A Book of the Seasons: Pine-sap and Tobacco-pipe

I would make a chart of our life,

know why just this circle of creatures completes the world.

Henry Thoreau, April 18, 1852

There is not only the tobacco-pipe,

but pine-sap. 

July 29, 1853

July 30, 2023

July 8.  Edith Emerson says she has seen the pine-sap this year in Concord.  July 8, 1857

July 22.  Monotropa uniflora, Indian-pipe.  July 22, 1852

July 23. The tobacco-pipe in damp woods. July 23, 1851

July 24.  Tobacco-pipe much blackened, out a long time. July 24, 1856

July 29.  Hypopitys lanuginosa, American pine-sap, just pushing up, — false beech-drops. Gray says from June to August. It is cream-colored or yellowish under the pines in Hubbard's Wood Path. Some near the fence east of the Close. A plant related to the tobacco-pipe. Remarkable this doubleness in nature, — not only that nature should be composed of just these individuals, but that there should be so rarely or never an individual without its kindred, — its cousin. It is allied to something else. There is not only the tobacco-pipe, but pine-sap. July 29, 1853

July 30.  I have seen a few new fungi within a week. The tobacco-pipes are still pushing up white amid the dry leaves, sometimes lifting a canopy of leaves with them four or five inches. July 30, 1854

July 31.  To Flint’s Pond . . . I have smelled fungi in the thick woods for a week, though they are not very common. I see tobacco-pipes now in the path.  July 31, 1858

August 10. I see many tobacco-pipes, now perhaps in their prime, if not a little late, and hear of pine-sap. The Indian pipe, though coming with the fungi and suggesting, no doubt, a close relation to them, — a sort of connecting link between flowers and fungi, — is a very interesting flower, and will bear a close inspection when fresh. The whole plant has a sweetish, earthy odor, though Gray says it is inodorous. I see them now on the leafy floor of this oak wood, in families of twelve to thirty sisters of various heights,—from two to eight inches,— as close together as they can stand, the youngest standing close up to the others, all with faces yet modestly turned downwards under their long hoods. Here is a family of about twenty-five within a diameter of little more than two inches, lifting the dry leaves for half their height in a cylinder about them. They generally appear bursting up through the dry leaves, which, elevated around, may serve to prop them. Springing up in the shade with so little color, they look the more fragile and delicate. They have very delicate pinkish half-naked stems with a few semitransparent crystalline-white scales for leaves, and from the sinuses at the base of the petals without (when their heads are drooping) more or less dark purple is reflected, like the purple of the arteries seen on a nude body. They appear not to flower only when upright. Gray says they are upright in fruit. They soon become black-specked, even before flowering.  August 10, 1858

August 13.  Hypopytis abundantly out (how long ?), apparently a good while, in that long wood-path on the left side, under the oak wood, before you begin to rise, going from the river end. Very little indeed is yet erect, and that which is not is apparently as forward as the rest. Not generally quite so high as the Monotropa uniflora which grows with it. I see still in their midst the dry upright brown spikes of last year’s seed-vessels. August 13, 1858

August 14.  Hypopitys, just beyond the last large (two-stemmed) chestnut at Saw Mill Brook, about done. Apparently a fungus like plant. It erects itself in seed. August 14, 1856.

August 23.  See an abundance of pine-sap on the right of Pine-sap Path.  August 23, 1858

August 27.  Tobacco-pipe still.  August 27, 1856

August 31. The monotropa is still pushing up. August 31, 1858 

September 1. P. M. — To Saw Mill Brook and Flint's Pond . . . See, I think, my first tobacco-pipe this afternoon, now that they are about done, and have seen no pine- sap this year, abundant as both the above were last year. Like fungi, these plants are apparently scarce in a dry year, so that you might at first think them rare plants. This is a phenomenon of drought. September 1, 1859

September 9. C. brings me a small red hypopitys. It has a faint sweet, earthy, perhaps checkerberry, scent, like that sweet mildewy fragrance of the earth in spring. September 9, 1857

September 21. Came through that thick white pine wood on the east of the spruce swamp. This is a very dense white pine grove . . . Under this dense shade, the red-carpeted ground is almost bare of vegetation and is dark at noon. There grow . . .on the low west side and also the east side, an abundance of tobacco-pipe, which has begun to turn black at the tip of the petals and leaves.  September 21, 1857

