A farmer in his field.

September 23

P. M. — Round by Clematis Brook.

The forget-me-not still.

I observe the rounded tops of the dogwood bushes, scarlet in the distance, on the edge of the meadow (Hubbard's), more full and bright than any flower.

The maples are mostly darker, the very few boughs that are turned, and the tupelo, which is reddening.

The ash is just beginning to turn.

The scarlet dogwood is the striking bush to-day.

I find huckleberries on Conantum still sound and blackening the bushes.

How much longer a mile appears between two blue mountain peaks thirty or more miles off in the horizon than one would expect!

Some acorns and hickory nuts on the ground, but they have not begun to shell.

Is it the nut of the Carya amara, with raised seams, but not bitter, that I perceive?

I suppose that is the Carya tomentosa, or mockernut hickory, with large rounded nuts on Lee's land.

The bitternuts (?), rubbed together, smell like varnish.

The sarothra in bloom.

The wind from the north has turned the white lily pads wrong side up, so that they look red, and their stems are slanted up-stream.

Almost all the yellow ones have disappeared.

September 23, 2018

A blue-stemmed goldenrod, its stem and leaves red.

The woodbine high on trees in the shade a delicate pink.

I gathered some haws very good to eat to-day. I think they must be the senelles of the Canadians.

Hamamelis Virginiana out, before its leaves fall.

A woodchuck out.

The waxwork not opened.

The "feathery tails" of the clematis fruit conspicuous and interesting now.

Yellow lily out (again?) in the pond-holes.

Passing a corn-field the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm. Any of his acquaintances would. He was only a trifle more weather-[beaten] than when I saw him last. His back being toward me, I missed nothing, and I thought to myself if I were a crow I should not fear the balance of him, at any rate.

In northern latitudes, where other edible fruits are scarce, they make an account of haws and bunch-berries.

The barberry bushes in Clematis Hollow are very beautiful now, with their wreaths of red or scarlet fruit drooping over a rock.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 23, 1852

The scarlet dogwood is the striking bush to-day. See note to September 25, 1852 ("The scarlet of the dogwood is the most conspicuous and interesting of the autumnal colors at present.")

A blue-stemmed goldenrod, its stem and leaves red. See September 23, 1860 ("I see everywhere in the shady yew wood those pretty round-eyed fungus-spots on the upper leaves of the blue-stemmed goldenrod, contrasting with the few bright-yellow flowers above them, -- yellowish-white rings (with a slate-colored centre), surrounded by green and then dark."); See also November 10, 1858 ("In the path below the Cliff, I see some blue-stemmed goldenrod turned yellow as well as purple.") and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Blue-stemmed Goldenrod (solidago caesia)

How much longer a mile appears between two blue mountain peaks thirty or more miles off in the horizon. See March 31, 1853 ("It is affecting to see a distant mountain-top,. . . still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it.'); May 17, 1858 ("I doubt if in the landscape there can be anything finer than a distant mountain-range. They are a constant elevating influence."); August 14, 1854 (“I have come forth to this hill at sunset to see the forms of the mountains in the horizon.— to behold and commune with something grander than man. “); August 30, 1854 ("The clearness of the air makes it delicious to gaze in any direction. . . ., and I see with new pleasure to distant hillsides and farmhouses . . and to the mountains in the horizon."); October 20, 1852 ("This is an advantage of mountains in the horizon: they show you fair weather from the midst of foul."); October 22, 1857 ("But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it? "); November 4, 1857 ("But those grand and glorious mountains, how impossible to remember daily that they are there, and to live accordingly! They are meant to be a perpetual reminder to us, pointing out the way."): November 22, 1860 ("Simply to see to a distant horizon through a clear air, - the fine outline of a distant hill or a blue mountaintop through some new vista, - this is wealth enough for one afternoon.")  

