An ancient cellar is uncovered.

September 22.

A mizzling day, with less rain than yesterday, filling the streams.

As I went past the Hunt cellar, where Hosmer pulled down the old house in the spring, I thought I would see if any new or rare plants had sprung up in that place which had so long been covered from the light. 

I was surprised to find there Urtica wrens (?), very fresh and in bloom, one to three feet high, with ovate deeply cut leaves, which I never saw before; also Nicotiana, probably Tabacum (not the wild one), in flower, and Anethum graveolens (?), or dill, also in flower. 

I had not seen either of the last two growing spontaneously in Concord before. It is remarkable that tobacco should have sprung up there. Could the seed have been preserved from a time when it was cultivated there? [I learn that it was formerly cultivated in Concord, but Temple, who has raised a little for two years past a mile and a quarter west of this, thinks he is the only one who has cultivated any in C. of late years.] Also the Solanum nigrum, which is rare in Concord, with many flowers and green fruit. 

The prevailing plants in and about this cellar were mallows, Urtica urens, rich-weed (very rank), catnep, Chenopodium Botrys, Solanum nigrum, chickweed, Bidens frondosa, etc. 

It is remarkable what a curse seems to attach to any place which has long been inhabited by man. Vermin of various kinds abide with him. It is said that the site of Babylon is a desert where the lion and the jackal prowl. If, as here, an ancient cellar is uncovered, there springs up at once a crop of rank and noxious weeds, evidence of a certain unwholesome fertility, — by which perchance the earth relieves herself of the poisonous qualities which have been imparted to her.  As if what was foul, baleful, grovelling, or obscene in the inhabitants had sunk into the earth and infected it. 

Certain qualities are there in excess in the soil, and the proper equilibrium will not be attained until after the sun and air have purified the spot. The very shade breeds saltpetre. Yet men value this kind of earth highly and will pay a price for it, as if it were as good a soil for virtue as for vice. 

In other places you find henbane and the Jamestown-weed and the like, in cellars, — such herbs as the witches are said to put into their caldron. It would be fit that the tobacco plant should spring up on the house-site, aye on the grave, of almost every householder of Concord. 

These vile weeds are sown by vile men. 

When the house is gone they spring up in the corners of cellars where the cider-casks stood always on tap, for murder and all kindred vices will out. And that rank crowd which lines the gutter, where the wash of the dinner dishes flows, are but more distant parasites of the host. 

What obscene and poisonous weeds, think you, will mark the site of a Slave State? — what kind of Jamestown-weed? There are mallows for food, — for cheeses, at least; rich-weed for high living; the nettle for domestic felicity, — a happy disposition; black nightshade, tobacco, henbane, and Jamestown-weed as symbols of the moral atmosphere and influences of that house, the idiocy and insanity of it; dill and Jerusalem-oak and catnep for senility grasping at a straw; and beggar-ticks for poverty.

I see the fall dandelions all closed in the rain this afternoon. Do they, then, open only in fair or cloudy forenoons and cloudy afternoons? 

There is mallow with its pretty little button-shaped fruit, which children eat and call cheeses, — eaten green. There are several such fruits discoverable and edible by children. 

The mountain-ash trees are alive with robins and cherry-birds nowadays, stripping them of their fruit (in drooping clusters). It is exceedingly bitter and austere to my taste. Such a tree fills the air with the watch-spring-like note of the cherry-birds coming and going.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 22, 1859

I see the fall dandelions all closed in the rain this afternoon. Do they, then, open only in fair or cloudy forenoons and cloudy afternoons? See September 1, 1859 ("The autumnal dandelion is a prevailing flower now, but since it shuts up in the afternoon it might not be known as common unless you were out in the morning or in a dark afternoon."); September 11, 1859 ("This being a cloudy and somewhat rainy day, the autumnal dandelion is open in the afternoon."); November 4, 1855 ("The autumnal dandelion sheltered by this apple-tree trunk is drooping and half closed and shows but half its yellow, this dark, late wet day in the fall.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Autumnal Dandelion

The mountain-ash trees are alive with robins and cherry-birds nowadays. See September 1, 1859 ("The cherry-birds and robins seem to know the locality of every wild cherry in the town.")