Sunday.
3 p. m. — To Conantum.
A warm day.
It has been cold, and we
have had fires the past week sometimes.
Clover begins to
show red in the fields, and the wild cherry is not out of blossom.
The river has a summer
midday look, smooth to a cobweb, with green shores, and shade from the trees on
its banks.
The Viburnum nudum.
The oblong- leaved sundew,
but not its flower.
Do the bulbous arethusas
last long?
What a sweetness fills the air now in low grounds or meadows,
reminding me of times when I went strawberrying years ago! It is as if all
meadows were filled with some sweet mint.
The Dracama borealis
(Bigelow) (Clintonia borealis (Gray)) amid the Solomon's-seals in Hubbard's
Grove Swamp, a very neat and handsome liliaceous flower with three large,
regular, spotless, green convallaria leaves, making a triangle from the root,
and sometimes a fourth from the scape, linear, with four drooping,
greenish-yellow, bell-shaped (?) flowers. Not in sun. In low shady woods. It is a handsome and
perfect flower, though not high-colored. I prefer it to some more
famous.
But Gray should not name it
from the Governor of New York. What is he to the lovers of flowers in Massachusetts? If named
after a man, it must be a man of flowers. Rhode Island botanists may as
well name the flowers after their governors as New York. Name your canals and
railroads after Clinton, if you please, but his name is not associated with
flowers.
Mosquitoes now trouble the
walker in low shady woods.
No doubt woodchucks in
their burrows hear the steps of walkers through the earth and come not forth.
Yellow wood sorrel (Oxalis
stricta), which, according to Gray, closes its leaves and droops at nightfall.
The woolly aphides on
alders whiten one's clothes now.
What is that palmate(?)-leaved water-plant by the Corner causeway?
The buck-bean grows in Conant's
meadow.
Lambkill is out. I remember with what delight I used to discover this flower in dewy mornings.
All things in this world
must be seen with the morning dew on them, must be seen with youthful,
early-opened, hopeful eyes.
Saw four cunning little
woodchucks nibbling the short grass, about one third grown, that live under
Conant's old house. Mistook one for a piece of
rusty iron.
The Viburnum Lentago
is about out of bloom; shows young berries.
The Smilax herbaeea,
carrion-flower, a rank green vine with long-peduncled umbels, with small
greenish or yellowish flowers just opening, and tendrils, at the Miles swamp. It smells exactly like a
dead rat in the wall, and apparently attracts flies (I find small gnats on it)
like carrion. A very remarkable odor; a
single minute flower in an umbel open will scent a whole room.
Nature imitates all things
in flowers. They are at once the most
beautiful and the ugliest objects, the most fragrant and the most offensive to
the nostrils, etc., etc.
The compound-racemed
convallaria, being fully out, is white. I put it down too early,
perhaps by a week.
The great leaves of the
bass attract you now, six inches in diameter.
The delicate maidenhair
fern forms a cup or dish, very delicate and graceful. Beautiful, too, its glossy
black stem and its wave-edged fruited leafets.
I hear the feeble plaintive
note of young bluebirds, just trying their wings or getting used to them.
Young robins peep.
I think I know four kinds
of cornel beside the dog wood and bunchberry:
- one now in bloom, with rather small leaves with a smooth, silky feeling beneath, a greenish-gray spotted stem, in older stocks all gray (Cornus alternifolia? or sericea?);
- the broad-leaved cornel in Laurel Glen, yet green in the bud (C. circinata?);
- the small-leaved cornel with a small cyme or corymb, as late to be [sic] as the last, in Potter's hedge and on high hills (C. paniculata);
- and the red osier by the river (C. stolonifera), which I have not seen this year.
Mosquitoes are first
troublesome in the house with sultry nights.
Orobanche uniflora,
single-flowered broom-rape (Bigelow), [or] Aphyllon uniflorum, one-flowered
cancer-root (Gray). C. found it June 12 at
Clematis Brook.
Also the common fumitory
(?), methinks; it is a fine-leaved small plant.
Captain Jonathan Carver
commences his Travels with these words:
"In June, 1766, I set out from Boston, and proceeded by way of Albany and Niagara, to Michillimackinac; a Fort situated between the Lakes Huron and Michigan, and distant from Boston 1300 miles. This being the uttermost of our factories towards the northwest, I considered it as the most convenient place from whence I could begin my intended progress, and enter at once into the Regions I designed to explore."
So he gives us no information respecting the intermediate
country, nor much, I fear, about the country beyond.
Holbrook says the Emys
picta is the first to be seen in the spring.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June
13, 1852
All things in this world must be seen with the morning dew on them, must be seen with youthful, early-opened, hopeful eyes. See July 18, 1851 ("It is a test question affecting the youth of a person , — Have you knowledge of the morning? . . . Are you abroad early , brushing the dews aside?"); March 17, 1852 ("There is a moment . . .before the exhalations of the day commence to rise, when we see things more truly than at any other time."); Walden (“Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.”); and note to March 17, 1857 (“No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring”)
The Viburnum nudum. . . .The Viburnum Lentago is about out of bloom; shows young berries. See June 10, 1854 ("The Viburnum lentago is just out of bloom now that the V. nudum is fairly begun.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Viburnum lentago (nannyberry)
Yellow wood sorrel (Oxalis stricta), which closes its leaves and droops at nightfall. See August 15, 1851 ("Oxalis stricta, upright wood-sorrel, the little yellow ternate-leaved flower in pastures and corn-fields. ")
The great leaves of the bass attract you now, six inches in diameter. See The bass suddenly expanding its little round leaves. May 13, 1854 ("The bass suddenly expanding its little round leaves. May 13, 1854"); See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Basswood
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 © 2009-2021
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