Showing posts with label october 18. Show all posts
Showing posts with label october 18. Show all posts

Monday, October 18, 2021

A Book of the Seasons : October 18 (trees to mark the season, the fall of the red maple, wintergreen above pine needles, shadows depart)




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

 October 18.

Bare ashy branches
of red maples sparkling in
this sun and clear air.

A great many crows
scattered about the meadow –
black against the green.
October 18, 1855

The sugar maples 
aglow in their glory now 
yellow red and green.

A red maple stripped
in one short windy rain-storm –
    November at hand.

A village is not
complete unless it has trees
to mark the season.
October 18, 1858



 
October 18, 2018

The fringed gentian closes every night and opens every morning in my pitcher. October 18, 1857

We find ourselves in a world that is already planted, but is also still being planted as at first. We say of some plants that they grow in wet places and of others that they grow in desert places. The truth is that their seeds are scattered almost everywhere, but here only do they succeed . . . The development theory implies a greater vital force in nature . . . and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation.  October 18, 1860

Chickadees and jays are heard from the shore as in winter. October 18, 1852

There are a great many crows scattered about on the meadow . . . very conspicuous, black against the green. October 18, 1855

I scare up in midst of the meadows a great many dark colored sparrows, one or two at a time, which go off with a note somewhat like the lesser redpoll’s,—some migrating kind, I think. October 18, 1855

Maples and some other shrubs, and more are very thin-leaved so that the swamp, with so many fallen leaves and migrating sparrows, etc., flitting through it, has a very late look. October 18, 1859

See larks, with their white tail-feathers, fluttering low over the meadows these days. October 18, 1858

I scare up a dozen larks at once. October 18, 1855

A large brown marsh hawk comes beating the bush along the river, and ere long a slate-colored one (male), with black tips, is seen circling against a distant wood-side. October 18, 1855

I see many robins on barberry bushes, probably after berries. October 18, 1857

A few muskrat houses are going up abrupt and precipitous on one side sloped on the other . October 18, 1852

The muskrat-houses are more sharpened now. October 18, 1853

As leaves fall along the river and in the woods, the squirrels and musquash make haste to shelter and conceal themselves by constructing nests and cabins. October 18, 1858

I still see a yellow butterfly occasionally zigzagging by the roadside. October 18, 1856 

The sugar maples are now in their glory, all aglow with yellow, red, and green. October 18, 1856

The large sugar maples on the Common are now at the height of their beauty . . . A delicate but warmer than golden yellow is the prevailing color, with scarlet cheeks. They are great regular oval masses of yellow and scarlet. October 18, 1858

Surely trees should be set in our streets with a view to their October splendor. October 18, 1858

All the sunny warmth of the season seems to be absorbed in their leaves. October 18, 1858

A village is not complete unless it has these trees to mark the season in it. They are as important as a town clock. October 18, 1858

The red maples have been bare a good while. In the sun and this clear air, their bare ashy branches even sparkle like silver. October 18, 1853

The maple swamps, bare of leaves, here and there about the meadow, look like smoke blown along the edge of the woods. October 18, 1855

The red maples are now fairly bare, though you may occasionally see one full of leaves. So gradually the leaves fall, after all  — though individuals will be completely stripped in one short windy rain-storm, — that you scarcely miss them out of the landscape; but the earth grows more bare  and the fields more hoary  and the heavy shadows that began in June take their departure , November being at hand  October 18, 1857

I am struck by the magical change which has taken place in the red maple swamps, . . . — all their splendor gone, wafted away, as it were, by a puff of wind, and they are the mere ghosts of trees, unnoticed by any, or, if noticed at all, like the smoke that is seen where a blaze is extinguished — desolate gray twigs. October 18, 1858

The fall of the leaf . . . began fairly with the fall of the red maple leaves, October 13th. October 18, 1857

Since the red maples generally fell, the chestnuts have been yellowing, and the oaks reddening and yellowing. October 18, 1858

It is a rich sight, that of a large chestnut tree with a dome-shaped top, where the yellowing leaves have become thin, — for most now strew the ground evenly as a carpet throughout the chestnut woods. October 18, 1856

The red oaks I see to-day are full of leaves, — a brownish yellow (with more or less green, but no red or scarlet) October 18, 1857

