I would fain pluck the whole tree and carry it home for a nosegay.

October 2.

P. M.— To Cliffs.

The beggar-ticks (Bidens) now adhere to my clothes. I also find the desmodium sooner thus — as a magnet discovers the steel filings in a heap of ashes — than if I used my eyes alone.

The river is as low, within an inch or two, as when I made my mark.

A very warm day after the frosts, so that I wish — though I am afraid to wear — a thin coat.

From Cliffs the shrub oak plain has now a bright-red ground, perhaps of maples.

How much more beautiful the lakes now, like Fair Haven, surrounded by the autumn-tinted woods and hills, as in an ornamented frame!

Some maples in sprout-lands are of a delicate, pure, clear, unspotted red, inclining to crimson, surpassing most flowers. I would fain pluck the whole tree and carry it home for a nosegay.

The veiny-leaved hawkweed in blossom (again?).

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 2, 1852

The beggar-ticks (Bidens) now adhere to my clothes. I also find the desmodium sooner thus than if I used my eyes alone. See August 26, 1856 ("These desmodiums are so fine and inobvious that it is difficult to detect them. I go through a grove in vain, but when I get away, find my coat covered with their pods. They found me, though I did not them.”); September 29, 1856 ("How surely the desmodium, growing on some rough cliff-side, or the bidens, on the edge of a pool, prophesy the coming of the traveller, brute or human, that will transport their seeds on his coat! "); October 12, 1851 ("The seeds of the bidens, or beggar-ticks, with four-barbed awns like hay-hooks, now adhere to your clothes, so that you are all bristling with them."); October 20, 1858 ("Now in low grounds the different species of bidens or beggar’s-ticks adhere to your clothes. These bidents, tridents, quadridents are shot into you by myriads of unnoticed foes."); October 23, 1853 ("I find my clothes all bristling as with a chevaux-de-frise of beggar-ticks, which hold on for many days")

The veiny-leaved hawkweed in blossom (again?) See October 11, 1856 (“Hieracium  venosum still.”)  See also June 23, 1858 ("Veiny-leaved hawkweed, how long?"); June 23, 1859 (Veiny-leaved hawkweed freshly out"") and August 21, 1851 (" I have now found all the hawkweeds. Singular these genera of plants, plants manifestly related yet distinct. They suggest a history to nature, a natural history in a new sense.”)