The wind from the north has turned the white lily pads wrong side up, so that they look red. See June 29, 1852 ("The wind exposes the red undersides of the white lily pads. This is one of the aspects of the river now."); August 24,1854 ("The bright crimson-red under sides of the great white lily pads, turned up by the wind in broad fields on the sides of the stream, are a great ornament to the stream. It is not till August, methinks, that they are turned up conspicuously.”)

Carya amara, bitternut -- Carya tomentosa, mockernut hickory,( North American hickories include:

·        Carya glabra – pignut hickory

·       Carya laciniosa - shagbark hickory

·     Carya ovata – shagbark hickory

·      Carya texana  black hickory

·      Carya tomentosa  – mockernut hickory

·      Carya cordiformis (amara)  – bitternut hickory)

 

 

What is that small conyza-like aster,?

July 19. 

Clematis has been open a day or two. 

The alisma will open to-morrow or next day. 

This morning a fog and cool.

What is that small conyza-like aster, with flaccid linear leaves, in woods near Boiling Spring? 

Some woodbine, cultivated, apparently long since flowered. The same of some on Lee's Cliff, where it is early.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 19, 1853

Clematis has been open a day or two. See July 14, 1853 ('The Clematis  [by the Heywood Brook](near the water-plantain) will open in a day or two.")

This morning a fog and cool. See July 22, 1851 ("The season of morning fogs has arrived. . . .These are our fairest days, which are born in a fog."); July 22, 1854 ("Fogs almost every morning now."); July 25, 1852 ("the sun having risen, I see great wreaths of fog far northeast, revealing the course of the river.")

What is that small conyza-like aster, with flaccid linear leaves?. See July 18, 1854 ("Methinks the asters and goldenrods begin, like the early ripening leaves, with midsummer heats."); July 26, 1853 ("I mark again, about this time when the first asters open. . . This the afternoon of the year."); July 28, 1852 ("Goldenrod and asters have fairly begun; i. e. there are several kinds of each out. ") [Note; Conyza (horseweed, butterweed or fleabane) is a genus of flowering plants in the sunflower family.

Woodbine, long since flowered. See September 12, 1851 ("What we call woodbine is the Vitis hederacea, or common creeper, or American ivy.")

In Beck Stow’s Swamp to-day; approached and discovered the Andromeda Polifolia

July 14.

Heavy fog. 

I see a rose, now in its prime, by the river, in the water amid the willows and button-bushes, while others, lower on shore, are nearly out of bloom.

Is it not the R. Carolina?

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 experience. 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 Linnæus’s account. I now find it in abundance. 

Andromeda Polifolia

It is a neat and tender-looking plant, with the pearly new shoots now half a dozen inches long and the singular narrow revolute leaves. I suspect the flower does not add much to it.

There is an abundance of the buck-bean there also. 

Holly berries are beginning to be ripe. 

The Polygonum Hydropiper, by to-morrow. 

Spergula arvensis gone to seed and in flower. 

A very tall ragged orchis by the Heywood Brook, two feet high, almost like a white fringed one. Lower ones I have seen some time. 

The clematis there (near the water-plantain) will open in a day or two.  

Mallows gone to seed and in bloom.

Erigeron Canadensis, butter-weed. 

 H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 14, 1853

In Beck Stow’s Swamp to-day approached and discovered the Andromeda Polifolia. See February 17, 1854 ("In the open part of Gowing's Swamp I find the Andromeda Polifolia. Neither here nor in Beck Stow's does it grow very near the shore. . . . 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. These are pleasing gardens.”); May 24, 1854 ("Surprised to find the Andromeda Polifolia in bloom and apparently past its prime. . .A timid botanist would never pluck it."); November 15,1857 ("At C. Miles Swamp [Ledum Swamp] [f]ind plenty of Andromeda Polifolia ... where you can walk dry-shod in the spruce wood”); See also February 12, 1858 ("There is, apparently, more of the Andromeda Polifolia in [C.Miles] swamp than anywhere else in Concord."); November 23, 1857 ("This [Gowing's] 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."). See also  Vascular Flora of Concord, Massachusetts

