The summer culminates.

June 21. 

It is so hot I 

have to lift my hat to let 

the air cool my head.  

June 21, 1853

the summer culminates

June 21, 2023

4.30 A.M.––Up river for lilies

No dew even where I keep my boat. The driest night yet, threatening the sultriest day. Yet I see big crystalline drops at the tips or the bases of the pontederia leaves. 

The few lilies begin to open about 5.

The nest of a brown thrasher with three eggs, on some green-briar, perfectly concealed by a grape vine running over it; eggs greenish brown; nest of dry sticks, lined with fibres of grape bark and with roots. Bird  scolded me much.

Carpet weed out. 

I have got a pan full of lilies open.

We have not had rain, except a mere sprinkling in the night of the 17th, since the 26th of May. 

P.M. To Conantum. 

The warmest day yet. For the last two days I have worn nothing about my neck. This change or putting off of clothing is, methinks, as good an evidence of the increasing warmth of the weather as meteorological instruments. 

I thought it was hot weather perchance when a month ago, I slept with a window wide open and laid aside a comfortable, but by and by I found that I had got two windows open, and to-night two windows and the door are far from enough. 

Hypericum perforatum just out.

This year the time when the locust was first heard was the time to put on summer clothes.

Early on the morning of the 18th the river felt lukewarm to my fingers when my paddle dipped deeper than usual. 

The galium with three small white petals (G. trifidum) has been out some time, and I find that erectish, broad-leaved, three-nerved, green-flowered one, perhaps G. circazans at Corner Spring.  

Peltandra Virginica, perhaps a week, for many of its flowers are effete and curved downward .

The Hypericum ellipticum by the riverside.

The only violets I notice nowadays are a few white lanceolate ones in the meadows.

The river has got down quite low, and the muddy shores are covered here and there with a sort of dark brown paper, the dried filaments of confervæ which filled the water. Now is their fall.

The bright little flowers of the Ranunculus reptans var filiformis are seen peeping forth between its interstices. 

Calopogon out. I think it surpasses the pogonia, though the latter is sometimes high colored and is of a handsome form;  but it is inclined to be pale ,is sometimes even white. 

Now see many bright red amelanchier berries and some purple or dark-blue ones amid them. They are mostly injured by insects or apparently pecked and deformed by birds, but, from the few perfectly sound and ripe I have eaten to-day, I should pronounce them superior to either blueberries or huckleberries. Those of the Botryapium have a soft skin; of the shorter bush with a stiffer leaf, a tough skin.  This is a little before blueberries.  

The panicled cornel is the only one of the cornels or viburnums that now is noticed in flower , generally speaking.  The last of our cornels – the C. sericea I think it must be – is just beginning.

The farmers have commenced haying. With this the summer culminates. The most extended crop of all is ready for the harvesting.

Lint still comes off the leaves and shoots.

It is so hot I have to lift my hat to let the air cool my head. 

I notice that that low, rather rigid fern, about two feet high, on the Great Hubbard Meadow, which a month ago was yellow, but now is green and in fruit, and with a harsh-feeling fruit atop, is decidedly inclined to grow in hollow circles from one foot to six or eight feet in diameter.– often, it is true, imperfect on one side, or, if large, filled up in the middle. How to account for it? Can it have anything to do with the hummocks deposited on the meadow? Many small stems near together in circles i. e. not a single line. Is it the Osmunda spectabilis?

Now I hear the spotted (?) flies about my head,–- flies that settle and make themselves felt on the hand sometimes. 

The morning-glory still fresh at 3 P.M.  A fine, large, delicate bell with waved border, some pure white ,some reddened. The buds open perfectly in a vase I find them open when I wake at 4 A .M. Is not this one of the eras or culminating places in the flower season? Not this till the sultry mornings come.

Angelica,  perhaps a day or more. Elder just opening. 

The four leaved asclepias, probably some days, rather handsome flower, with the peculiar fragrance of the milkweeds. 

Observed three or four sweet-briar bushes with white flowers of the usual size, by the wall under Conantum Cliff,– very slightly tinted with red or rose. In the paucity and form of prickles at least I make them answer to the micrantha, but not else  Is it intermediate? Opened at home in a vase in the shade. They are more distinctly rose-tinted. Leaves and all together in the water, they have a strong spirituous or rummy scent. 

There are no flowers nor flower-buds on the bass this year, though it was so full last year.

Where the other day I saw a pigeon woodpecker tapping and enlarging a hole in the dead limb of an apple tree ,when as yet probably no egg was laid, to-day I see two well grown young woodpeckers about as big as the old looking out at the hole, showing their handsome spotted breasts and calling lustily for something to eat, or, it may be, suffering from the heat. Young birds in some situations must suffer greatly from heat these days, so closely packed in their nests and perhaps insufficiently shaded. It is a wonder they remain so long there patiently.