September 23. I see yellow pine-sap, in the woods just east of where the beeches used to stand, just done, but the red variety is very common and quite fresh generally there. September 23, 1857

September 23. Red pine-sap by north side of Yew Path some ten rods east of yew, not long done. The root of the freshest has a decided checkerberry scent, and for a long time — a week after — in my chamber, the bruised plant has a very pleasant earthy sweetness. September 23, 1860

October 6.  Going through Ebby Hubbard's woods . . . I see a great quantity of hypopitys, now all sere, along the path in the woods beyond. Call it Pine-Sap Path. It seems to have been a favorable season for it. It was evidently withered earlier than the tobacco-pipe, which is still pretty white! October 6, 1857

October 14. On the top of Ball’s Hill, nearly half-way its length, the red pine-sap, quite fresh, apparently not long in bloom, the flower recurved. As last year, I suspect that this variety is later than the yellowish one, of which I have seen none for a long time. The last, in E. Hubbard’s wood, is all brown and withered. This is a clear and distinct deep-red from the ground upward, all but the edges and tips of the petals, and is very handsome amid the withered lower leaves, as it were the latest flower of the year. The roots have not only a sweet earthy, but decidedly checkerberry, scent. At length this fungus-like plant bursts red-ripe, stem and all, from the ground. Its deep redness reminds me of the deeper colors of the western sky after the sun has set, — a sort of afterglow in the flowery year. I suspect that it is eminently an autumnal flower.  October 14, 1858

November 25. Methinks there has been more pine-sap than usual the past summer. I never saw a quarter part so much. It stands there withered in dense brown masses, six or eight inches high, partly covered with dead leaves. The tobacco-pipes are a darker brown. November 25, 1857

July 30, 2023

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Pine-sap and Tobacco-pipe

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 ©  2009-2023

Notes.  

We’ve been seeing numerous clusters of both ghost plant (Monotropa uniflora) and yellow pine-sap (Hypopitys monotropa). These plants, which are often mistaken for fungi, lack chlorophyll and don’t rely on photosynthesis. Instead, both are mycotrophs, meaning that they parasitize mycorrhizal fungi, and in this way, indirectly, pull energy from the roots of the trees. Although they’re similar looking, if you inspect their flowers closely, you’ll see that ghost plant has singular flowers, whereas pine-sap produces cascades of flowers. Pine-sap also has fuzz on its stems, and ghost plant does not. (Most of the time ghost plant is also much more pure white than pine-sap…but that isn’t a reliable distinction.) ~northernwoodlandsmagazine #ThisWeekintheWoods July 27. 2023

The red, yellow (and other “species” of pine sap) are often lumped together as Monotropa hypopitys, described generally as a saprophytic, red, pink, lavender, or yellow plant with several vase-like, nodding flowers on a downy, scaly stem; stem and flowers colored alike, with  autumn-flowering plants being red color, and early-flowering plants yellow.  Like Indian-pipe, pine-saps are mycotrophs, receiving nutrients via fungal mycelia rather than through photosynthesis. ~ GoBotany, Wildflower.org

"Pine drops" (Pterospora andromedea).See First Sighting Of 'Pine-Drops' Plant In Massachusetts In Berkshires; MassWildlife; U.S. Forest Service.

A Book of the Seasons: The Season of Sunny Water

 

The year is but a succession of days, 

and I see that I could assign some office to each day

which, summed up, would be the history of the year.

Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852

July 18. A hot midsummer day with a sultry mistiness in the air and shadows on land and water beginning to have a peculiar distinctness and solidity. I do not know why the water should be so remarkably clear and the sun shine through to the bottom of the river, making it so plain. Methinks the air is not clearer nor the sun brighter, yet the bottom is unusually distinct and obvious in the sun. There seems to be no concealment for the fishes. On all sides, as I float along, the recesses of the water and the bottom are unusually revealed, and I see the fishes and weeds and shells. I look down into the sunny water. July 18, 1854

July 27. The water has begun to be clear and sunny, revealing the fishes and countless minnows of all sizes and colors, this year's brood. July 27, 1860

