November 23.
Monday. P. M. — To Gowing's Swamp.
Garfield, who was working in what was Moore's Swamp, tells me that he sometimes digs up frogs in the winter, when ditching in springy places, one at a time. He is very much troubled by the short-tailed meadow mouse in that meadow. They live under the stumps, and gnaw his potatoes in the fall. He thought that his little dog, a terrier, had killed a bushel of them the past year.
At the back of Gowing's hillside, just west of his swamp, in the midst of shrub oaks and other dry up land trees, the ground slopes regularly on all sides to a deep round hollow, perhaps fifteen feet lower than the lowest side and thirty feet in diameter at the bottom. The bottom is rather wet and covered with sphagnum, and many stiff and dead-looking button-bushes stand in it, while all around a dense high hedge of high blueberry curves over it. So sudden a change there will be in the vegetation with a change of soil. Many such a dimple with its peculiar vegetations have I seen in a dry wood-lot. The Vaccinium corymbosum and panicled andromeda in a dense hedge, in a circular or oval or other curved form, surrounding and slanting over it so as almost to conceal it; and in the same manner the blueberry, etc., will grow around and overhang the largest ponds.
Walked through Gowing's Swamp from west to east. You may say it is divided into three parts, – first, the thin woody; second, the coarse bushy or gray; and third, the fine bushy or brown.
First: The trees are larch, white birch, red maple, spruce, white pine, etc.
Second: The coarse bushy part, or blueberry thicket, consists of high blueberry, panicled andromeda, Amelanchier Canadensis var. oblongifolia, swamp-pink, choke-berry, Viburnum nudum, rhodora, (and probably prinos, holly, etc., etc., not distinguishable easily now), but chiefly the first two. Much of the blueberry being dead gives it a very gray as well as scraggy as pect. It is a very bad thicket to break through, yet there are commonly thinner places, or often opens, by which you may wind your way about the denser clumps. Small specimens of the trees are mingled with these and also some water andromeda and lamb-kill.
Third: There are the smooth brown and wetter spaces where the water andromeda chiefly prevails, together with purplish lamb-kill about the sides of them, and hairy huckleberry; but in the midst and wettest part the narrow revolute and glaucous (beneath) leaves of the Andromeda Polifolia and Kalmia glauca are seen, and in the sphagnum the Vaccinium Oxycoccus. In one of the latter portions occurs that open pool.
Sphagnum is found everywhere in the swamp.
First, there is the dark wooded part; second, the scraggy gray blueberry thicket; third, the rich brown water andromeda spaces.
The high blueberry delights singularly in these localities. You distinguish it by its gray spreading mass; its light-gray bark, rather roughened; its thickish shoots, often crimson; and its plump, roundish red buds. Think of its wreaths and canopies of cool blue fruit in August, thick as the stars in the Milky Way! The panicled andromeda is upright, light-gray, with a rather smoother bark, more slender twigs, and small, sharp red buds lying close to the twig. The blueberry is particularly hard to break through, it is so spreading and scraggy, but a hare can double swiftly enough beneath it. The ground of sphagnum is now thickly strewn with the leaves of these shrubs.
The water andromeda makes a still more uniformly dense thicket, which must be nearly impervious to some animals; but as man lifts his head high above it, finds but little difficulty in making his way through it, though it sometimes comes up to his middle, and if his eye scans its surface it makes an impression of smoothness and denseness, – its rich brown, whole some surface, even as grass or moss.
Ascending the high land on the south, I looked down over the large open space with its navel pool in the centre. This green stagnant pool, rayed with the tracks or trails of musquash and making but a feeble watery impression, reminded me of portions of the map of the moon.
This swamp appears not to have had any natural outlet, though an artificial one has been dug. The same is perhaps the case with the C. Miles Swamp. And is it so with Beck Stow's These three are the only places where I have found the Andromeda Polifolia. The Kalmia glauca in Gowing's, C. Miles's, and Holden's swamps. The latter has no outlet of any kind.
I am interested in those plants, like panicled andromeda, shrub oak, etc., for which no use that I know has been discovered. The panicled andromeda, instead of the date tree, might be my coat-of arms.
Fresh slender shoots of the Viburnum nudum make very good withes, I find.
Austin Bacon told me that the worst swamp he ever found was not in Vermont or up country where he had surveyed, but in Newton (?), where he surveyed for a road once. The water was about two feet deep, and you jumped from tussock to tussock; these generally tipped over with you into the water.