I saw a yellowbird's nest in the willows on the causeway this afternoon and three young birds nearly ready to fly, overflowing the nest ,all holding up their open bills and keeping them steadily open for a minute or more, on noise of my approach. 

Still see cherry-birds in flocks.

Dogsbane and Prinos verticillatus. 

My white lilies in the pan are mostly withering the first day, the weather is so warm.

At sunset to Island. 

The white anemone is withering with drought; else would probably have opened.  

Return while the sun is setting behind thunder clouds, which now shadow us.  Between the heavy masses of clouds, mouse colored, with dark blue bases, the patches of clear sky are a glorious cobalt blue, as Sophia calls it.  

How happens it that the sky never appears so intensely, brightly, memorably blue as when seen between clouds and, it may be, as now in the south at sunset?  This, too, is like the blue in snow. 

For the last two or three days it has taken me all the forenoon to wake up. 

H. D. Thoreau,  Journal, June 21, 1853

4.30 A.M.––Up river for lilies . . .The few lilies begin to open about 5. See July 26, 1856 ("At five [A.M.] the lilies had not opened, but began about 5.15 and were abundantly out at six") and note to July 17, 1854 ("I go to observe the lilies. ")

The summer culminates.  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Haymaking

Calopogon . . . surpasses the pogonia, See.June 23, 1853 ("Pogonias are now very abundant in the meadow-grass, and now and then a calopogon is mixed with them .The last is broader and of more singular form,  commonly with an unopened bud above on one side."); June 24, 1852 (""The calopogon is a more bluish purple than the pogonia.); July 5, 1852 (The calopogon, or grass-pink, now fully open, . . — its four or five open purple flowers — . . . makes a much greater show than the pogonia. It is of the same character with that and the arethusa. "); July 7, 1852 ("The Arethusa bulbosa, " crystalline purple;" Pogonia ophioglossoides, snake-mouthed arethusa, "pale purple;" and the Calopogon pulchellus, grass pink, "pink purple," make one family in my mind, — next to the purple orchis, or with it, — being flowers par excellence, all flower, all color, with inconspicuous leaves, naked flowers,")

Now see many bright red amelanchier berries and some purple or dark-blue ones amid them.  See June 25, 1853 (" An unusual quantity of amelanchier berries . . . I never saw nearly so many before. It is a very agreeable surprise") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Shad-bush,Juneberry, or Service-berry (Amelanchier canadensis)

How happens it that the sky never appears so intensely, brightly, memorably blue as when seen between clouds and, it may be, as now in the south at sunset? See December 14. 1851 ("There is a beautifully pure greenish-blue sky under the clouds now in the southwest just before sunset."); January 11, 1852 ("The glory of these afternoons, . . . is in the ineffably clear blue, or else pale greenish-yellow, patches of sky in the west just before sunset "); January 17, 1852 ("Those western vistas through clouds to the sky show the clearest heavens, clearer and more elysian than if the whole sky is comparatively free from clouds.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Western Sky

I hear the sound of distant thunder. The perception of beauty. The succession of wildflowers; the history of a hillside.

June 21. 

June 21, 2020

Monday. 7 p.m. — To Cliffs via Hubbard Bathing-Place.

Cherry-birds. I have not seen, though I think I have heard them before, — their fine seringo note, like a vibrating spring in the air. They are a handsome bird, with their crest and chestnut breasts. There is no keeping the run of their goings and comings, but they will be ready for the cherries when they shall be ripe. 

The adder's-tongue arethusa smells exactly like a snake. How singular that in nature, too, beauty and offensiveness should be thus combined! 

In flowers, as well as men, we demand a beauty pure and fragrant, which perfumes the air. The flower which is showy but has no, or an offensive, odor expresses the character of too many mortals. 

The swamp-pink bushes have many whitish spongy excrescences. 

Elder is blossoming; flowers opening now where black berries will be by and by. 

Panicled andromeda, or privet andromeda. 

Nature has looked uncommonly bare and dry to me for a day or two. With our senses applied to the surrounding world we are reading our own physical and corresponding moral revolutions. Nature was so shallow all at once I did not know what had attracted me all my life. I was therefore encouraged when, going through a field this evening, I was unexpectedly struck with the beauty of an apple tree. The perception of beauty is a moral test. 

When, in bathing, I rush hastily into the river the clamshells cut my feet. It is dusky now. Men are fishing on the Corner Bridge. 

I hear the veery and the huckleberry-bird and the catbird. 