July 28. The season has now arrived when I begin to see further into the water, -- see the bottom, the weeds, and fishes more than before. I can see the bottom when it is five and a half feet deep even, see the fishes scuttling in and out amid the weeds.  July 28, 1859

July 30. This is a perfect dog-day. The atmosphere thick, mildewy, cloudy. The water is suddenly clear, as if clarified by the white of an egg or lime. I think it must be because the light is reflected downward from the overarching dog-day sky. It assists me very much as I go looking for the ceratophyllum, potamogetons, etc. All the secrets of the river bottom are revealed. I look down into sunny depths which before were dark. The wonderful clearness of the water, enabling you to explore the river bottom and many of its secrets now, exactly as if the water had been clarified. This is our compensation for a heaven concealed. The air is close and still. July 30, 1856

July 30. This dog-day weather I can see the bottom where five and a half feet deep. At five feet it is strewn clear across with sium, heart-leaf, Ranunculus Purshii, etc. It is quite green and verdurous, especially with the first. I see the fishes moving leisurely about amid the weeds, their affairs revealed, especially perch, — some large ones prowling there; and pickerel, large and small, lie imperturbable. I see more moss (?) covered rocks on the bottom and some rising quite near the surface, — three or four between my boat's place and thirty rods above, — and a good many three feet over on the bottom, revealed in the sunny water, and little suspected before. July 30, 1859

August 8. This is a day of sunny water . . . I look down a rod and see distinctly the fishes and the bottom. August 8, 1854

August 8. The river, now that it is so clear and sunny, is better than any aquarium. August 8, 1859

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Season of Sunny Water

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 ©  2009-2023

Many little toads.

(mary holland, July 17, 2013)

July 25. 

Many little toads about.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 25, 1855

See July 25, 1854 ("See in woods a toad, dead-leaf color with black spots.") See also  July 12, 1852 ("I go to walk at twilight, — at the same time that toads go to their walks, and are seen hopping about the sidewalks or the pump"); July 17, 1853 ("Young toads not half an inch long at Walden shore."); July 17, 1856 (“I see many young toads hopping about on that bared ground amid the thin weeds, not more than five eighths to three quarters of an inch long.”)  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Midsummer Toads;  Northland Nature: Tiny toad time in late July;  WHAT ARE THESE TINY TOADS? ("The tadpoles of many species of the genus Bufo (what most people consider to be the “true toads”) metamorphose at a very small size, often all at once, and then disperse. If you live near a pond or lake or stream where the tadpoles are common, you might all of a sudden see dozens or even hundreds of these tiny toadlets for a few days, and after that, see them only occasionally.); toadlets dispersing (July 17, 2013)

A Book of the Seasons: July 12 (moonlight, clouds, swallows, bullfrogs and toads)

The year is but a succession of days,

and I see that I could assign some office to each day

which, summed up, would be the history of the year.

Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852

July 12

Long after starlight

high-pillared clouds of the day

reflect a downy light.

July 12, 1852

July 12, 2013

The moon is full, and I walk alone, July 12, 1851

The moonlight is more perfect than last night; hardly a cloud in the sky, — only a few fleecy ones. There is more serenity and more light. July 12, 1851

I observed this morning a row of several dozen swallows perched on the telegraph-wire by the bridge. July 12, 1852

I hear the toads still at night, together with bullfrogs, but not so universally nor loud as formerly. I go to walk at twilight, — at the same time that toads go to their walks, and are seen hopping about the sidewalks or the pump. July 12, 1852

Now, a quarter after nine, as I walk along the river-bank, long after starlight, and perhaps an hour or more after sunset, I see some of those high-pillared clouds of the day, in the southwest, still reflecting a downy light from the regions of day, they are so high. It is a pleasing reminiscence of the day in the midst of the deepening shadows of the night.July 12, 1852

The green-flowered lanceolate-leafed orchis at Azalea Brook will soon flower. July 12, 1853

Many young barn swallows sit in flocks on the bared dead willows over the water and let me float within four or five feet. Birds do not distinguish a man sitting in a boat. July 12, 1854

The upland plover begins with a quivering note somewhat like a tree-toad and ends with a long, clear, somewhat plaintive or melodious hawk-like scream. I never heard this very near to me, and when I asked the inhabitants about it they did not know what I meant.* It hovers on quivering wing, and alights by a steep dive. July 12, 1855

