The beauty of willows

August 7. 

Saturday. 

P. M. —Up Assabet. 

The most luxuriant groves of black willow, as I recall them, are on the inside curves, or on sandy capes between the river and a bay, or sandy banks parallel with the firmer shore, e. g. between Lee’s and Fair Haven on north side, point of Fair Haven Island, opposite Clamshell and above, just below stone bridge, Lee Meadow or opposite house, below Nathan Barrett’s at Bay, sandy bank below Dove Rock. 

They also grow on both sides sometimes, where the river runs straight through stagnant meadows or swamps,—e.g. above Hollowell Bridge, —or on one side, though straight, along the edge of a swamp,—as above Assabet Spring,—but rarely ever against a firm bank or hillside, the positive male shore, e.g. east shore of Fair Haven Pond, east side above railroad bridge, etc. 

Measured the two largest of three below Dove Rock. The southernmost is three feet nine inches in circumference at ground, and it branches there. The westernmost is four feet two inches in circumference at ground and three feet two inches at three feet above ground. Or the largest is one foot and four inches in diameter at ground. 

They all branch at the ground, dividing within four or five feet into three or four main stems. The three here have the effect of one tree, seen from the water, and are twenty-five feet high or more, and, all together, broader than high. They are none of them upright, but in this case, close under a higher wood of maples and swamp white oak, slant over the stream, and, taken separately or viewed from the land side, are very imperfect trees. 

If you stand at their base and look upward or outward, you see a great proportion of naked trunk but thinly invested with foliage even at the summit, and they are among the most unsightly trees. The lower branches slant down ward from the main divisions so as commonly to rest on the water. 

But seen from the water side no tree of its height, methinks, so completely conceals its trunk. They meet with many hard rubs from the ice and from driftwood in freshets in the course of their lives, and whole trees are bent aside or half broken off by these causes, but they soon conceal their injuries. 

The Sternothaerus odoratus knows them well, for it climbs highest up their stems, three or four feet or more nowadays, sometimes seven or eight along the slanting branches, and is frequently caught and hung by the neck in its forks. They do not so much jump as tumble off when disturbed by a passer. 

The small black mud tortoise, with its muddy shell, eyes you motionless from its resting-place in a fork of the black willow. They will climb four feet up a stem not more than two inches in diameter, and yet undo all their work in an instant by tumbling off when your boat goes by. The trunk is covered with coarse, long, and thick upraised scales. It is this turtle’s castle and path to heaven. He is on the upward road along the stem of the willow, and by its dark stem it is partially concealed. 

Yes, the musquash and the mud tortoise and the bittern know it well. 

But not these sights alone are now seen on our river, but the sprightly kingbird glances and twitters above the glossy leaves of the swamp white oak. Perchance this tree, with its leaves glossy above and whitish beneath, best expresses the life of the kingbird and is its own tree. 

How long will it be after we have passed before the mud tortoise has climbed to its perch again? 

The author of the Chinese novel “Ju-Kiao-Li,” some eight hundred years ago, appears to have appreciated the beauty of willows. Pe, his principal character, moved out of the city late in life, to a stream bordered with willows, about twenty miles distant, in order to spend the rest of his days drinking wine and writing verses there. He describes the eyebrow of his heroine as like a willow leaf floating on the surface of the water. 

In the upper part of J. Farmer’s lane I find huckleberries which are distinctly pear-shaped, all of them. These and also other roundish ones near by, and apparently huckleberries generally, are dotted or apparently dusted over with a yellow dust or meal, which looks as if it could be rubbed off. Through a glass it looks like a resin which has exuded, and on the small green fruit is of a bright orange or lemon-color, like small specks of yellow lichens. It is apparently the same as that on the leaves. 

Monarda fistula is now apparently in prime, four and more, eight or ten rods behind red oak on Emerson’s Assabet field.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 7, 1858

The most luxuriant groves of black willow are on the inside curves, —but rarely ever against a firm bank or hillside, the positive male shore. See March 24, 1855 ("Rivers are continually changing their channels, -eating into one bank and adding their sediment to the other, - so that frequently where there is a great bend you see a high and steep bank or bill on one side, which the river washes, and a broad meadow on the other. ");August 15, 1858 (" I notice the black willows . . . to see where they grow, distinguishing ten places. In several instances they are on the concave or female side distinctly."); August 19, 1858 ("I noticed the localities of black willows as far up as the mouth of the river in Fair Haven Pond, but not so carefully as elsewhere, and from the last observations I infer that the willow grows especially and almost exclusively in places where the drift is most likely to lodge, as on capes and points and concave sides of the river") See also August 25, 1856 ("Why is the black willow so strictly confined to the bank of the river?"); May 14, 1852 (“Going over the Corner causeway, the willow blossoms fill the air with a sweet fragrance, and I am ready to sing, Ah! willow, willow!”); May 10, 1854 (“I perceive the sweetness of the willows on the causeway. ”); February 14, 1856(“I was struck to-day by the size and continuousness of the natural willow hedge on the east side of the railroad causeway, at the foot of the embankment, next to the fence. Some twelve years ago, when that causeway was built through the meadows, there were no willows there or near there, but now, just at the foot of the sand-bank, where it meets the meadow, and on the line of the fence, quite a dense willow hedge has planted itself. ”); May 12, 1857 (“When I consider how many species of willow have been planted along the railroad causeway within ten years, of which no one knows the history, and not one in Concord beside myself can tell the name of one, so that it is quite a discovery to identify a single one in a year, and yet within this period the seeds of all these kinds have been conveyed from some other locality to this, I am reminded how much is going on that man wots not of”) and A Book of Seasons: the Propogation of the Black Willow.

Huckleberries generally are dotted or apparently dusted over with a yellow dust or meal, which looks as if it could be rubbed off. Through a glass it looks like a resin which has exuded, and on the small green fruit is of a bright orange or lemon-color. See August 8, 1858 ("I see there [at Ledum Swamp], especially near the pool, tall and slender huckleberry bushes of a peculiar kind. Some are seven feet high. They are, for the most part, three or four feet high, very slender and drooping, bent like grass to one side. The berries are round and glossy-black, with resinous dots, as usual, and in flattish-topped racemes, sometimes ten or twelve in a raceme, but generally more scattered. Call it, perhaps, the tall swamp huckleberry")

The Sternothaerus odoratus is frequently caught and hung by the neck in its forks. See August 6, 1855 ("Saw a Sternotherus odoratus, caught by the neck and hung in the fork between a twig and main trunk of a black willow, about two feet above water, — apparently a month or two, being nearly dry. Probably in its haste to get down had fallen and was caught. I have noticed the same thing once or twice before. ")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Musk Turtle (Sternothaerus odoratus )