Surveying a blueberry and maple swamp.

June 5. 

June 5, 2018

A. M. —Surveying a blueberry and maple swamp belonging to Thomas Brooks in the northeast part of Lincoln, burned over in fall of '57. 

The fire spread across a ditch about four feet wide, catching the dry grass. 

The maples are killed part way or entirely round, near the ground, as you find on cutting the bark, being most protected on the inside of a clump toward each other, but less and less as you try higher up. Yet, generally, they have leaved out. Will they, when thus girdled, live more than one year? 

The effect on the alders has been that the bark for a foot or two next the ground is now in loose curls turned back or outward, showing the yellowish wood and yellowish inner side of the bark, evidently owing to the drying and contracting of the outside. 

The principal loss appears to have been of blueberries. Brooks says he has got twenty-five (??) bushels there in a year. 

P. M. —Surveying, for Warner, wood bought of John Brown near Concord line. 

I now see a painted turtle in a rut, crossing a sandy road. They are now laying, then. When they get into a rut they find it rather difficult to get out, and, hearing a wagon coming, they draw in their heads, lie still, and are crushed. 

Clasping hound's-tongue in garden. 

Can our second gooseberry in garden be the R. rotundifolium?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 5, 1858

Surveying, for Warner, wood bought of John Brown. See May 19, 1858 ("A. M. – Surveying (by the eye) for Warner the meadow surveyed for John Hosmer in June, ’56. “)


I now see a painted turtle in a rut. See June 15, 1857 ("Now is the time that they are killed in the ruts all the country over.”). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Painted Turtle