Red lilies in prime, single upright fiery flowers, their throats how splendidly and variously spotted, hardly two of quite the same hue and not two spotted alike, —leopard-spotted, — averaging a foot or more in height, amid the huckleberry and lambkill, etc., in the moist, meadowy pasture.  July 12, 1856

The cows stand up to their bellies in the river, lashing their sides with their tails from time to time.  July 12, 1857

It having cleared up, we shouldered our packs and commenced our descent.  July 12, 1858 [Mt. Washington]

In the evening, the moon being about full, I paddle up the river to see the moonlight and hear the bullfrogs. The toads and the pebbly dont dont are most common. July 12, 1859. 

I see at 9.30 p. m. a little brood of four or five barn swallows, which have quite recently left the nest, perched close together for the night on a dead willow twig in the shade of the tree, about four feet above the water. Their tails not yet much grown. July 12, 1859

Hear a nuthatch in the street. So they breed here. July 12, 1860

*****

See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau:

 Midsummer Toads

July 12, 2012

If you make the least correct 

observation of nature this year,

 you will have occasion to repeat it

 with illustrations the next, 

and the season and life itself is prolonged.

  April 7, 1853   

 

July 11 <<<<< July 12 >>>>> July 13

 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,   July 12

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 ©  2009-2023

https://tinyurl.com/HDT12JULY 

A Book of the Seasons: July 5 (eternal summer, cows in pasture, fruits as well as flowers, a good place to walk by moonlight)

 

The year is but a succession of days,

and I see that I could assign some office to each day

which, summed up, would be the history of the year.

Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852

July 5

July 5, 2016

I came here to live.

 Always there was the sound of 

the morning cricket. 

July 5, 1845 

The sun getting low

cool wind blows up the valley

      and we sit a while. 

July 5, 1851

We watch as cows pass

before our line of vision

to look between them.

July 5, 1853

Here is a small road 

along the edge of the wood

to walk by moonlight. 

July 5, 1851

July 5, 2015

 Saturday. Walden. - Yesterday I came here to live . . . Always there was the sound of the morning cricket. July 5, 1845 

Another very hot night, and scarcely any dew this morning.   July 5, 1854

There is a handsome wood-path on the east side of White Pond. The shadows of the pine stems and branches fall across the path, which is perfectly red with pine-needles. July 5, 1851

The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind. To whomsoever this fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery, there are no flowers in nature. July 5, 1852

The deepest part of the river is generally rather toward one side, especially where the stream is energetic. On a curve it is generally deepest on the inside bank, and the bank most upright. July 5, 1859 

We are favored in having two rivers, flowing into one, whose banks afford different kinds of scenery, the streams being of different characters; one a dark, muddy, dead stream, full of animal and vegetable life, with broad meadows and black dwarf willows and weeds, the other comparatively pebbly and swift, with more abrupt banks and narrower meadows.  To the latter I go to see the ripple, and the varied bottom with its stones and sands and shadows; to the former for the influence of its dark water resting on invisible mud, and for its reflections. July 5 1852

For some days I have seen great numbers of blackish spiny caterpillars stripping the black willows, some full-grown on June 30th and some now not more than three quarters of an inch long. When looking at a blackbird's nest I pricked my hand smartly on them several times; in fact the nest was pretty well protected by this chevaux-de-frise. Are they the caterpillars of the Vanessa Antiopa? Yes; according to Harris's description, they are. July 5, 1857

There has been, amid the chips where a wood-pile stood, in our yard, a bumblebee's nest for ten days or more. Near it there was what I should have called a mouse's nest of withered grass, but this was mainly of different material and perhaps was made by the bee. It was a little heap two inches high, six long, and four wide, made of old withered grass and small bits of rags, brown paper, cotton-wool, strings, lint, and whole feathers, with a small half-closed hole at one end, at which the [bee] buzzed and showed himself if you touched the nest. I saw the cat putting out her paw there and starting back, and to-day I find the remains, apparently, of the bee dead at the entrance. On opening, I find nothing in the nest.  July 5, 1857

Some fields are quite yellow with johnswort now, — a pleasing motley hue, which looks autumnal. July 5, 1852

Pink-colored yarrow. July 5, 1856

How fitting to have every day in a vase of water on your table the wild-flowers of the season which are just blossoming! Can any house [be] said to be furnished without them ? July 5, 1852

It is growing warm again, but the warmth is different from that we have had.