This is another instance of a common experience. When I become interested in some plant or other thing, I am pretty sure to find it soon. See  May 31, 1853 ("The fact that a rare and beautiful flower which we never saw. . . may be found in our immediate neighborhood, is very suggestive."); 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.”); 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.”); August 30, 1856 ("I have come out this afternoon a-cranberrying, chiefly to gather some of the small cranberry, Vaccinium Oxycoccus . . . “I noticed also a few small peculiar-looking huckleberries hanging on bushes amid the sphagnum, and, tasting, perceived that they were hispid, a new kind to me. Gaylussacia dumosa var. hirtella . . .. Has a small black hairy or hispid berry, shining but insipid and inedible, with a tough, hairy skin left in the mouth.”);  September 2, 1856 ("It commonly chances that I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I am in a thrilled and expectant mood, perhaps wading in some remote swamp where I have just found something novel and feel more than usually remote from the town. Or some rare plant which for some reason has occupied a strangely prominent place in my thoughts for some time will present itself. My expectation ripens to discovery. I am prepared for strange things."); February 4, 1858 ("It is a remarkable fact that, in the case of the most interesting plants which I have discovered in this vicinity, I have anticipated finding them perhaps a year before the discovery.") November 4, 1858 ("We cannot see any thing until we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly see anything else. In my botanical rambles I find that first the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my thoughts, though it may at first seem very foreign to this locality, and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it and expecting it unconsciously, and at length I surely see it, and it is henceforth an actual neighbor of mine. This is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants which I could name.”); August 22, 1860 ("I never find a remarkable Indian relic but I have first divined its existence, and planned the discovery of it. Frequently I have told myself distinctly what it was to be before I found it.") See also  January 27, 1857 ("The most poetic and truest account of objects is generally by those who first observe them, or the discoverers of them, whether a sharper perception and curiosity in them led to the discovery or the greater novelty more inspired their report.")

Beck Stow's Swamp. See July 17, 1852 ("Beck Stow's Swamp! What an incredible spot to think of in town or city! When life looks sandy and barren, is reduced to its lowest terms, we have no appetite, and it has no flavor, then let me visit such a swamp as this, deep and impenetrable, where the earth quakes for a rod around you at every step, with its open water where the swallows skim and twitter, its meadow and cotton-grass, its dense patches of dwarf andromeda, now brownish-green, with clumps of blue berry bushes, its spruces and its verdurous border of woods imbowering it on every side. ") A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  at Beck Stow's Swamp. 

There is an abundance of the buck-bean there also See August 30, 1856 ("Consider how remote and novel that [Gowings] 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  May 29, 1856 (" Where you find a rare flower, expect to find more rare ones”)

A very tall ragged orchis by the Heywood Brook, two feet high, almost like a white fringed one. See July 21, 1851 ("The ragged orchis on Conantum."); July 13, 1856 ("Orchis lacera, apparently several days, lower part of spike, willow-row, Hubbard side, opposite Wheildon's land.")

The only hazel I saw in Maine

July 27

Monday. 

There were some yellow lilies (Nuphar), Scutellaria galericulata, clematis (abundant), sweet-gale, "great smilacina" (did I mean S. racemosa?), and beaked hazel, the only hazel I saw in Maine.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 27, 1857

