In the low Flint's Pond Path, beyond Britton's, the tall rough goldenrod makes a thicket higher than my head.

July 24. 

P. M. — To Flint's Pond. 

July 24.

Solidago stricta, Ingraham Path, well out, some days.

Chimaphila maculata, three flowers, apparently but few days, while the umbellata is quite done there. Leaves just shooting up. 

See those light-bordered dark spots on tall and other goldenrod leaves (fungi (?) says Russell). In the low Flint's Pond Path, beyond Britton's, the tall rough goldenrod makes a thicket higher than my head.

Many hazelnut burs now look rough and reddish about the base. 

Tobacco-pipe much blackened, out a long time. 

I find, at the shallow stone wharf shore, three balls in good condition, walking about half the length of that shore. Methinks it was about a week earlier than this that they were found last year. 

There is on the surface of the water, washed up and floating about, a good deal of the eriocaulon, loosened up, perhaps, by pouts or other creatures, and also some other fine weeds with it. Yet the eriocaulon has but just begun to bloom!

So also the vallisneria has washed up some time in river. 

There is also a very fine rush (?) on the bottom there like hair. Is that a little submerged kind of utricularia or ranunculus on the sandy bottom in shallow water there, looking thin and dissolving from above, like a conferva? — like little regular green masses of conserve? 

The red lilies are completely out of bloom now at Smith's meadow pasture, but the yellow ones are still very abundant in the meadows. 

The Ranunculus Purshii is now very hard to meet with. Saw one double flower with sixteen petals (at least) in two rows. Time to get seeds of it. 

Hardhack well out, how long? 

The small purple fringed orchis, apparently three or four days at least. 

The fall has already come to skunk-cabbage and hellebore. Their yellow and black decaying leaves and stems now cover the floor of the swamps which they recently clothed in early green. 

The Lobelia Dortmanna still, but no full spikes. It is apparently the worse for the wear. The oldest stems of it are covered here and there with apparently the red ova of some insect. 

Some Gnaphalium uliginosum going to seed; how long?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 24, 1856

In the low Flint's Pond Path, beyond Britton's, the tall rough goldenrod makes a thicket higher than my head. See note to July 18, 1854 ("Methinks the asters and goldenrods begin, like the early ripening leaves, with midsummer heats.")

Yellow butterflies in the damp road.

September 3.

September 3, 2023

Fair weather and a clear atmosphere after two days of mizzling, cloudy, and rainy weather and some smart showers at daylight and in the night. The street is washed hard and white. 

P. M. —- With Minot Pratt into Carlisle.

Woodbine berries purple. 

Even at this season I see some fleets of yellow butterflies in the damp road after the rain, as earlier. 

Pratt showed me a tobacco flower, long and tubular, slightly like a datura. 

In the meadow southwest of Hubbard's Hill saw white Polygala sanguinea, not described.

Close to the left-hand side of bridle-road, about a hundred rods south of the oak, a bayberry bush without fruit, probably a male one. 

It made me realize that this was only a more distant and elevated sea-beach and that we were within reach of marine influences. My thoughts suffered a sea-turn.

North of the oak (four or five rods), on the left of the bridle-road in the pasture next to Mason’s, tried to find the white hardback still out, but it was too late. 

Found the mountain laurel out again, one flower, close sessile on end of this year’s shoot. There were numerous blossom-buds expanding, and they may possibly open this fall.

