To my great surprise the saxifrage is in bloom.

April 3. 

Saturday.


Nothing is more saddening than an ineffectual and proud intercourse with those of whom we expect sympathy and encouragement. I repeatedly find myself drawn toward certain persons but to be disappointed. No concessions which are not radical are the least satisfaction. By myself I can live and thrive, but in the society of incompatible friends I starve. To cultivate their society is to cherish a sore which can only be healed by abandoning them. I can not trust my neighbors whom I know any more than I can trust the law of gravitation and jump off the Cliffs. 

The last two Tribunes I have not looked at. I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire, — thinner than the paper on which it is printed, — then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them. 

No fields are so barren to me as the men of whom I expect everything but get nothing. In their neighborhood I experience a painful yearning for society, which cannot be satisfied, for the hate is greater than the love. 

P. M. – To Cliffs. 

At Hayden's I hear hylas on two keys or notes. Heard one after the other, it might be mistaken for the varied note of one. 

The little croakers, too, are very lively there. I get close to them and witness a great commotion and half hopping, half swimming, about, with their heads out, apparently in pursuit of each other, — perhaps thirty or forty within a few square yards and fifteen or twenty within one yard. There is not only the incessant lively croaking of many together, as usually heard, but a lower, hoarser, squirming, screwing kind of croak, perhaps from the other sex. As I approach nearer, they disperse and bury themselves in the grass at the bottom; only one or two remain outstretched on the surface, and, at another step, these, too, conceal themselves. 

Looking up the river yesterday, in a direction opposite to the sun, not long before it set, the water was of a rich, dark blue — while looking at it in a direction diagonal to this, i. e. northeast, it was nearly slate-colored. 

To my great surprise the saxifrage is in bloom. It was, as it were, by mere accident that I found it. I had not observed any particular forwardness in it, when, happening to look under a projecting rock in a little nook on the south side of a stump, I spied one little plant which had opened three or four blossoms high up the Cliff. 

Evidently you must look very sharp and faithfully to find the first flower, such is the advantage of position, and when you have postponed a flower for a week and are turning away, a little further search may reveal it.

Some flowers, perhaps, have advantages one year which they have not the next. This spring, as well as the past winter, has been remarkably free from snow, and this reason, and the plant being hardy withal, may account for its early blossoming.

With what skill it secures moisture and heat, growing commonly in a little bed of moss which keeps it moist, and lying low in some cleft of the rock! The sunniest and most sheltered exposures possible it secures. This faced the southeast, was nearly a foot under the eaves of the rock, of buds in the least above the level of its projecting, calyx-like leaves. It was shelter within shelter. The blasts sweep over it. Ready to shoot upward when it shall be warm. The leaves of those which have been more exposed are turned red. It is a very pretty, snug plant with its notched leaves, one of the neatest and prettiest leaves seen now. 

A blackberry vine which lay over the rock was beginning to leave out, as much or more than the gooseberry in the garden, such was the reflected heat. The Missouri currant is perhaps more advanced than the early gooseberry in our garden. 

The female Populus tremuliformis catkins, narrower and at present more red and somewhat less downy than the male, west side of railroad at Deep Cut, quite as forward as the male in this situation. 

The male P. grandidentata's a little further west are nearly out.

I should have noticed the fact that the pistillate flower of the hazel peeps forth gradually.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 3, 1853

I hear hylas on two keys or notes. Heard one after the other, it might be mistaken for the varied note of one. See March 31, 1857 (" As I rise the east side of the Hill, I hear the distant faint peep of hylodes . . ..  How gradually and imperceptibly the peep of the hylodes mingles with and swells the volume of sound which makes the voice of awakening nature! If you do not listen carefully for its first note, you probably will not hear it, and, not having heard that, your ears become used to the sound, so that you will hardly notice it at last, however loud and universal.. . . The shrill peeping of the hylodes locates itself nowhere in particular.");  April 1, 1860 (" I hear the first hylodes by chance, but no doubt they have been heard some time. "); April 2, 1852 ("I hear a solitary hyla for the first time."); 

The little croakers, too, are very lively there. See March 26, 1860 ("The wood frog may be heard March 15, as this year, or not till April 13, as in ’56, — twenty-nine days."); March 31, 1857 ("The dry croaking and tut tut of the frogs (a sound which ducks seem to imitate, a kind of quacking, —and they are both of the water!) is plainly enough down there in some pool in the woods, but the shrill peeping of the hylodes locates itself nowhere in particular."); April 4, 1857 (“Caught a croaking frog in some smooth water in the railroad gutter. Above it was a uniform (perhaps olive?) brown, without green, and a yellowish line along the edge of the lower jaws. . . What frog can it be?”); April 8, 1852 ("To-day I hear the croak of frogs in small pond-holes in the woods,"); April 13, 1855 ("The small croaking frogs are now generally heard in all those stagnant ponds or pools in woods floored with leaves, which are mainly dried up in the summer.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Wood Frog (Rana sylvatica)

 Looking up the river yesterday, in a direction opposite to the sun, not long before it set, the water was of a rich, dark blue. See  April 4, 1855 ("All the earth is bright; the very pines glisten, and the water is a bright blue."); April 5, 1856 ("We overlook the bright-blue flood alternating with fields of ice (we being on the same side with the sun). The first sight of the blue water in the spring is exhilarating. "); April 9, 1856  ("The water on the meadows now, looking with the sun, is a far deeper and more exciting blue than the heavens. "); April 9, 1859 ("For three weeks past, when I have looked northward toward the flooded meadows they have looked dark-blue or blackish." See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Blue Waters in Spring

 

To my great surprise the saxifrage is in bloom. under a projecting rock. See April 6, 1858 ("At Lee's Cliff I find no saxifrage in bloom above the rock . . .but on a few small warm shelves under the rocks the saxifrage makes already a pretty white edging.");  April 10, 1855 ("As for the saxifrage, when I had given it up for to-day, having, after a long search in the warmest clefts and recesses, found only three or four buds which showed some white, I at length, on a still warmer shelf, found one flower partly expanded, and its common peduncle had shot up an inch.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  the Saxifrage in Spring (Saxifraga vernalis)

You must look very sharp and faithfully to find the first flower. See April 17, 1855 ("undoubtedly an insect will have found the first flower before you"); April 2, 1856 ("It will take you half a lifetime to find out where to look for the earliest flower"); February 28, 1857 ("It takes several years' faithful search to learn where to look for the earliest flowers.")  See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Earliest Flower, 

The female Populus tremuliformis catkins, narrower and at present more red and somewhat less downy than the male See March 29, 1853 ("The catkins of the Populus tremuloides are just beginning to open, — to curl over and downward like caterpillars")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Aspens

April 3. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, April 3

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 © 2009-2022