely a citizen of Concord ever sees.")

Andromeda Polifolia, much past its prime. See May 24, 1855 ("Andromeda Polifolia now in prime. . . . "); May 24, 1854 ("Surprised to find the Andromeda Polifolia in bloom and apparently past its prime. . .A timid botanist would never pluck it."); February 17, 1854 ("In the open part of Gowing's Swamp I find the Andromeda Polifolia. Neither here nor in Beck Stow's does it grow very near the shore. . . . in the middle or deepest part will be an open space not yet quite given up to water, where the Andromeda calyculata and a few A. Polifolia reign almost alone. These are pleasing gardens.”)

Note HDT first discoverd Andromeda Polifolia on July 14, 1853 at Beck Stow’s Swamp (“Saw something blue, or glaucous, in Beck Stow's Swamp to-day; approached and discovered the Andromeda Polifolia, in the midst of the swamp at the north end, not long since out of bloom. This is another instance of a common experience. When I am shown from abroad, or hear of, or in any [way] become interested in, some plant or other thing, I am pretty sure to find it soon. “) On February 17, 1854 he first records finding it at Gowing’s Swamp. On November 15,1857 he finds ‘plenty 'at Miles swamp [Ledum Swamp]. See Vascular Flora of Concord, Massachusetts

The sterile flowers on lower twigs around stand up now three quarters of an inch long, open and reddish-brown. See May 25, 1857 ("The white spruce cones are cylindrical and have an entire firm edge to the scales, and the needles are longer."); June 10, 1855 (" The white spruce cones are now a rich dark purple, more than a half inch long.")")

May 31. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, May 31

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