A white hardback out of bloom by a pile of stones (on which I put another) in Robbins’s field, and a little south of it a clump of red huckleberries.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 3, 1854

Even at this season I see some fleets of yellow butterflies in the damp road after the rain, as earlier. See July 26, 1854 ("Today I see in various parts of the town the yellow butterflies in fleets in the road, on bare damp sand, twenty or more collected within a diameter of five or six inches in many places . . . I do not know what attracts them thus to sit near together , like a fleet in a haven; why they collect in groups.") See also July 14, 1852 ("See to-day for the first time this season fleets of yellow butterflies in compact assembly in the road”); July 16, 1851 ("I see the yellow butterflies now gathered in fleets in the road, and on the flowers of the milkweed"); July 19, 1856 ("Fleets of yellow butterflies on road.");  October 18, 1856 (“I still see a yellow butterfly occasionally zigzagging by the roadside”); October 20, 1858 ("I see yellow butterflies chasing one another, taking no thought for the morrow, but confiding in the sunny day as if it were to be perpetual.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Yellow Butterflies

September 3.  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, September 3

Again see fleets of 

yellow butterflies in the 

damp road after rain.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  Yellow butterflies in the damp road

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-540903

The royal month of August

August 4

Now the hardback and meadow-sweet reign. 

The mayweed, too, dusty by the roadside, and in the fields I scent the sweet-scented life-everlasting, which is half expanded. 

The yellow Bethlehem-star still, and the yellow gerardia, and a bluish "savory-leaved aster."

The grass is withered by the drought. The potatoes begin generally to flat down. The corn is tasselled out, turnips growing in its midst. The farmer with his barns and cattle and poultry and grain and grass. The smell of his hay.

As my eye rests on the blossom of the meadow-sweet in a hedge, I hear the note of a cricket, and am penetrated with the sense of autumn. Was it sound? or was it form? or was it scent? or was it flavor? 

It is now the royal month of August. When I hear this sound I am as dry as the rye which is everywhere cut and housed, though I am drunk with the season's wine. 

The farmer is the most inoffensive of men, with his barns and cattle and poultry and grain and grass. I like the smell of his hay well enough, though as grass it may be in my way. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 4, 1851

In the fields I scent the sweet-scented life-everlasting, which is half expanded. See August 4, 1852 ("I smell the fragrant life-everlasting, now almost out; another scent that reminds me of the autumn.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Aromatic Herbs

The yellow Bethlehem-star still. See June 15, 1851 ("The Hypoxis erecta, yellow Bethlehem-star, where there is a thick, wiry grass in open path; should be called yellow-eyed grass, methinks. "); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Yellow Bethlehem-star

The corn is tasselled out. See July 12, 1851 ("The earliest corn is beginning to show its tassels now, and I scent it as I walk, — its peculiar dry scent.");  July 27, 1852 ("I now perceive the peculiar scent of the corn-fields.")

A bluish"savory-leaved aster. See July 29, 1852 ("That common rigid narrow-leaved faint-purplish aster in dry woods by shrub oak path, Aster linariifolius of Bigelow, but it is not savory leaved. I do not find it in Gray."); December 26, 1855 (“Weeds in the fields and the wood-paths are the most interesting. Here are asters, savory-leaved, whose flat imbricated calyxes, three quarters of an inch over, are surmounted and inclosed in a perfectly transparent icebutton, like a glass knob, through which you see the reflections of the brown calyx.”); see also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Savory-leaved aster

My eye rests on the blossom of the meadow-sweet. See June 20, 1853 ("Meadow-sweet out, probably yesterday. It is an agreeable, unpretending flower."); July 11, 1851 ("The meadow-sweet has bloomed")

It is now the royal month of August. See August 18, 1852 ("There is indeed something royal about the month of August"); August 10, 1853 ("August, royal and rich")

I hear the note of a cricket, and am penetrated with the sense of autumn. See  August 4, 1852 ("Have had a gentle rain . . . but still I hear the cricket. He seems to chirp from a new depth toward autumn, new lieferungs of the fall. ");   See also  August 3, 1852 (" I hear a cricket creak in the shade; also the sound of a distant piano."); August 18, 1856 ("  I hear the steady (not intermittent) shrilling of apparently the alder cricket, clear, loud, and autumnal, a season sound. Hear it, but see it not. It reminds me of past autumns and the lapse of time, suggests a pleasing, thoughtful melancholy.")  and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Cricket in August

August 4. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  August 4 

I hear a cricket

and am penetrated with 

the sense of autumn. 

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 © 2009-2025