It is a cool evening, past 8 o'clock.

I see the tephrosia out through the dusk; a handsome flower. 

What rich crops this dry hillside has yielded! First I saw the Viola pedata here, and then the lupines and the snapdragon covered it; and now the lupines are done and their pods are left, the tephrosia has taken their place. 

This small dry hillside is thus a natural garden. I omit other flowers which grow here, and name only those which to some extent cover it or possess it. No eighth of an acre in a cultivated garden would be better clothed, or with a more pleasing variety, from month to month, and while one flower is in bloom you little suspect that which is to succeed and perchance eclipse it. It is a warmly placed dry hillside beneath a wall, very thinly clad with grass. Such spots there are in nature, natural flower gardens. Of this succession I hardly know which to admire the most. 

It would be pleasant to write the history of one hillside for one year. First and last you have the colors of the rainbow and more, and the various fragrances, which it has not. Blackberries, roses, and dogsbane also are now in bloom here.

I hear neither toads nor bullfrogs at present; they want a warmer night. 

I hear the sound of distant thunder, though no cloud is obvious, muttering like the roar of artillery. That is a phenomenon of this season. As you walk at evening, you see the light of the flashes in the horizon and hear the muttering of distant thunder, where some village is being refreshed with the rain denied to Concord. We say that showers avoid us, that they go down the river, i. e. go off down the Merrimack, or keep to the south. 

Thunder and lightning are remarkable accompaniments to our life, as if to remind us that there always is or should be a kind of battle waging. The thunder is signal guns to us. 

The dwarf orchis (O. herbiola (Bigelow), Platanthera flava (Gray)) at the bathing-place in Hubbard's meadow, not remarkable. 

The purple orchis is a good flower to bring home. It will keep fresh many days, and its buds open at last in a pitcher of water. 

Obtuse galium. 

I observe a rose (called by some moss rose), with a bristly reddish stem; another, with a smooth red stem and but a few prickles; another, with many prickles and bristles. 

Found the single-flowered broom-rape in Love Lane, under the oak.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 21, 1852


The swamp-pink bushes have many whitish spongy excrescences. See June 20, 1853 ("Those great greenish-white puffs on the panicled andromeda are now decaying.On the swamp-pink they are solid.")

The adder's-tongue arethusa smells exactly like a snake. Compare July 26, 1856 ("The pod of the ellipticum, when cut, smells like a bee.") See July 7, 1852 ("The Arethusa bulbosa, "crystalline purple;" Pogonia ophioglossoides, snake-mouthed arethusa, "pale purple;" and the Calopogon pulchellus, grass pink, "pink purple," make one family in my mind, — next to the purple orchis, or with it, — being flowers par excellence, all flower, all color, with inconspicuous leaves, naked flowers, . . .the pogonia has a strong snaky odor."); see also July 2, 857 ("Pogonia ophioglossoides apparently in a day or two. "); to July 7, 1856 ("the snake-head arethusa is now abundant amid the cranberries. there [Gowings Swamp]");July 8, 1857 ("Find a Pogonia ophioglossoides with a third leaf and second flower an inch above the first flower."); August 1, 1856 ("Snake-head arethusa still in the meadow. “)..Coompare Arethusa bulbosa, May 30, 1854 ("I am surprised to find arethusas abundantly out in Hubbard's Close, maybe two or three days ... This high-colored plant shoots up suddenly, all flower, in meadows where it is wet walking. A superb flower.”); June 10, 1854 (“The fragrance of the arethusa is like that of the lady's-slipper, or pleasanter.”).  See also  June 19, 1852 ("These are peculiar days when you find the purple orchis and the arethusa, too, in the meadows."); June 30, 1852 ("Is not this period more than any distinguished for flowers, when roses, swamp-pinks, morning-glories, arethusas, pogonias, orchises, blue flags, epilobiums, mountain laurel, and white lilies are all in blossom at once?")

With our senses applied to the surrounding world we are reading our own physical and corresponding moral revolutions.See  June 25, 1852 ("There is a flower for every mood of the mind."); May 23, 1853 ("The poet must bring to Nature the smooth mirror in which she is to be reflected. Every new flower that opens, no doubt, expresses a new mood of the human mind.”) August 7, 1853 ("Is it not as language that all natural objects affect the poet? He sees a flower or other object, and it is beautiful or affecting to him because it is a symbol of his thought. . .The objects I behold correspond to my mood.”);  June 6, 1857 (“Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind.”); August 30, 1851 ("The fall of each humblest flower marks the annual period of some phase of human life experience. I can be said to note the flower's fall only when I see in it the symbol of my own change. When I experience this, then the flower appears to me.)