There is a strong and warm southwest wind, which brings the frost out of the ground, — more than I thought was in it, — making the surface wet.
Walking along the top of Gowing's hill wood-lot, I see from time to time large ant-hills amid the young oaks. Often their tops have been disturbed and flattened, by some creature apparently. Some may be deserted. The sedge-grass has sprung up long and thick about the sides of these mounds, though there may be none amid the oaks around. The working of the ants keeps clear a little space amid the bushes.
In the evening heavy rain and some thunder and lightning, and rain in the night.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 23, 1857
I looked down over the large open space with its navel pool in the centre. See
May 31, 1857 (“That central meadow and pool in Gowing's Swamp is its very navel,”);
August 23, 1854 ("There is in the middle an open pool, twenty or thirty feet in diameter,. . .an abrupt edge next the water, this on a dense bed of quaking sphagnum, in which I sink eighteen inches in water, upheld by its matted roots, where I fear to break through. On this the spatulate sundew abounds.”).
Water andromeda chiefly prevails, together with purplish lamb-kill about the sides of them, and hairy huckleberry; but in the midst and wettest part the narrow revolute and glaucous (beneath) leaves of the Andromeda Polifolia and Kalmia glauca are seen, and in the sphagnum the Vaccinium Oxycoccus. See
February 17, 1854 (“In these swamps, then, you have three kinds of andromeda. The main swamp is crowded with high blueberry, panicled andromeda, prinos, swamp-pink, etc., etc., and then in the middle or deepest part will be an open space not yet quite given up to water, where the
Andromeda calyculata and a few
A. Polifolia reign almost alone.”);
August 23, 1854 (“Next comes, half a dozen rods wide, a dense bed of A
ndromeda calyculata, — the
A. Polifolia mingled with it, — the rusty cotton- grass, cranberries, — the common and also
V. Oxycoccus, — pitcher-plants, sedges, and a few young spruce and larch here and there,”);
August 30, 1856 ("Consider how remote and novel that swamp. Beneath it is a quaking bed of sphagnum, and in it grow
Andromeda Polifolia, Kalmia glauca, menyanthes (or buck -bean),
Gaylussacia dumosa, Vaccinium Oxycoccus, — plants which scarcely a citizen of Concord ever sees.”) See also
Gowing's; Swamp historical survey and botanical inventory (2010) (Rare or unusual plants remaining today at Gowing’s Swamp include:
- Black spruce (Picea marianna)
- Bog rosemary (Andromeda polifolia)
- Bog or pale laurel (Kalmia polifolia)
- Purple pitcher-plant (Sarracenia purpurea)
- Round-leaved sundew (Drosera rotundifolia)
- Small-flowered cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccus)
- Tawny cotton sedge (Eriophorum virginicum)
- 53 lichen species, including 3 not found elsewhere in the local area (Cladoniaincrassata, Parmeliopsis subambigua, and Pseudevernia consocians)
- Mountain holly (Nemopanthus mucronatus))
Andromeda polifolia. See
July14, 1853 (“Saw something blue, or glaucous, in Beck Stow's Swamp to-day; approached and discovered the
Andromeda Polifolia, in the midst of the swamp at the north end, not long since out of bloom. This is another instance of a common experi ence. When I am shown from abroad, or hear of, or in any [way] become interested in, some plant or other thing, I am pretty sure to find it soon. Within a week R. W. E. showed me a slip of this in a botany, as a great rarity which George Bradford brought from Watertown. I had long been interested in it by Linnaeus's account. I now find it in abundance.”)
V. Oxycoccus. See
August 23, 1854 (“I find a new cranberry on the sphagnum amid the
A. calyculata, —
V. Oxycoccus . . .It has small, now purplish-dotted fruit, flat on the sphagnum, some turned scarlet partly, on terminal peduncles, with slender, thread-like stems and small leaves strongly revolute on the edges.”)
Kalmia glauca var. rosmarinifolia. See
January 9, 1855 (“Make a splendid discovery this afternoon. Walking through Holden’s white spruce swamp, I see peeping above the snow-crust some slender delicate evergreen shoots very much like the
Andromeda Polifolia, amid sphagnum, lambkill,
Andromeda calyculata, blueberry bushes, etc., though there is very little to be seen above the snow. It is, I have little doubt, the
Kalmia glauca var. rosmarinifolia.”)