Looking across to the sprout-land beneath the Cliffs, I see that the pale brown of withered oak leaves begins to be conspicuous, amid the red, in sprout-lands. October 18, 1857

Some white oaks are salmon-red, some lighter and drier. The black oaks are a greenish 
yellow. October 18, 1853

Poplars (grandidentata) clear, rich yellow.  October 18, 1853

Larches have begun to change in water. October 18, 1858

By the brook, witch-hazel, as an underwood, is in the height of its change, but elsewhere exposed large bushes are bare. October 18, 1858

Many alders and birches just bare. October 18, 1857

The bass and the black ash are completely bare; how long? October 18, 1857

Red cedar is fallen and falling. October 18, 1857


So many leaves have now fallen in the woods that a squirrel cannot run after a nut without being heard. October 18, 1857

The woods are losing their bright colors. October 18, 1853

The autumnal tints though less brilliant and striking are perhaps quite as agreeable now that the frosts have somewhat dulled and softened them. October 18, 1852

Now that the forest is universally imbrowned they make a more harmonious impression. October 18, 1852

In Lee's Wood, white pine leaves are now fairly fallen . . . These leaves, like other, broader ones, pass through various hues (or shades) from green to brown, — first yellow, giving the tree that parti-colored look, then pale brown when they fall, then reddish brown after lying on the ground, and then darker and darker brown when decaying. October 18, 1857

As I come through Hubbard’s Woods I see the wintergreen, conspicuous now above the freshly fallen white pine needles. Their shining green is suddenly revealed above the pale-brown ground. I hail its cool unwithering green, one of the humbler allies by whose aid we are to face the winter. October 18, 1858

The wintergreen now
shining above the freshly
fallen pine needles.

I find my boat all covered — the bottom and seats — with the yellow leaves of the golden willow under which it is moored, and if I empty it, it is full again to-morrow.  October 18, 1853

The long, curved, yellowish buds of the Salix discolor begin to show, the leaves falling; even the down has peeped out from under some. October 18, 1859

A large pasture thistle bud close to the ground amid its leaves, as in spring. October 18, 1856

Snakes lie out now on sunny banks, amid the dry leaves, now as in spring. They are chiefly striped ones. October 18, 1857

Noticed a little snake brown above with a paler-brown dorsal stripe.
October 18, 1858

What a strong medicinal but rich scent now after the rain, from decaying weeds, perhaps ferns, by the road side! The rain, falling on the fresh dried herbs and filling the ditches into which they drooped, has converted them into tea. October 18, 1856

Going by Dennis Swamp on railroad, the sour scent of decaying ferns is now very strong there. October 18, 1859

Saw a tree-toad on the ground in a sandy wood-path.  October 18, 1859

In the ditch along the west side of Dennis Swamp I see half a dozen yellow-spot turtles moving about. Probably they are preparing to go into winter quarters. October 18, 1859

At the brook beyond Hubbard's Grove, I stand to watch the water-bugs . . . The shadows of these bugs on the bottom, half a dozen times as big as themselves, are very distinct and interesting, with a narrow and well-defined halo about them . . .  I also see plainly the shadows of ripples they make, which are scarcely perceptible on the surface. October 18, 1857 

Returning late, we see a double shadow of ourselves and boat, one, the true, quite black, the other directly above it and very faint, on the willows and high bank. October 18, 1853

All that interests the reader is the depth and intensity of the life excited.We touch our subject but by a point which has no breadth, but the pyramid of our experience, or our interest in it, rests on us by a broader or narrower base. That is, man is all in all, Nature nothing, but as she draws him out and reflects him. October 18, 1856

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. October 18, 1855 

So gradually the leaves fall. . . that you scarcely miss them out of the landscape; but the earth grows more bare, and the fields more hoary, and the heavy shadows that began in June take their departure, November being at hand. October 18, 1857

If you will stay here awhile I will promise you strange sights. You shall walk on water; all these brooks and rivers and ponds shall be your highway. You shall see the whole earth covered a foot or more deep with purest white crystals, in which you slump or over which you glide, and all the trees and stubble glittering in icy armor.  October 18, 1859


October 18, 2015

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, October Moods
A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Reflections