Nature was so shallow all at once I did not know what had attracted me all my life. See November 18, 1857 ("I lost for the time my rapport or relation to nature. ")

I was unexpectedly struck with the beauty of an apple tree. The perception of beauty is a moral test. See  December 11. 1855 ("Beauty and music are not mere traits and exceptions. They are the rule and character. It is the exception that we see and hear "); January 17, 1852 (“As the skies appear to a man, so is his mind. Some see only clouds there; some behold there serenity, purity, beauty ineffable.”); May 17, 1853 ("I was surprised, on turning round, to behold the serene and everlasting beauty of the world, it was so soothing. I saw that I could not go home to supper and lose it. It was so much fairer, serener, more beautiful, than my mood had been."); July 26, 1852 ("The mind that perceives clearly any natural beauty is in that instant withdrawn from human society."); December 11. 1855 ("It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance."); November 18, 1857 ("You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind."); October 4, 1859 ("You have got to be in a different state from common.") Autumnal Tints ("There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate")

Panicled andromeda, or privet andromeda. See June 21, 1854 ("(panicled andromeda, which loves dry places, now in blossom")

I see the tephrosia out through the dusk; a handsome flower. See July 10, 1857 ("The tephrosia, which grows by Peter's road in the woods, is a very striking and interesting, if I may not say beautiful, flower, especially when, as here, it is seen in a cool and shady place, its clear rose purple contrasting very agreeably with yellowish white, rising from amidst a bed of finely pinnate leaves.")

A natural garden. Blackberries, roses, and dogsbane also are now in bloom here. See June 30, 1852 (" Is not this period more than any distinguished for flowers, when roses, swamp-pinks, morning-glories, arethusas, pogonias, orchises, blue flags, epilobiums, mountain laurel, and white lilies are all in blossom at once?")

We say that showers avoid us, that they go down the river, i. e. go off down the Merrimack, See May 16, 1853 ("At 5 P. M., dark, heavy, wet-looking clouds are seen in the northern horizon, perhaps over the Merrimack Valley, and we say it is going down the river and we shall not get a drop."); June 15, 1860 (“A thunder-shower in the north goes down the Merrimack.”)  See also June 16, 1860 ("Thunder-showers show themselves about 2 P.M. in the west, but split at sight of Concord and go east on each side.”); June 16, 1854 ("Three days in succession, — the 13th, 14th, and 15th, — thunder-clouds, with thunder and lightning, have risen high in the east, threatening instant rain, and yet each time it has failed to reach us.”); June 17, 1852 ("A small thunder-shower comes up . . . We see the increasing outline of the slate-colored falling rain from the black cloud. It passes mainly to the south. Also see note to June 9, 1860 ("We have half a dozen showers to-day, distinct summer showers from black clouds suddenly wafted up from the west and northeast; also some thunder and hail, - large white stones.")

The dwarf orchis Platanthera flava (Gray) at the bathing-place in Hubbard's meadow, not remarkable.  See June 18, 1854 ("Platanthera flava at the Harrington Bathing - Place, possibly yesterday , — an unimportant yellowish - green spike of flowers.")

The purple orchis is a good flower to bring home. It will keep fresh many days, and its buds open at last in a pitcher of water. See June 19, 1852 ("The orchis keeps well. One put in my hat this morning, and carried all day, will last fresh a day or two at home"); June 16, 1854 (" It is eight days since I plucked the great orchis; one is perfectly fresh still in my pitcher. It may be plucked when the spike is only half opened, and will open completely and keep perfectly fresh in a pitcher more than a wee") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Purple Fringed Orchids

I observe a rose (called by some moss rose), with a bristly reddish stem.See June 21, 1854 ("Again I am attracted by the deep scarlet of the wild moss rose half open in the grass , all glowing with rosy light."); See also June 12, 1853 ("A wild moss rose in Arethusa Meadow, where are arethusas lingering still.")

Summer grasses.

June 21. 

June 21, 2019

Tuesday. P. M. — To Derby's pasture behind and beyond schoolhouse. 

Meadow-sweet. 

Hedge-hyssop out. 

In that little pool near the Assabet, above our bath-place there, Glyceria pallida well out in water and Carex lagopodurides just beginning. 

That grass covering dry and dryish fields and hills, with curled or convolute radical leaves, is apparently Festuca ovina, and not Danthonia as I thought it. It is now generally conspicuous. Are any of our simpler forms the F. tenella? [Vide July 2d, 1860.]

