May 15
Sunday. P. M. – To Annursnack.
Silvery cinquefoil now open. Its petals, perchance, show the green between them, but the beautiful undersides of the leaves more than make up for it.
What was that bird beyond the Lee place, with a chickadee like note, black head and throat, and light color round the neck and beneath; methinks longer and slenderer than the chickadee?
The golden willow catkins begin to fall; their prime is past.
And buttercups and silvery cinquefoil and the first apple blossoms, and waving grass beginning to be tinged with sorrel, introduce us to a different season.
The huckleberry, resinosa, its red flowers are open, in more favorable places sev eral days earlier, probably; and the earliest shrub and red and black oaks in warm exposures may be set down to to-day.
A red butterfly goes by. Methinks I have seen them before.
The painted-cup is now abundantly and fully out. Six or eight inches high above its spidery leaves, almost like a red flame, it stands on edge of the hill just rising from the meadow, - on the instep of the hill. It tells of July with its fiery color. It promises a heat we have not experienced yet .
This is a field which lies nearer to summer . Yellow is the color of spring; red of midsummer. Through pale golden and green we arrive at the yellow of the buttercup; through scarlet, to the fiery July red, the red lily.
The first cricket's chirrup which I have chanced to hear now falls on my ear and makes me forget all else; all else is a thin and movable crust down to that depth where he resides eternally. He already foretells autumn. Deep under the dry border of some rock in this hill side he sits, and makes the finest singing of birds outward and insignificant, his own song is so much deeper and more significant.
His voice has set me thinking, philosophizing, moralizing at once.It is not so wildly melodious, but it is wiser and more mature than that of the wood thrush. With this elixir I see clear through the summer now to autumn and any summer work seems frivolous. I am disposed to ask this humblebee that hurries humming past so busily if he knows what he is about. At one leap I go from the just opened buttercup to the life-everlasting. This singer has antedated autumn . His strain is superior (inferior ?) [Exaltedly inferior.] to seasons. It annihilates time and space; the summer is for time-servers.
The Erigeron bellidifolius has now spread its rays out flat since last Sabbath. I may set it down to May 10th, methinks. It is the first of what I may call the daisy family, sometimes almost white.
What are those large conical-shaped fungi of which I see a dozen round an apple tree? I thought them pieces of a yellowish wasp-nest, they are so honeycombed.
I looked again on the forest from this hill, which view may contrast with that of last Sunday. The mist produced by the leafing of the deciduous trees has greatly thickened now and lost much of its reddishness in the lighter green of expanding leaves, has be come a brownish or yellowish green, except where it has attained distinctness in the light-green foliage of the birch, the earliest distinct foliage visible in extensive great masses at a great distance, the aspen not being common. The pines and other evergreens are now fast being merged in a sea of foliage.
The weather has grown rapidly warm. Methinks I wore a greatcoat here last Sunday; now an under coat is too much. I even think of bathing in the river .
I love to sit in the wind on this hill and be blown on. We bathe thus first in air; then, when the air has warmed it, in water.
Here are ten cows feeding on the hill beside me. Why do they move about so fast as they feed? They have advanced thirty rods in ten minutes, and some times the [last] one runs to keep up. Is it to give the grass thus a chance to grow more equally and always get a fresh bite?
The tall buttercup on the west edge of Painted-Cup Meadow for a day or two at least, and the fringed polygala as long.
This side stone bridge, Barbarea vulgaris, or common winter cress yellow rocket, also as long.
A thorn will blossom in a day or two, without varnished ashy twigs and with deep-cut lobes.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 15, 1853
The following trees and shrubs methinks leaf out in nearly the following order . The more questionable , or which I have not seen , are marked — ( ? ) . Nemopanthes } ( 7 ) Gooseberry Thorns Swamp white oak Currant Waxwork Chestnut oak Trembles Maples ( ?? ) Hardhack ( ? ) Some willows Shrub oak Salix nigra Young white , red , and Chinquapin oak Grape sugar maples Red White ash Balm - of - Gilead Black Black Elder Scarlet ( ? ) Sumach Meadow - sweet Hazel Beech ( ? ) Diervilla Larch Swamp - pink Black cherry White pine Witch - hazel Ostrya Elm Alder Hornbeam ( ?? ) Prinos Paper birch Cornels ( some later ? ) Clethra Black Chestnut Tupelo Yellow “ Great - leaved poplar Mountain laurel ( ?? ) White Butternut Panicled andromeda Pyrus arbutifolia Hickories Dwarf Apple Bass Rhodora Amelanchier Sassafras Button - bush Choke cherry Locust ( ? ) Hemlock ( ? ) ? ( ? ) ? Dwarf Celtis ( ? ) White spruce Wild red " Pitch pine Black spruce ' Viburnum nudum Juniperus repens Lentago Red cedar The above list made Maple leaved vibur- White num ( ? ) Arbor - vitæ Barberry White oak 66 ( 2 ) May 20th . Seen a day or two after the button - bush started . The hemlock appeared later , but it may [ be ] because it is of slower growth
I looked again on the forest from this hill, which view may contrast with that of last Sunday. See May 8, 1853 ("They have cut off the woods, and with them the shad-bush, on the top of Annursnack, but laid open new and wider prospects. The landscape is in some respects more interesting because of the overcast sky, threatening rain; a cold southwest wind. . . .The pyramidal pine-tops are now seen rising out of a reddish mistiness of the deciduous trees just bursting into leaf. A week ago the deciduous woods had not this misty look, and the evergreens were more sharply divided from them, but now they have the appearance of being merged in or buoyed up in a mist.")
The mist produced by the leafing of the deciduous trees has greatly thickened now and [t]he pines and other evergreens are now fast being merged in a sea of foliage. See May 15, 1854 ("Looking off from hilltop . . . The aspect of oak and other woods at a distance is somewhat like that of a very thick and reddish or yellowish mist about the evergreens.“); May 15, 1860 (“Looking from the Cliffs through the haze, the deciduous trees are a mist of leaflets, against which the pines are already darkened. At this season there is thus a mist in the air and a mist on the earth. ”) See also May 8, 1852 (“I am most impressed by the rapidity of the changes within a week”); May 26, 1857 ("At the same season with this haze of buds comes also the kindred haziness of the air.”)
And buttercups and silvery cinquefoil and the first apple blossoms, and waving grass introduce us to a different season.Yellow is the color of spring; red of midsummer. Through pale golden and green we arrive at the yellow of the buttercup; through scarlet, to the fiery July red, the red lily. See May 23, 1853 ("At first we had the lighter, paler spring yellows of willows, dandelion, cinquefoil, then the darker and deeper yellow of the buttercup; and then this broad distinction between the buttercup and the senecio, as the seasons revolve toward July."); May 27, 1853 ("A new season has commenced -- summer -- leafy June. . . . The buttercups in the church-yard and on some hillsides are now looking more glossy and bright than ever after the rain."); May 28, 1851 ("The buttercups spot the churchyard."); May 30, 1857 ("Buttercups thickly spot the churchyard."); June 2, 1852 (“Buttercups now spot the churchyard.”);
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau"A book, each page written in its own season,out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
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