October 23
P. M. — To Ledum Swamp.
One tells me that he saw geese go over Wayland the 17th.
Large wild cherries are half fallen or more, the few remaining leaves yellowish. Choke-cherries are bare; how long?
Amelanchier bare.
Viburnum nudum half fallen or more; when wet and in shade, a light crimson.
Hardhack, in low ground, where it has not withered too soon, inclines to a very light scarlet.
Sweet-gale is not fallen, but a very dull yellowish and scarlet.
You see in woods many black (?) oak sprouts, forming low bushes or clumps of green and dark crimson. (C. says they are handsome, like a mahonia.)
The meadow-sweet is yellowish and yellow-scarlet.
In Ledum Swamp the white azalea is a dirty brown scarlet, half fallen, or more.
Panicled andromeda reddish-brown and half fallen.
Some young high blueberry, or sprouts, never are a deeper or brighter crimson-scarlet than now.
Wild holly fallen.
Even the sphagnum has turned brownish-red on the exposed surfaces, in the swamp, looking like the at length blushing pellicle of the ripe globe there.
The ledum is in the midst of its change, rather conspicuous, yellow and light-scarlet and falling. I detect but few Andromeda Polifolia and Kalmia glaucaleaves turned a light red or scarlet.
The spruce is changed and falling, but is brown and inconspicuous.
A man at work on the Ledum Pool, draining it, says that, when they had ditched about six feet deep, or to the bottom, near the edge of this swamp, they came to old flags, and he thought that the whole swamp was once a pond and the flags grew by the edge of it. Thought the mud was twenty feet deep near the pool, and that he had found three growths of spruce, one above another, there. He had dug up a hard-pan with iron in it (as he thought) under a part of this swamp, and in what he cast out sorrel came up and grew, very rankly indeed.
I notice some late rue turned a very clear light yellow.
I see some rose leaves (the early smooth) turned a handsome clear yellow, — and some (the R. Carolina) equally clear and handsome scarlet or dark red. This is the rule with it.
Elder is a dirty greenish yellow and apparently mostly fallen.
Beach plum is still green with some dull red leaves, but apparently hardly any fallen.
Butternuts are bare.
Mountain-ash of both kinds either withered or bare.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 23, 1858
Geese go over Wayland the 17th. See
October 24, 1858 ("A northeast storm, though not much rainfalls to-day, but a fine driving mizzle or “drisk.” This, as usual, brings the geese, and at 2.30 P. M. I see two flocks go over. . . .This weather warns of the approach of winter, and this wind speeds them on their way.")");
October 27, 1857 ("I hear that Sammy Hoar saw geese go over to-day. The fall (strictly speaking) is approaching an end in this probably annual northeast storm");
November 13, 1858 ("A large flock of geese go over just before night. ");
November 8 , 1857 ("About 10 A.M. a long flock of geese are going over from northeast to southwest");
November 13, 1855 ("Seventy or eighty geese, in three harrows successively smaller, flying southwest—pretty well west—over the house. A completely overcast, occasionally drizzling forenoon. ");
November 13, 1858 ("A large flock of geese go over just before night. ");
November 18, 1854 (" Sixty geese go over the Great Fields, in one waving line, broken from time to time by their crowding on each other and vainly endeavoring to form into a harrow, honking all the while."); November 20, 1853 ("Methinks the geese are wont to go south just before a storm, and, in the spring, to go north just after one, say at the end of a long April storm.");
November 30, 1857 ("The air is full of geese. I saw five flocks within an hour, about 10 A. M., containing from thirty to fifty each, and afterward two more flocks, making in all from two hundred and fifty to three hundred at least");
December 1, 1857 ("I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day.");
December 6, 1855 ("10 P. M. — Hear geese going over.")
The ledum is in the midst of its change, rather conspicuous. I detect but few Andromeda Polifolia and Kalmia glauca. See
February 4, 1858 ("Discover the
Ledum latifolium, quite abundant over a space about six rods in diameter just east of the small pond-hole, growing with the
Andromeda calyculata,
Polifolia, Kalmia glauca, etc.")
The spruce is changed and falling, but is brown and inconspicuous. See
February 12, 1858 ("About the ledum pond-hole there is an abundance of that abnormal growth of the spruce. . . , which have an impoverished look, altogether forming a broom-like mass, very much like a heath. ")
A man at work on the Ledum Pool, draining it. See
November 8, 1857 ("I have no doubt that a good farmer, who, of course, loves his work, takes exactly the same kind of pleasure in draining a swamp, seeing the water flow out in his newly cut ditch, that a child does in its mud dikes and water-wheels. Both alike love to play with the natural forces.")