You see now the Eupatoreum purpureum pushing up in rank masses in the low grounds, and the lower part of the uppermost leaves, forming a sort of cup, is conspicuously purplish.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 21, 1859

Hedge-hyssop out. See August 6, 1855 ("These great meadows through which I wade have a great abundance of hedge-hyssop now in bloom in the water. ")

That grass covering dry and dryish fields and hills, with curled or convolute radical leaves. See July 10, 1860 ("The Festuca ovina is a peculiar light-colored, whitish grass.");

Are any of our simpler forms the F. tenella? July 2, 1860 ("Yesterday I detected the smallest grass that I know, apparently Festuca tenella (?), apparently out of bloom, in the dry path southwest of the yew, — only two to four inches high, like a moss.")

The Eupatoreum purpureum pushing up in rank masses. See August 6, 1856 ("Eupatorium purpureum at Stow's Pool, apparently several days")

In the Natural History Rooms talking of the myrtle-bird.

June 21. 

June 21, 2018

Vide at Cambridge, apparently in prime, Silene inflata; also, in a rich grass-field on Sacramento Street, what may be Turritis glabra (?), also in prime, the last three or four feet high. Both pressed. 

Talked with Mr. Bryant at the Natural History Rooms. He agrees with Kneeland in thinking that what I call the myrtle-bird’s is the white-throat sparrow’s note. Bryant killed one Down East in summer of ’56. He has lived the last fifteen years at Cohasset, and also knows the birds of Cambridge, but talks of several birds as rare which are common in Concord, such as the stake-driver, marsh hawk (have neither of their eggs in the collection), Savannah sparrow, the passerina much rarer, and I think purple finch, etc. Never heard the tea-lee note of myrtle-bird ( ?) in this State. 

Their large hawk is the red-shouldered, not hen-hawk. 

He thinks that the sheldrake of the Maine lakes is the merganser, the serrator belonging rather to the sea coast. 

Of the two little dippers or grebes, he thought the white-breasted one would be the commonest, which has also a slender bill, while the other has a brownish breast and a much thicker bill. 

The egg of the Turdus solitarius in the collection is longer, but marked very much like the tanager’s, only paler-brown. They have also the egg of the T. brunneus, the other hermit thrush, not common here.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 21, 1858

Mr. Bryant at the Natural History Rooms agrees with Kneeland in thinking that what I call the myrtle-bird’s is the white-throat sparrow’s note. See January 15, 1858 ("At Natural History Rooms, Boston. . . . Talked with Dr. Kneeland. . . . Speaking to him of my night warbler, he asked if it uttered such a note, making the note of the myrtle-bird, ah, te-te-te te-te-te te-te-te, exactly, and said that that was the note of the white throated sparrow, which he heard at Lake Superior, at night as well as by day.”)

The egg of the Turdus solitarius in the collection. See June 12, 1857 (“The egg of the Turdus solitarius is lettered "Swamp Robin."”)

It is plain for miles without a tree . . . That solitude was sweet to me as a flower.

June 21. 

Sunday. 

June 21, 2020

About noon it cleared up, and after dinner I set out for Provincetown, straight across the country to the Bay where the new road strikes it, directly through the pine plantation about one mile from the lighthouse. The pines have apparently not done so well here as in some other places on the Cape. 

I observed a tuft of crow-berry, together with poverty-grass, about one mile west of the light. This part of Truro affords singularly interesting and cheering walks for me, with regular hollows or dimples shutting out the sea as completely as if in the midst of the continent, though when you stand on the plain you commonly see the sails of vessels standing up or down the coast on each side of you, though you may not see the water. At first you may take them for the roofs of barns or houses. 

It is plain for miles without a tree, where the new telegraph-wires are a godsend to the birds, affording them something to perch upon. That solitude was sweet to me as a flower. I sat down on the boundless level and enjoyed the solitude, drank it in, the medicine for which I had pined, worth more than the bear-berry so common on the Cape. 

As I was approaching the Bay through a sandy hollow a mile east of High Head, I found two or three arrow-points and a rude axe or hammer, a flattish stone from the beach with a deep groove chipped around it. 

The beach on the Bay Side was completely strewn with seaweed (the grassy kind), which does not grow on the Atlantic side, as if the Bay were a meadow compared with the Atlantic. The beach was harder than the Back Side, the hardest part being on the weed at high-water line. The skulls and backbones of black-fish, their vertebrae and spinal processes, and disk-shaped bones, five inches in diameter, from the spine were strewn all along. These looked like rough crackers. 

Also the ribs of whale (probably humpbacked), — they get humpback and finback and right whales, I heard, — six feet long, lay under the bank, hardly to be distinguished from their gray rails. Some of those whale ribs, ten inches wide, were from time to time set up in the sand, like mile stones (or bones); they seemed to answer that purpose along the new road. 