October 18, 2020

October 4, 1858 ("Witch-hazel apparently at height of change, yellow below, green above, the yellow leaves by their color concealing the flowers. . . . The leaves are often richly spotted reddish and greenish brown.")
October 5, 1857 ("The jay seems to scream more fitly and with more freedom now that some fallen maple leaves have made way for his voice")
October 6, 1856 ("The jay's shrill note is more distinct of late about the edges of the woods, when so many birds have left us.”)
October 6, 1856 ("The common notes of the chickadee, so rarely heard for a long time, and also one phebe strain from it, amid the Leaning Hemlocks, remind me of pleasant winter days, when they are more commonly seen.")
October 6, 1858 ("Now, methinks, the autumnal tints are brightest in our streets and in the woods generally.")
October 9, 1851 ("I see half a dozen snakes in this walk, green and striped (one very young striped one), who appear to be out enjoying the sun. They appear to make the most of the last warm days of the year.")
October 9, 1858 ("I watch two marsh hawks which rise from the woods before me as I sit on the Cliff. . .gradually lifting themselves as they come round in their gyrations, higher and higher, and floating toward the southeast. Slender dark motes they are at last, almost lost to sight, but every time they come round eastward I see the light of the westering sun reflected from the under sides of their wings")
October 9, 1853 ("The bass bare.")
October 10, 1851 ("Some maples which a week ago were a mass of yellow foliage are now a fine gray smoke, as it were, and their leaves cover the ground.")
October 11, 1857 ("The maple and other leaves strew the water, and it is almost a leaf harvest")
October 11, 1859 ("The note of the chickadee, heard now in cooler weather and above many fallen leaves, has a new significance.")
October 11, 1856 ("In the woods I hear the note of the jay, a metallic, clanging sound, some times a mew. Refer any strange note to him")
October 12, 1851 ("Many maples around the edges of the meadows are now quite bare, like smoke.")
October 12, 1855 ("The leaves fallen last night now lie thick on the water next the shore, concealing it, —fleets of dry boats.");
October 12, 1858 ("There are many maple, birch, etc., leaves on the Assabet, in stiller places along the shore, but not yet a leaf harvest");
October 12, 1858 ("Some bass trees are quite bare, others but partly.")
October 13, 1855 ("The bass is bare.")
October 13,1852 ("The autumnal tints have already lost their brightness. It lasts but a day or two.")
October 13, 1852 ("Many maples have lost all their leaves and are shrunk all at once to handsome clean gray wisps on the edge of the meadows. Crowded together at a distance they look like smoke.”)
October 13, 1855 ("A thick carpet of white pine needles lies now lightly, half an inch or more in thick ness, above the dark-reddish ones of last year")
October 13, 1855 ("The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows")
October 13, 1857 (“Maple fires are burnt out generally, and they have fairly begun to fall and look smoky in the swamps. When my eyes were resting on those smoke-like bare trees, it did not at first occur to me why the landscape was not as brilliant as a few days ago”)
October 13, 1857 ("Those most brilliant days, then, so far as the autumnal tints are concerned, are over.")
October 13, 1860 ("Now, as soon as the frost strips the maples, and their leaves strew the swamp floor and conceal the pools, the note of the chickadee sounds cheerfully winteryish.")
October 14, 1852 ("Jays and chickadees are oftener heard in the fall than in summer.")