• We lie in the shade of locust trees. 
• Haymakers go by in a hay-rigging. 
• I am reminded of berrying. 
• I scent the sweet-fern and the dead or dry pine leaves. . 

July 5, 185/

The warmth is something more normal and steady, ripening fruits. July 5, 1852

It begins to be such weather as when people go a-huckle-berrying. July 5, 1852

Raspberries, some days. July 5, 1853

Plucked some large luscious purple pyrus berries. july 5, 1856

Nature offers fruits now as well as flowers. We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity. July 5, 1852

Some birds are poets and sing all summer. They are the true singers. Any man can write verses during the love season. I am reminded of this while we rest in the shade on the Major Heywood road and listen to a wood thrush, now just before sunset. We are most interested in those birds who sing for the love of the music and not of their mates; who meditate their strains, and amuse themselves with singing; the birds, the strains, of deeper sentiment; not bobolinks, that lose their plumage, their bright colors, and their song so early. The robin, the red-eye, the veery, the wood thrush, etc., etc.  The wood thrush's is no opera music; it is not so much the composition as the strain, the tone, — cool bars of melody from the atmosphere of everlasting morning or evening. It is the quality of the song, not the sequence. In the peawai's note there is some sultriness, but in the thrush's, though heard at noon, there is the liquid coolness of things that are just drawn from the bottom of springs. The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. Here is a bird in whose strain the story is told, though Nature waited for the science of aesthetics to discover it to man. Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him. Most other birds sing from the level of my ordinary cheerful hours — a carol; but this bird never fails to speak to me out of an ether purer than that I breathe, of immortal beauty and vigor. He deepens the significance of all things seen in the light of his strain. He sings to make men take higher and truer views of things. He sings to amend their institutions ; to relieve the slave on the plantation and the prisoner in his dungeon, the slave in the house of luxury and the prisoner of his own low thoughts.  July 5, 1852

 The robin, the red-eye, the veery, the wood thrush, etc., etc. July 5, 1852

 A kingbird’s nest in fork of a button—bush five feet high on shore (not saddled on); three young just hatched and one egg.  July 5, 1856 

  A phoebe's nest with four eggs half hatched, at stone bridge. July 5, 1857

 Cherry-birds alight on a neighboring tree.July 5, 1852

One hundred and nine swallows on telegraph-wire at bridge within eight rods, and others flying about.  July 5, 1854

That new ravine at Clamshell is so enlarged that bank swallows already use its sides, and I feel some young there. July 5, 1857

Young partridges (with the old bird), as big as robins, make haste into the woods from off the railroad.  July 5, 1856

Partridges big as quails July 5, 1857 

How many virtues have cattle in the fields! They do not make a noise at your approach, like dogs; they rarely low, but are quiet as nature, — merely look up at you July 5, 1852 

Such a habit have cows in a pasture of moving forward while feeding that, in surveying on the Great Fields to-day, I was interrupted by a herd of a dozen cows, which successively passed before my line of vision, feeding forward, and I had to watch my opportunity to look between them. Sometimes, however, they were of use, when they passed behind a birch stake and made a favorable background against which to see it. July 5, 1853

I push up Well Meadow Brook a few rods, through the weeds. I see by the commotion that great numbers of fishes fled before me and concealed themselves amid the weeds or in the mud. The mud is all stirred up by them. Some ran partly ashore. Higher up, when I leave the boat and walk up the brook on the quaking shore, I find a bay and pool connected with the brook all alive with them, and observe two or three caught partly high and dry by their heedless haste, in a shallow and very weedy place. These are young pickerel two or three inches long. I suspect that all, or the greater part, are pickerel, and that they commonly breed in such still weedy basins in deep muddy meadows. July 5, 1857

Many pickerel dart away from amidst the pads, and in one place I see one or two great snap-turtles. July 5, 1856