See The Maine Woods ("Monday, July 27. Having rapidly loaded the canoe, which the Indian always carefully attended to, that it might be well trimmed, and each having taken a look, as usual, to see that nothing was left, we set out again descending the Caucomgomoc, and turning northeasterly up the Umbazookskus. . . . Having paddled several miles up the Umbazookskus, it suddenly contracted to a mere brook, narrow and swift, the larches and other trees approaching the bank and leaving no open meadow, and we landed to get a black spruce pole for pushing against the stream. . . .Having poled up the narrowest part some three or four miles, the next opening in the sky was over Umbazookskus Lake, which we suddenly entered about eleven o'clock in the forenoon. . . .We crossed the southeast end of the lake to the carry into Mud Pond. Umbazookskus Lake is the head of the Penobscot in this direction, and Mud Pond is the nearest head of the Allegash, one of the chief sources of the St. John. . . . Mud Pond is about halfway from Umbazookskus to Chamberlain Lake, into which it empties, and to which we were bound. . . . After a long while my companion came back, and the Indian with him. We had taken the wrong road, and the Indian had lost us. . . .We then entered another swamp, at a necessarily slow pace, where the walking was worse than ever, not only on account of the water, but the fallen timber, which often obliterated the indistinct trail entirely. . . .and, going back for his bag, my companion once lost his way and came back without it.. . . As I sat waiting for him, it would naturally seem an unaccountable time that he was gone. Therefore, as I could see through the woods that the sun was getting low, and it was uncertain how far the lake might be, even if we were on the right course, and in what part of the world we should find ourselves at night fall, I proposed that I should push through with what speed I could, leaving boughs to mark my path, and find the lake and the Indian, if possible, before night, and send the latter back to carry my companion's bag. . . . If he had not come back to meet us, we probably should not have found him that night, . . .We had come out on a point extending into . . .Chamberlain Lake, west of the outlet of Mud Pond, where there was a broad, gravelly, and rocky shore, encumbered with bleached logs and trees. . . . 

In the middle of the night, as indeed each time that we lay on the shore of a lake, we heard the voice of the loon, loud and distinct, from far over the lake. It is a very wild sound, quite in keeping with the place and the circumstances of the traveler, and very unlike the voice of a bird. I could lie awake for hours listening to it, it is so thrilling. When camping in such a wilderness as this, you are prepared to hear sounds from some of its inhabitants which will give voice to its wildness. . . This of the loon I do not mean its laugh , but its looning , is a long - drawn call , as it were , sometimes singularly human to my ear , hoo - hoo - ooooo , like the hallooing of a man on a very high key , having thrown his voice into his head . I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils , half awake at ten at night , suggesting my affinity to the loon ; as if its language were but a dialect of my own , after all . Formerly , when lying awake at midnight in those woods , I had listened to hear some words or sylla- bles of their language , but it chanced that I listened in vain until I heard the cry of the loon . I have heard it occasionally on the ponds of my native town , but there its wildness is not enhanced by the surrounding scenery.

 I was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low- flying bird, probably a loon, flapping by close over my head, along the shore. So, turning the other side of my half-clad body to the fire, I sought slumber again.")

Yellow lilies. See July 27, 1856 ("The yellow lilies stand up seven or eight inches above the water")

In the middle of the night . . .we heard the voice of the loon, loud and distinct, from far over the lake. See June twenty-four two thousand two ("across the dusky lake / the voice of a loon / penetrates lost time")

far over the lake

in the middle of the night

the voice of the loon

July 27, 1857 

(The Maine Woods)

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  July 27, 1857

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 ©  2009-2024

tinyurl.com/hdt-570727

Little flocks of chip-birds

September 16.

Sophia and mother returned from Wachusett. S. saw much bayberry in Princeton. 

September 16, 2016

P. M. —To Fringed Gentian Meadow over Assabet and to Dugan Desert. 

I see a wood tortoise in the woods. Why is it there now? 

There have been a few slight frosts in some places. The clematis is feathered. One Asclepias Cornuti begun to discount. I see many hardhacks in the lichen pasture by Tommy Wheeler’s which are leafing out again conspicuously. 

I see little flocks of chip-birds along the roadside and on the apple trees, showing their light under sides when they rise. 