They had taken a whale in Provincetown Harbor on the previous 17th, and stripped off the blubber at one of the wharves. I saw many dogfish whose livers had been extracted. 

At East Harbor River, as I sat on the Truro end of the bridge, I saw a great flock of mackerel gulls, one hundred at least, on a sandy point, whitening the shore there like so many white stones on the shore and in the water, uttering all together their vibrating shrill note. They had black heads, light bluish-slate wings, and light rump and tail and beneath. From time to time all or most would rise and circle about with a clamor, then settle again on the same spot close together. 

Soon after crossing the bridge, I turned off and ascended Mt. Ararat. It exhibited a remarkable landscape: on the one side the desert, of smooth and spotless palest fawn-colored sand, slightly undulating, and beyond, the Atlantic; on the other, the west, side, a few valleys and hills, densely clothed with a short, almost moss-like (to look down at) growth of huckleberry, blueberry, bear-berry, josh-pear (which is so abundant in Provincetown), bayberry, rose, checkerberry, and other bushes, and beyond, the Bay. All these bushes formed an even and dense covering to the sand-hills, much as bear-berry alone might. It was a very strange scenery. You would think you might be in Labrador, or some other place you have imagined. The shrubbery at the very summit was swarming with mosquitoes, which troubled me when I sat down, but they did not rise above the level of the bushes. 

At the Pilgrim House, though it was not crowded, they put me into a small attic chamber which had two double beds in it, and only one window, high in a corner, twenty and a half inches by twenty-five and a half, in the alcove when it was swung open, and it required a chair to look out conveniently. Fortunately it was not  a cold night and the window could be kept open, though at the risk of being visited by the cats, which appear to swarm on the roofs of Provincetown like the mosquitoes on the summits of its hills. 

I have spent four memorable nights there in as many different years, and have added considerable thereby to my knowledge of the natural history of the cat and the bedbug. Sleep was out of the question. A night in one of the attics of Provincetown! to say nothing of what is to be learned in entomology. It would be worth the while to send a professor there, one who was also skilled in entomology. Such is your Pilgerruhe or Pilgrims'-Rest. Every now and then one of these animals on its travels leaped from a neighboring roof on to mine, with such a noise as if a six-pounder had fallen within two feet of my head, — the discharge of a catapult, — a twelve-pounder discharged by a catapult, — and then followed such a scrambling as banished sleep for a long season, while I watched lest they came in at the open window. A kind of foretaste, methought, of the infernal regions. I didn't wonder they gave quit claim deeds of their land here. My experience is that you fare best at private houses. The barroom may be defined a place to spit. 

"Soon as the evening shades prevail,

The cats take up the wondrous tale."

At still midnight, when, half awake, half asleep, you seem to be weltering in your own blood on a battle field, you hear the stealthy tread of padded feet belonging to some animal of the cat tribe, perambulating the roof within a few inches of your head. 

I had already this evening called on Mr. Atwood, the Representative of the town and one of the commissioners appointed by the legislature to superintend the experiments in the artificial breeding of fishes. He said that he knew (I think) eighty-two kinds of fishes there. 

When Mr. Pool, the Doorkeeper of the House of Representatives, — if that is his name and title, — who makes out a list of the Representatives and their professions, asked him his business, he answered, "Fisherman." At which Pool was disturbed and said that no representative had ever called himself a fisherman before. It would not do to print it so. And so Atwood is put down as "Master Mariner"! ! So much for American democracy. I reminded him that Fisherman had been a title of honor with a large party ever since the Christian Era at least. When next we have occasion to speak of the apostles I suppose we should call them "Master Mariners"! 

Atwood said that his brother here took the bone shark recently which I read was thirty feet long. 

Fog again at night.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 21, 1857

A Book of the Seasons: June 21.

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

June 21.

June 21. 2021

The deep scarlet of

the wild moss rose, half open,

glowing in the grass.

June 21, 1854

a yellow rose 

almost hidden 

in deep grass 

Issa

The perception of beauty is a moral test. June 21, 1852

That solitude was sweet to me as a flower. June 21, 1857

Nature has looked uncommonly bare and dry to me for a day or two . . . all at once I did not know what had attracted me all my life. I was therefore encouraged when, going through a field this evening, I was unexpectedly struck with the beauty of an apple tree. June 21, 1852

Again I am attracted by the deep scarlet of the wild moss rose half open in the grass, all glowing with rosy light. June 21, 1854

June 21, 2013

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Serene as the Sky.

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 

June 20 <<<<< June 21 >>>>>   June 22

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, June 21

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 ©  2009-2022 

Pine pollen washed up on the northwest side of Walden Pond

June 21

June 21, 2016
White Pine

P. M. — To Walden. 

Much pine pollen is washed up on the northwest side of the pond. Must it not have come from pines at a distance? 