October 14, 1852 (" The pines are now two-colored, green and yellow, - the latter just below the ends of the boughs.")
October 14, 1856. ("Pine-needles, just fallen, now make a thick carpet ")
October 14, 1858 ("The white maples are now apparently in their autumnal dress. The leaves are much curled and of a pale hoary or silvery yellow, with often a rosaceous cheek")
October 14, 1859 ("I see a black snake, and also a striped snake, out this warm day.")
October 15, 1851 ("The muskrat-houses appear now for the most part to be finished. Some, it is true, are still rising. They line the river all the way. Some are as big as small hay cocks.")
October 15, 1856 ("Large fleets of maple and other leaves are floating on its surface as I go up the Assabet.")
October 16, 1855 ("How evenly the freshly fallen pine-needles are spread on the ground! quite like a carpet, as evenly strewn as if sifted over the whole surface, giving it a uniform neat fawn-color, tempting one to stretch himself on it. They rest alike on the few green leaves of weeds and the fallen cones and the cobwebs between them, in every direction across one another like joggle-sticks")
October 16, 1857 ("The large poplar (P. grandidentata) is now at the height of its change, – clear yellow, but many leaves have fallen")
October 16, 1857 ("The red maples are now fairly bare,")
October 16, 1857 ("Am surprised to find an abundance of witch-hazel, now at the height of its change, . . .The tallest bushes are bare, though in bloom, but the lowest are full of leaves, many of them green, but chiefly clear and handsome yellow of various shades, from a pale lemon in the shade or within the bush to a darker and warmer yellow with out.")
October 16, 1859 ("I see the new musquash-houses erected, conspicuous on the now nearly leafless shores. To me this is an important and suggestive sight. . .For thirty years I have annually observed, about this time or earlier, the freshly erected winter lodges of the musquash along the riverside, . . . It has an important place in my Kalendar. So surely as the sun appears to be in Libra or Scorpio, I see the conical winter lodges of the musquash rising above the withered pontederia and flags.")
October 16, 1859 ("The musquash is steadily adding to his winter lodge. There is no need of supposing a peculiar instinct telling him how high to build his cabin. He has had a longer experience in this river-valley than we. ")
October 16, 1857 ("I see red oaks now turned various colors, – red-brown or yellow-brown or scarlet-brown, – not commonly bright")
October 17, 1857("The swamp floor is covered with red maple leaves, many yellow with bright-scarlet spots or streaks")
October 17, 1858 ("There are many crisped but colored leaves resting on the smooth surface of the Assabet, . . .These leaves are chiefly of the red maple")
October 17, 1858 ("They remind me of ditches in swamps, whose surfaces are often quite concealed by leaves now. The waves made by my boat cause them to rustle, ")
October 17, 1858 ("Some late red maples are unexpectedly as fair and bright as ever, both scarlet and yellow, and still distance all competitors")
October 17, 1858 ("There is no brighter and purer scarlet (often running into crimson) and no softer and clearer yellow than theirs now, though the greater part have quite lost their leaves.")
October 17, 1858 ("I distinguish one large red oak — the most advanced one — from black ones, by its red brown, though some others are yellow-brown and greenish. ")
October 17, 1858 ("The large red oaks are about in their prime. Some are a handsome light scarlet, with yellow and green.")