 I hear my hooting owl now just before sunset. You can fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if Nature meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her quire the dying moans of a human being, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness. It reminds of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. One answers from far woods in a strain made really sweet by distance. Some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley. I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it. Yet for the most part it is a sweet and melodious strain to me. July 5, 1852

The large evening-primrose below the foot of our garden. . . was not open when I went to bathe, but freshly out in the cool of the evening at sundown, as if enjoying the serenity of the hour. July 5, 1856

I notice of late the Osmunda regalis fully grown, fresh and handsome. July 5, 1860

As we come over Hubbard's Bridge between 5 and 6 P.M., the sun getting low, a cool wind blowing up the valley, we sit a while.  July 5, 1851

This retired bridge is a favorite spot with me. I have witnessed many a fair sunset from it. July 5, 1851

The sun has set. . . Some fine clouds, which have just escaped being condensed in dew, hang on the skirts of day and make the attraction in our western sky . . .  soon to be gilded by his parting rays. They are remarkably finely divided clouds, a very fine mackerel sky, or, rather, as if one had sprinkled that part of the sky with a brush, the outline of the whole being that of several large sprigs of fan coral. C, as usual, calls it a Mediterranean sky. They grow darker and darker, and now are reddened, while dark-blue bars of clouds of wholly different character lie along the northwest horizon.  July 5, 1852 

 Here is a small road running north and south along the edge of the wood, which would be a good place to walk by moonlight.  July 5, 1851 

July 5, 2017

See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau:

The Eastern Phoebe

 July Moonlight

 The Buff-edged Butterfly

the Partridge

July 5,  2018

July 5, 2020

June 11, 1851 ("The woodland paths are never seen to such advantage as in a moonlight night, opening before me almost against expectation as I walk, as if it were not a path, but an open, winding passage through the bushes, which my feet find")

June 15, 1858 ("The Osmunda regalis, growing in very handsome hollow circles, or sometimes only crescents or arcs of circles, is now generally a peculiarly tender green.")

June 20, 1856 ("Five young phoebes in a nest . . .just ready to fly.")

June 25, 1855 ("A phoebe’s nest, with two birds ready to fly.")

June 29, 1857 ("At Lee's Cliff, a phoebe has built her nest, and it now has five eggs in it, nearly fresh") 

July 1, 1852 ("The path by the wood-side is red with the effete staminiferous flowers of the white pine")

July 2, 1851("Some of the raspberries are ripe, the most innocent and simple of fruits”)

July 6, 1857 (“Rubus triflorus well ripe.”)

July 9, 1859 ("See young kingbirds which have lately flown perched in a family on the willows, — the airy bird, lively, twittering");

July 29, 1858 ("I see nowadays . . . young swallows on the telegraph wire.")

August 27, 1859 ("I often see yarrow with a delicate pink tint, very distinct from the common pure-white ones.") 

July 5, 2020

If you make the least correct 

observation of nature this year,

 you will have occasion to repeat it

 with illustrations the next, 

and the season and life itself is prolonged.

  April 7, 1853  

July 4 <<<<< July 5  >>>>> July 6

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, July 5

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 ©  2009-2023

https://tinyurl.com/HDT05JULY 

To see the lilies open

July 4.  Sunday.

July 4, 2022

3 A. M. - To Conantum, to see the lilies open.

I hear an occasional crowing of cocks in distant barns, as has been their habit for how many thousand years. It was so when I was young; and it will be so when I am old.

I hear the croak of a tree-toad as I am crossing the yard.

I am surprised to find the dawn so far advanced.  There is a yellowish segment of light in the east, paling a star and adding sensibly to the light of the waning and now declining moon.

There is very little dew on the uplands.

I hear a little twittering and some clear singing from the seringo and the song sparrow as I go along the back road, and now and then the note of a bullfrog from the river.

The light in the east has acquired a reddish tinge near the horizon.  Small wisps of cloud are already fuscous and dark, seen against the light, as in the west at evening.

It being Sunday morning, I hear no early stirring farmer driving over a bridge.  The crickets are not remarkably loud at this season. The sound of a whip-poor-will is wafted from the woods.  Now, on the Corner road, the hedges are alive with twittering sparrows, a bluebird or two, etc. 

The daylight now balances the moonlight.