Very hot day, as was yesterday, -— 98° at 2 P. M., 99° at 3, and 128° in sun. 

Nighthawks numerously squeak at 5 P. M. and boom. See them fly low and touch the water like swallows over Walden. 

Find a dozen of the hydropeltis out, apparently several days. 

My canoe birch wine smells and tastes like mead considerably. All my birch wines are now more acid and very good indeed with sugar. Am surprised to see it effervesce, all white with white sugar only, like a soda water.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 21, 1856



Much pine pollen is washed up on the northwest side of the pond. Must it not have come from pines at a distance? See June 21, 1850 ("The flowers of the white pine are now in their prime, but I see none of their pollen on the pond."); June 21, 1860 ("Having noticed the pine pollen washed up on the shore of three or four ponds in the woods lately and at Ripple Lake, a dozen rods from the nearest pine, it suggested to me that the air must be full of this fine dust at this season, that it must be carried to great distances, and its presence might be detected remote from pines by examining the edges of bodies of water, where it would be collected to one side by the wind and waves from a large area ... the lakes detect for us thus the presence of the pine pollen in the atmosphere. They are our pollinometers.") See also May 4, 1853 ("Humboldt speaks of its having been proved that pine pollen falls from the atmosphere."); June 3, 1857 ("The pitch pine at Hemlocks is in bloom. . . .As usual, when I jar them the pollen rises in a little cloud about the pistillate flowers and the tops of the twigs, there being a little wind"); June 8, 1851 ("I found the white-pine-top full of staminate blossom buds not yet fully grown or expanded, with a rich red tint like a tree full of fruit, but I could find no pistillate blossom."); June 9, 1850 ("I see the pollen of the pitch pine now beginning to cover the surface of the pond. Most of the pines at the north northwest end have none, and on some there is only one pollen-bearing flower. ");  June 14, 1853 ("The pollen of the pine yellowed the driftwood on the shore and the stems of bushes which stood in the water, and in little flakes extended out some distance on the surface, until at four or five rods in this cove it was suddenly and distinctly bounded by an invisible fence on the surface"); June 14, 1854 ("Bacon says he has seen pitch pine pollen in a cloud going over a hill a mile off;"); June 18, 1860 (I see in the southerly bays of Walden the pine pollen now washed up thickly; only at the bottom of the bays, especially the deep long bay, where it is a couple of rods long by six to twenty-four inches wide and one inch deep; pure sulphur-yellow, and now has no smell. It has come quite across the pond from where the pines stand, full half a mile, probably washed across most of the way. "); June 20, 1858 ("Walking in the white pine wood there, I find that my shoes and, indeed, my hat are covered with the greenish-yellow pollen of the white pines, which is now being shed abundantly and covers like a fine meal all the plants and shrubs of the forest floor.");  June 22, 1858 ("I notice, after tipping the water out of my boat under the willows, much evidently pine pollen adhering to the inside of the boat along the water-line. Did it fall into it during my excursion to Holden’s Swamp the 20th, or has it floated through the air thus far?"); June 25, 1852 ("I am too late for the white pine flowers. The cones are half an inch long and greenish, and the male flowers effete.”); June 25, 1857 ("White pine effete. "); June 25, 1858 ("The ground under the white pines is now strewn with the effete flowers, like an excrement.”);  July 1, 1852 ("The path by the wood-side is red with the effete staminiferous flowers of the white pine")

Nighthawks numerously squeak at 5 P. M. and boom  Saw them fly low and touch the water like swallows. See May 31, 1856 ("As I return in the dusk, many nighthawks, with their great spotted wings, are circling low over the river, as the swallows were when I went out.") See also June 11, 1851("I hear the nighthawks uttering their squeaking notes high in the air now at nine o ' clock P. M., and occasionally – what I do not remember to have heard so late –their booming note."); June 15, 1852 ("The nighthawk squeaks and booms.");  June 23, 1851 ("It is a pleasant sound to me, the squeaking and the booming of nighthawks flying over high open fields in the woods. They fly like butterflies . . . to secure their own insect prey. ") and A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,, the Nighthawk

June 21. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 21   

Nighthawks fly low and

touch the water like swallows

over Walden Pond.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Pine pollen washed up on the northwest side of Walden Pond

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 ©  2009-2026

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-560621

Peetweets make quite a noise calling to their young with alarm.

June 21.

Saw a white lily in Everett’s Pond. 

Sparrow’s nest, four eggs, deep in the moist bank beyond cherry-bird’s nest (have three), of peculiar color. She deserted the nest after one was taken. Outside of stubble, scantily lined with fibrous roots.

