The shad-bush in bloom.

May 15. 

7.30 A. M. – Ride to the Shawsheen in the northeast of Bedford. 

Meadow saxifrage well out, many of them, at the tan-yard meadow. 

The Equisetum limosum will apparently (?) open there in two or three days.

Thalictrum dioicum abundant, apparently in prime; how long? It is a very interesting, graceful, and delicate plant, especially the sterile, with its pretty, commonly purple, petal-like sepals, and its conspicuous long yellow anthers in little bare clusters (?), trembling over the meadow. Yet a frail and rather inobvious plant. It grows on moist, commonly rocky slopes next to meadows at the base of hills, or by rocks in rather swampy woods. 

The meadows are now full of sedges in bloom, which shed clouds of pollen and cover my shoes with it. 

The cassia has not come up yet. 

High blueberries well out. 

Hear the evergreen-forest note. 

Also, in rather low ground in Bedford, a note much like the summer yellowbird's, or between that and the redstart, and see the bird quite near, but hopping quite low on the bushes. It looked like the yellowbird with a bluish ash top of head. What was it? [Probably parti-colored warbler.]

The shad-bush in bloom is now conspicuous, its white flags on all sides. Is it not the most massy and conspicuous of any wild plant now in bloom? I see where the farmer mending his fence has just cut one to make part of the fence, and it is stretched out horizontally, a mass of white bloom. 

Measured two apple trees by the road from the middle of Bedford and Fitch’s mill. One, which divided at the ground, was thirteen and a half feet in circumference there, around the double trunk; but another, in a field on the opposite side of the road, was the most remarkable tree for size. 

This tree was exceedingly low for the size of its trunk, and the top rather small. At three feet from the ground it measured ten and a quarter feet in circumference, and immediately above this sent off a branch as big as a large apple tree. It was hollow, and on one side part of the trunk had fallen out. These trees mark the residence of an old settler evidently.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal  May 15, 1858

It looked like the yellowbird with a bluish ash top of head. See May 15, 1856 ("See also, for a moment, in dry woods, a warbler with blue-slate head and apparently all yellow beneath for a minute, nothing else conspicuous; note slightly like tseep, tseep, tseep, tseep, tsit sitter ra-re-ra")  ; May 16, 1858 ("See again the warbler of yesterday. . . . Its note, with little variation, is like twit twit, twit twit, twitter twitter twe. It must be the parti-colored warbler"); and note to May 13, 1856 ("The tweezer-bird or Sylvia Americana . . .the parti-colored warbler, and was that switter switter switter switter swit also by it?.”)

Hear the evergreen-forest note. See May 11, 1854 ("Hear the evergreen-forest note"); May 6, 1855 ("The er er twe, ter ter twe, evergreen-forest note.");  June 1, 1854 ("Hear my evergreen-forest note, . . . I get a glimpse of its black throat and, I think, yellow head "); May 30, 1855 ("In the thick of the wood between railroad and Turnpike, hear the evergreen forest note, and see probably the bird,-- black throat, greenish-yellow or yellowish-green head and back, light-slate (?) wings with two white bars. Is it not the black-throated green warbler?”).

The shad-bush in bloom is now conspicuous. See May 9, 1852 ("The first shad-bush, Juneberry, or service-berry (Amclanchier canadensis), in blossom.") and note to May 13, 1852 ("The shad-blossom days in the woods.")