October 18, 2015

October 19, 1853 ("The leaves have fallen so plentifully that they quite conceal the water along the shore, and rustle pleasantly when the wave which the boat creates strikes them.")
October 19, 1856 (“Both the white and black ash are quite bare, and some of the elms there.”)
October 19, 1856 ("The bass has lost, apparently, more than half its leaves")
October 20, 1857 ("The barberry bushes are now alive with, I should say, thousands of robins feeding on them.")
October 20, 1856 ("Thus, of late, when the season is declining, many birds have departed, and our thoughts are turned towards winter . . .we hear the jay again more frequently, and the chickadees are more numerous and lively and familiar and utter their phebe note")
October 21, 1858 ("The Populus grandidentata is quite yellow and leafy yet.")
October 21, 1858 ("The large sugar maples on the Common are in the midst of their fall to-day. ")
October 22, 1851("The pines, both white and pitch, have now shed their leaves, and the ground in the pine woods is strewn with the newly fallen needles.")
October 22, 1854 (" Bass trees are bare.")
October 23, 1852 (" A striped snake out.")
October 23, 1857("The fallen pine-needles, as well as other leaves, now actually paint the surface of the earth brown in the woods, covering the green and other colors, and the few evergreen plants on the forest floor stand out distinct and have a rare preeminence.")
October 23, 1852 ("October has been the month of autumnal tints")
October 23, 1852 ("A striped snake out.")
October 24, 1857 ("The sugar maple leaves are now falling fast.")
October 24, 1855 ("The rich yellow and scarlet leaves of the sugar maple on the Common now thickly cover the grass in great circles about the trees, and, half having fallen, look like the reflection of the trees in water lighting up the Common, reflecting light even to the surrounding houses.")
October 24, 1858 ("The Populus grandidentata and sugar maple . . .have lost the greater part of their leaves.")
October 25, 1853("The ground is strewn with pine-needles as sunlight")
October 25, 1858 ("Now that the leaves are fallen (for a few days), the long yellow buds (often red-pointed) which sleep along the twigs of the S. discolor are very conspicuous and quite interesting, already even carrying our thoughts forward to spring.")
October 26, 1854 ("Apple trees are generally bare, as well as bass, ash, elm, maple.")
October 28, 1857 ("I look up and see a male marsh hawk with his clean cut wings, that has just skimmed past above my head, – not at all disturbed, only tilting his body a little, now twenty rods off, with demi-semi-quaver of his wings. He is a very neat flyer")
October 28, 1860 ("See a very large flock of crows")
October 29, 1855 ("As I pass Merrick’s pasture, I see and count about a hundred crows advancing in a great rambling flock from the southeast and crossing the river on high, and cawing.")
October 29, 1857 ("A flock of about eighty crows flies ramblingly over toward the sowing, cawing and loitering and making a great ado, apparently about nothing.")
October 29, 1858 (“With the fall of the white pine, etc., the Pyrola umbellata and the lycopodiums, and even evergreen ferns, suddenly emerge as from obscurity. If these plants are to be evergreen, how much they require this brown and withered carpet to be spread under them for effect. Now, too, the light is let in to show them.”)
November 1, 1853 ("I notice crows flying southwesterly in a very long straggling flock, of which I see probably neither end.")
November 1, 1860 (" A striped snake basks in the sun amid dry leaves.")
November 3, 1857 ("I see on many rocks, etc., the seeds of the barberry, which have been voided by birds, – robins, no doubt, chiefly. How many they must thus scatter over the fields, spreading the barberry far and wide!")
November 16, 1852 ("Muskrat-houses completed. Interesting objects looking down a river-reach at this season, and our river should not be represented without one or two of these cones. They are quite conspicuous half a mile distant, and are of too much importance to be omitted in the river landscape")
November 19, 1850 ("Now that the grass is withered and the leaves are withered or fallen, it begins to appear what is evergreen the partridge-berry and checkerberry, and winter-green leaves even, are more conspicuous.”)

October 18, 2020
October 18, 2026
October 18, 2024

 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.


A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  October 18
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

https://tinyurl.com/HDT18Oct


 




Sunday, October 18, 2020

Chickadees and jays are heard from the shore as in winter.



October 18.

Up river to Bittern Cliff.

October 18, 2020
 (avesong)



A mild still but cloudy or rather misty afternoon,

The water is at present perfectly smooth and calm but covered with a kind of smoky or hazy film.

Nevertheless the reflections of distant woods though less distinct are softer seen through this smoky and darkened atmosphere.

I speak only of the reflections as seen in the broader bays and longer reaches of the river as at the Willow End.

The general impression made by the river landscape now is that of bareness and bleakness the black willow not yet the golden and the button bush having lost almost all their leaves the latter perhaps all and the last is covered with the fuzzy mikania blossoms gone to seed a dirty white.

There are a very few polygonums hydropiperaides and perhaps the unknown rose tinted one but most have withered before the frosts.

The vegetation of the immediate shore and the water is for the most part black and withered.

A few muskrat houses are going up abrupt and precipitous on one side sloped on the other I distinguish the dark moist layer of weeds deposited last night on what had dried in the sun,

The tall bulrush and the wool grass are dry and yellow except a few in deep water but the rainbow rush Juncus militaris is still green.

The autumnal tints though less brilliant and striking are perhaps quite as agreeable now that the frosts have somewhat dulled and softened them.

Now that the forest is universally imbrowned they make a more harmonious impression.

Wooded hillsides reflected in the water are particularly agreeable.

The undulation which the boat creates gives them the appearance of being terraced.

Chickadees and jays are heard from the shore as in winter.