How short the nights! The last traces of day have not disappeared much before 10 o'clock, or perchance 9.30, and before 3 A. M. you see them again in the east, probably 2.30, leaving about five hours of solid night, the sun so soon coming round again.

The robins sing, but not so loud and long as in the spring. I have not been awakened by them latterly in the mornings. Is it my fault? 

Ah! those mornings when you are awakened in the dawn by the singing, the matins, of the birds!

 

I hear the dumping sound of frogs now on the causeway.

Some small clouds in the east are reddish fuscous. There is no fog on the river nor in the meadows.

The kingbird twitters (?) on the black willows.

Methinks I saw the not yet extinguished lights of one or two fireflies in the darker ruts in the grass, in Conant's meadow.

The moon yields to the sun. She pales even in the presence of his dawn.

It is chiefly the spring birds that I hear at this hour, and in each dawn the spring is thus revived.

The notes of the sparrows and the bluebirds and the robin have a prominence now which they have not by day.

The light is more and more general, and some low bars begin to look bluish as well as reddish. (Else-where the sky wholly clear of clouds.) The dawn is at this stage far lighter than the brightest moonlight. I write by it. Yet the sun will not rise for some time.

Those bars are reddening more purplish, or lilac rather, light in the eastern sky. (And now, descending to the Cliff by the riverside, I cannot see the low horizon and its phenomena.)

I love to go through these old apple orchards so irregularly set out. Sometimes two trees standing close together. The rows of grafted fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them like these.

A bittern leaves the shore at my approach. I suppose it is he whose excrement has whitened the rocks, as if a mason had spilled his whitewash.

A nighthawk squeaks and booms, before sunrise.

The insects shaped like shad-flies (some which I see are larger and yellowish) begin to leave their cases (and selves?) on the stems of the grasses and the rushes in the water. I find them so weak they can hardly hold on.

I hear the black-bird's conqueree, and the kingfisher darts away with his alarum and outstretched neck.

Every lily is shut.

Sunrise. I see it gilding the top of the hill behind me, but the sun itself is concealed by the hills and woods on the east shore.

A very slight fog begins to rise now in one place on the river.

There is something serenely glorious and memorable to me in the sight of the first cool sunlight now gilding the eastern extremity of the bushy island in Fair Haven, that wild lake.

The subdued light and the repose remind me of Hades. In such sunlight there is no fever. It is such an innocent pale yellow as the spring flowers. It is the pollen of the sun, fertilizing plants. The color of the earliest spring flowers is as cool and innocent as the first rays of the sun in the morning falling on woods and hills.

The fog not only rises upward (about two feet), but at once there is a motion from the sun over the surface.

What means this endless motion of water-bugs collected in little groups on the surface and ceaselessly circling about their centre, as if they were a family hatched from the eggs on the under side of a pad? Is not this motion intended partly to balk the fishes? Methinks they did not begin to move till sunrise. Where were they? 

And now I see an army of skaters advancing in loose array, of chasseurs or scouts, as Indian allies are drawn in old books.

Now the rays of the sun have reached my seat, a few feet above the water; flies begin to buzz, mosquitoes to be less troublesome.

A hummingbird hums by over the pads up the river, as if looking, like myself, to see if lilies have blossomed.

The birds begin to sing generally, and, if not loudest, at least most noticeably on account of the quietness of the hour, just before -- a few minutes before -- sunrise. They do not sing so incessantly and earnestly, as a regular thing, half an hour later.

Carefully looking both up and down the river, I could perceive that the lilies began to open about fifteen minutes after the sun from over the opposite bank fell on them, which was perhaps three quarters of an hour after sunrise (which is about 4.30), and one was fully expanded about twenty minutes later.  When I returned over the bridge about 6.15, there were perhaps a dozen open ones in sight. 

It was very difficult to find one not injured by insects.  Even the buds which were just about to expand were frequently bored quite through, and the water had rotted them. You must be on hand early to anticipate insects.

One thimble-berry which will be quite ripe by to-morrow.

Indigo almost expanded.

I perceive the meadow fragrance on the causeway.

Bobolinks still.