Clams abundant within three feet of shore, and bream-nests. 

The early grass is ripe or browned, and clover is drying. 

Peetweets make quite a noise calling to their young with alarm. 

On an apple at R.W.E.’s a small pewee’s nest, on a horizontal branch, seven feet high, almost wholly of hair, cotton without, not incurved at edge; four eggs, pale cream-color.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 21, 1855

Peetweets ... calling to their young... See July 2, 1860 ("Nowadays hear from my window the constant tittering of young golden robins, and by the river fields the alarm note of the peetweets, concerned about their young"); July 2, 1853  ("The peetweets are quite noisy about the rocks in Merrick's pasture when I approach; have eggs or young there, which they are anxious about").

A wild and strange place

June 21.

Now there is a dense mass of weeds along the waterside, where the muskrats lurk, and overhead a canopy of leaves conceals the birds and shuts out the sun. 

In the little meadow pool, or bay, in Hubbard's shore, I see two old pouts tending their countless young close to the shore. The former are slate-colored. The latter are about half an inch long and very black, forming a dark mass from eight to twelve inches in diameter. The old are constantly circling around them, -over and under and through, as if anxiously endeavoring to keep them together, from time to time moving off five or six feet to reconnoitre. The whole mass of the young and there must be a thousand of them at least is incessantly moving, pushing forward and stretching out. Are often in the form of a great pout, apparently keeping together by their own instinct chiefly, now on the bottom, now rising to the top. Alone they might be mistaken for polly-wogs. The old, at any rate, do not appear to be very successful in their apparent efforts to communicate with and direct them. At length they break into four parts. The old are evidently very careful parents. One has some wounds apparently . . . I think also that I see the young breams in schools hovering over their nests while the old are still protecting them. 

Up the grassy hollows in the sprout-lands north of Goose Pond I feel as if in a strange country, — a pleasing sense of strangeness and distance. 

Here are numerous open hollows more or less connected, where for some reason the wood does not spring up, — and I am glad of it, — filled with a fine wiry grass, with the panicled andromeda, which loves dry places, now in blossom around the edges, and small black cherries and sand cherries straggling down into them. 

As wild and strange a place as you might find in the unexplored West or East. The quarter of a mile of sprout-land which separates it from the highway seems as complete a barrier as a thousand miles of earth. 

Your horizon is there all your own.

Again I am attracted by the deep scarlet of the wild moss rose half open in the grass , all glowing with rosy light.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 21, 1854

See August 6, 1851 ("After how few steps, how little exertion, the student stands in pine woods . . .in a place still unaccountably strange and wild to him.")

June 21. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 21

The deep scarlet of

the wild moss rose, half open,

glowing in the grass.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, A Wild and Strange Place

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-540621

A cold wind.

June 21.

June 21, 2020

The wind is still northeast, and the air is now so cold (cooled by the rain) that most have fires, and it is uncomfortably cool out of the sun, which does not shine much this forenoon.

At 12 m. it is only 59° above zero, and I am surprised to hear some toads ring, which I have not heard lately by day; as if this degree of coolness is agreeable to them.

At noon the sun comes fairly out and the wind rises, now blowing quite strong from the northeast.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  June 21, 1860

At 12 m. it is only 59° above zero, See June 21, 1856 ("Very hot day, as was yesterday, –– 98° at 2 P. M., 99° at 3, and 128° in sun. ")

I am surprised to hear some toads ring, as if this degree of coolness is agreeable to them. Compare June 21, 1852 ("I hear neither toads nor bullfrogs at present; they want a warmer night. ")

The wind is still northeast , and the air is now so cold ( cooled by the rain ) that most have fires , and it is un- comfortably cool out of the sun , which does not shine much this forenoon . Phalaris Americana ( some probably two or three days ) . It is the rankest and for its size most conspic- uous common grass . You see great dark - green islets of it by the side of , or even in , the river , where it is muddy , with the large whitish panicles ( ? ) lifted above the broad rank leaves . These are four or five feet high , very luxuriant . I first noticed elms full of dark shade at a distance some three or four days ago . As soon as they are well leafed it is seen how gracefully they droop . 

At 12 м . it is only 59 ° above zero , and I am surprised to hear some toads ring , which I have not heard lately by day ; as if this degree of coolness even ( at midday ) was agreeable to them , corresponding to 62 or more at evening . At noon the sun comes fairly out and the wind rises . 

June has been quite a breezy month thus far . I have waited in vain for perfectly smooth water in which to watch the bream poised over her nest . There has been almost a steady breeze or breeziness with the waving of new - leafed boughs .