Saw two or three ducks which fly up before and alight far behind.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 18, 1852

Chickadees and jays are heard from the shore as in winter. See  October 14, 1852 ("Jays and chickadees are oftener heard in the fall than in summer."); October 20, 1856 (" Thus, of late, when the season is declining, many birds have departed, and our thoughts are turned towards winter . . .we hear the jay again more frequently, and the chickadees are more numerous and lively and familiar and utter their phebe note, and the nuthatch is heard again, and the small woodpecker seen amid the bare twigs.");  November 3, 1858 ("The jay is the bird of October. I have seen it repeatedly flitting amid the bright leaves, of a different color from them all and equally bright, and taking its flight from grove to grove. It, too, with its bright color, stands for some ripeness in the bird harvest. And its scream! it is as if it blowed on the edge of an October leaf. It is never more in its element and at home than when flitting amid these brilliant colors.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Chickadee in Winter; A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau. The Blue Jay

Friday, October 18, 2019

The sour scent of decaying ferns

October 18

Rains till 3 p. m., but is warmer. 

October 18, 2019


P. M. — To Assabet, front of Tarbell's. 

Going by Dennis Swamp on railroad, the sour scent of decaying ferns is now very strong there. 

Rhus venenata is bare, and maples and some other shrubs, and more are very thin-leaved, as alder and birches, so that the swamp, with so many fallen leaves and migrating sparrows, etc., flitting through it, has a very late look. For falling, put the canoe birch with the small white. The beach plum is almost quite bare. The leaves of a chinquapin oak have not fallen. 

The long, curved, yellowish buds of the Salix discolor begin to show, the leaves falling; even the down has peeped out from under some. 

In the ditch along the west side of Dennis Swamp I see half a dozen yellow-spot turtles moving about. Probably they are preparing to go into winter quarters. 

I see one of the smaller thrushes to-day. 

Saw a tree-toad on the ground in a sandy wood-path. It did not offer to hop away, may have been chilled by the rain (?). It is marked on the back with black, some what in the form of the hylodes. 

Why can we not oftener refresh one another with original thoughts ? If the fragrance of the dicksonia fern is so grateful and suggestive to us, how much more refreshing and encouraging — re-creating — would be fresh and fragrant thoughts communicated to us fresh from a man's experience and life! I want none of his pity, nor sympathy, in the common sense, but that he should emit and communicate to me his essential fragrance, that he should not be forever repenting and going to church (when not otherwise sinning), but, as it were, going a-huckleberrying in the fields of thought, and enrich all the world with his visions and his joys. 

Why do you flee so soon, sir, to the theatres, lecture-rooms, and museums of the city? If you will stay here awhile I will promise you strange sights. You shall walk on water; all these brooks and rivers and ponds shall be your highway. You shall see the whole earth covered a foot or more deep with purest white crystals, in which you slump or over which you glide, and all the trees and stubble glittering in icy armor.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 18, 1859


Maples and some other shrubs, and more are very thin-leaved so that the swamp, with so many fallen leaves and migrating sparrows, etc., flitting through it, has a very late look.
See October 18, 1853 ("The red maples have been bare a good while. In the sun and this clear air, their bare ashy branches even sparkle like silver."); October 18, 1855 ("The maple swamps, bare of leaves, here and there about the meadow, look like smoke blown along the edge of the woods."); October 18, 1858 ("I am struck by the magical change which has taken place in the red maple swamps, . . . — all their splendor gone, wafted away, as it were, by a puff of wind, and they are the mere ghosts of trees, unnoticed by any, or, if noticed at all, like the smoke that is seen where a blaze is extinguished, ")

The sour scent of decaying ferns is now very strong. See  October 1, 1858 ("The cinnamon ferns are crisp and sour in open grounds"); October 2, 1857 ("In the more open swamp beyond, these ferns, recently killed by the frost and exposed to the sun, fill the air with a very strong sour scent"); October 2, 1859 ("I perceive in various places, in low ground, this afternoon, the sour scent of cinnamon ferns decaying. It is an agreeable phenomenon, reminding me of the season and of past years.")

The long, curved, yellowish buds of the Salix discolor begin to show. See October 24, 1860 ("I see those narrow pointed yellow buds now laid bare so thickly along the slender twigs of the Salix discolor, which is almost bare of leaves."); October 25, 1858 ("Now that the leaves are fallen (for a few days), the long yellow buds (often red-pointed) which sleep along the twigs of the S. discolor are very conspicuous and quite interesting, already even carrying our thoughts for ward to spring.")

Thursday, October 18, 2018

The large sugar maples on the Common are now at the height of their beauty

October 18. 