I bring home a dozen perfect lily buds, — all I can find within many rods, — which have never yet opened; I prepare a large pan of water; I cut their stems quite short; I turn back their calyx-leaves with my fingers, so that they may float upright; I touch the points of their petals, and breathe or blow on them, and toss them in. They spring open rapidly, or gradually expand in the course of an hour, all but one or two. 

At 12.30 P. M., I perceive that the lilies in the river have begun to shut up. The water has gone down so much that I can stand on the shore and pluck as many as I want, and they are the fairest ones, concealed by the pickerel-weed, often the whole plant high and dry. I go again to the river at 2.30 P. M., and every lily is shut.

I will here tell the history of my rosaceous lilies plucked the 1st of July.

• They were buds at the bottom of a pitcher of water all the 2d, having been kept in my hat part of the day before.
• On the morning of the 3d I assisted their opening, and put them in water, as I have described; but they did not shut up at noon, like those in the river, but at dark, their petals, at least, quite tight and close.
• They all opened again in the course of the forenoon of the 4th, but had not shut up at 10 o'clock P. M., though I found them shut in the morning of the 5th.

May it be that they can bear only a certain amount of light, and these, being in the shade, remained open longer? ( I think not, for they shut up in the river that quite cloudy day, July 1st.) Or is their vitality too little to permit [them] to perform their regu- lar functions? 

Can that meadow fragrance come from the purple summits of the eupatorium? 

I looked down on the river behind Dodd's at 2.30 P. M., a slate-colored stream with a scarcely perceptible current, with a male and female shore; the former, more abrupt, of button-bushes and willows, the other, flat, of grass and pickerel-weed alone. Beyond the former, the water being deep, extends a border or fringe of green and purplish pads lying perfectly flat on the surface, but on the latter side the pads extend a half a rood or a rod beyond the pickerel-weed, — shining pads reflecting the light, dotted with white or yellow lilies. This sort of ruff does the river wear, and so the land is graduated off to water.

A tender place in nature, an exposed vein, and nature making a feint to bridge it quite over with a paddy film, with red-winged black- birds liquidly warbling and whistling on the willows, and kingbirds on the elms and oaks; these pads, if there is any wind, rippling with the water and helping to smooth and allay it. It looks tender and exposed, as if it were naturally subterranean, and now, with these shields of pads, held scale-like by long threads from the bottom, she makes a feint to bridge it.

So floats the Musketaquid over its segment of the sphere.

Methinks there is not even a lily, white or yellow, in Walden.

I see perfectly formed pouts by the shore of the river, one inch long.

The great spatterdock lily is a rich yellow at a little distance, and, seen lying on its great pads, it is an indispensable evidence of the fertility of the river.  The gratiola begins to yellow the mud by the riverside. The Lysimachia lanceolata var. hybrida is out, in the meadows. 

The Rosa nitida (?) appears to be now out of bloom.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 4, 1852

the light of the waning and now declining moon. See June 30, 1852 ('Moon nearly full; rose a little before sunset.") See also  A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, July Moonlight

To see the lilies open. See June 21, 1853 ("4.30 A.M.––Up river for lilies . . .The few lilies begin to open about 5."); July 1, 1852 ("...to see the white lilies in blossom...to breathe the atmosphere of lilies, and get the full impression which lilies are fitted to make"); July 11, 1852 ("The first lily I noticed opened about half an hour after sunrise, or at 5 o'clock."); July 17, 1854 ("I go to observe the lilies . . .I think that I could tell when it was 12 o'clock within half an hour by the lilies.")

They shut up in the river that quite cloudy day, July 1st. See July 1, 1852 ("The freshly opened lilies are a pearly white, and though the water amid the pads is quite unrippled, the passing air gives a slight oscillating, boat-like motion to and fro to the flowers, like boats held fast by their cables.After eating our luncheon at Rice's landing, I can not find one open anywhere for the rest of the day.")

The Rosa nitida (?) appears to be now out of bloom. See June 16, 1854 ("The Rosa nitida grows along the edge of the ditches, the half-open flowers showing the deepest rosy tints, so glowing that they make an evening or twilight of the surrounding afternoon, seeming to stand in the shade or twilight. Already the bright petals of yesterday's flowers are thickly strewn along on the black mud at the bottom of the ditch."); July 8, 1854 ("The Rosa nitida I think has [been] some time done") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Rose