I find the mud turtle’s eggs at the Desert all hatched, one still left in the nest. As the eggs were laid the 7th of June, it makes about three months before they came out of the ground. The nest is full of sand and egg shells. I see no tracks of the old one. I take out the remaining one, and it begins slowly to crawl toward the brook about five rods distant.  It is so slow that I can not stop to watch it, and so carry it to within seven or eight inches of the water, turning its head inland. At length it puts out its head and legs, turns itself round, and crawls to the water.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 16, 1854

One Asclepias Cornuti begun to discount. See September 10, 1860 ("If you sit at an open attic window almost anywhere, about the 20th of September, you will see many a milkweed down go sailing by . . . notwithstanding that you may not know of any of these plants growing in your neighborhood.") ; September 21, 1856 ("Asclepias Cornuti discounting."); October 19, 1856 ("The Asclepias Cornuti pods are now apparently in the midst of discounting."); October 25, 1858 ("Near the end of the causeway, milkweed is copiously discounting."); November 20, 1858 ("he common milkweed (Asclepias Cornuti) and some thistles still discounting") See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Milkweed.

I see little flocks of chip-birds. See September 1, 1854 ("Now I notice a few faint-chipping sparrows, busily picking the seeds of weeds in the garden."); October 5, 1858 ("I still see large flocks, apparently of chip birds, on the weeds and ground in the yard; without very distinct chestnut crowns, and they are divided by a light line") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Chipping Sparrow 

 I see a wood tortoise in the woods. Why is it there now? See September 15, 1855 ("An Emys insculpta . . . to my surprise found it coupled with another. It was at first difficult to separate them with a paddle.")October 21, 1857 ("I saw wood tortoises coupled up the Assabet, the back of the upper above water. It held the lower with its claws about the head, and they were not to be parted.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau The Wood Turtlw (Emys insculpta)

The eggs were laid the 7th. See June 7, 1854 ("A snapping turtle . . . had just been excavating.”) \

At length it puts out its head and legs, turns itself round, and crawls to the water. See September 11, 1854 (“At length it put its head out far enough to see if the coast was clear, then, with its flippers, it turned itself toward the water”)  See August 26, 1854 (“Open one of my snapping turtle's eggs. Its eyes are open. It puts out its head, stretches forth its claws, and liberates its tail. With its great head it has already the ugliness of the full-grown, and is already a hieroglyphic of snappishness. . . . I am convinced that there must be an irresistible necessity for mud turtles.”)

September 16.  See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  September 16

Flocks of chip-birds rise

along the roadside showing

their light undersides.

A Book of the Seasons,   by Henry Thoreau, Little flocks of chip-birds 

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 © 2009-2024

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-540916

Gerard's Herbal

September 22.

P. M. – To Clamshell by boat. 

Find more pieces of that Indian pot. Have now thirty- eight in all.

Evidently the recent rise of the river has caused the lower leaves of the button-bush to fall. A perfectly level line on these bushes marks the height to which the water rose, many or most of the leaves so high having fallen.

The clematis yesterday was but just beginning to be feathered, but its feathers make no show. Feathers out next day in house. 

See a large flock of crows. 

The sweet-gale fruit is yet quite green, but perhaps it is ripe. 

The button-bush balls are hardly reddened. 

Moreover the beach plum appears to prefer a sandy place, however far inland, and one of our patches grows on the only desert which we have.

I rarely read a sentence in a new botany which reminds me of flowers or living plants. The early botanists, like Gerard, were prompted and compelled to describe their plants, but most nowadays only measure them, as it were.

The former is affected by what he sees and so inspired to portray it; the latter merely fills out a schedule prepared for him. I am assisted by these books in identifying a particular plant and learning some of its humbler uses, but very few indeed write as if they had seen the thing they pretend to describe.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 22, 1860

See a large flock of crows. See September 29, 1854 ("A large flock of crows wandering about and cawing as usual at this season.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the American Crow

I rarely read a sentence in a new botany which reminds me of flowers or living plants . . nowadays [botanists] only measure them, as it were. See February 6, 1852 ("Are there no works written in the language of the flowers? I asked a learned and accurate naturalist, who is at the same time the courteous guardian of a public library,  . . . for I trusted that each flower had had many lovers and faithful describers in past times, but he informed me that I had read all; that no one was acquainted with them, they were only catalogued like his books."); December 16, 1859 ("[Gerard] describes according to his natural delight in the plants. It is a man's knowledge added to a child's keen joy who has just seen a flower for the first time and comes running in with it to its friends.")