October 18, 2018


P. M. — To Smith’s chestnut grove and Saw Mill Brook. 

The large sugar maples on the Common are now at the height of their beauty. One, the earliest to change, is partly bare. This turned so early and so deep a scarlet that some thought that it was surely going to die. 

Also that one at the head of the Turnpike reveals its character now as far as you can see it. Yet about ten days ago all but one of these was quite green, and I thought they would not acquire any bright tints. A delicate but warmer than golden yellow is the prevailing color, with scarlet cheeks. They are great regular oval masses of yellow and scarlet. All the sunny warmth of the season seems to be absorbed in their leaves. 

There is an auction on the Common, but its red flag is hard to be discerned amid this blaze of color. The lowest and inmost leaves next the bole are of the most delicate yellow and green, as usual, like the complexion of young men brought up in the house.

Little did the fathers of the town anticipate this brilliant success when they caused to be imported from further in the country some straight poles with the tops cut off, which they called sugar maple trees, — and a neighboring merchant’s clerk, as I remember, by way of jest planted beans about them. Yet these which were then jestingly called bean-poles are these days far the most beautiful objects noticeable in our streets. They are worth all and more than they have cost, — though one of the selectmen did take the cold which occasioned his death in setting them out, — if only because they have filled the open eyes of children with their rich color so unstintedly so many autumns. 

We will not ask them to yield us sugar in the spring, while they yield us so fair a prospect in the autumn. Wealth may be the inheritance of few in the houses, but it is equally distributed on the Common. All children alike can revel in this golden harvest. These trees, throughout the street, are at least equal to an annual festival and holiday, or a week of such, — not requiring any special police to keep the peace, — and poor indeed must be that New England village’s October which has not the maple in its streets. 

This October festival costs no powder nor ringing of bells, but every tree is a liberty-pole on which a thousand bright flags are run up. Hundreds of children’s eyes are steadily drinking in this color, and by these teachers even the truants are caught and educated the moment they step abroad. It is as if some cheap and innocent gala-day were celebrated in our town every autumn, — a week or two of such days. 

What meant the fathers by establishing this living institution before the church, —this institution which needs no repairing nor repainting, which is continually “enlarged and repaired” by its growth? Surely trees should be set in our streets with a view to their October splendor. 

Do you not think it will make some odds to these children that they were brought up under the maples?  Indeed, neither the truant nor the studious are at present taught colors in the schools. These are instead of the bright colors in apothecary shops and city windows. It is a pity we have not more red maples and some hickories in the streets as well. Our paint-box is very imperfectly filled. Instead of, or besides, supplying paint-boxes, I would supply these natural colors to the young.

I know of one man at least, called an excellent and peculiarly successful farmer, who has thoroughly repaired his house and built a new barn with a barn cellar, such as every farmer seems fated to have, who has not a single tree or shrub of any kind about his house or within a considerable distance of it. 

No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery, — flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read. Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gunhouse be all the colors a village can display? 

A village is not complete unless it has these trees to mark the season in it. They are as important as a town clock. Such a village will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose; an essential part is wanting. Let us have willows for spring, elms for summer, maples and walnuts and tupelos for autumn, evergreens for winter, and oaks for all seasons. 

What is a gallery in a house to a gallery in the streets! I think that there is not a picture gallery in the country which would be worth so much to us as is the western view under the elms of our main street. They are the frame to a picture, and we are not in the dilemma of the Irishman who, having bought a costly gilt picture-frame at an auction, found himself obliged to buy a picture at private sale to put into it, for our picture is already painted with each sunset behind it. 

An avenue of elms as large as our largest, and three miles long, would seem to lead to some admirable place, though only Concord were at the end of it. Such a street as I have described Would be to the traveller, especially in October, an ever-changing panorama. 

A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheery prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. 

October 18, 2018

Show me two villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most desperate and hardest drinkers. What if we were to take half as much pains in protecting them as we do in setting them out,— not stupidly tie our horses to our dahlia stems? They are cheap preachers, permanently settled, which preach their half-century, and century, aye, and century and a half sermons, with continually increasing influence and unction, ministering to many generations of men, and the least we can do is to supply them with suitable colleagues as they grow infirm.  

Children are now everywhere playing with the brown and withered leaves of elms and buttonwoods, which strew the streets and are collected into heaps in the sluiceways. 

In the woods even the little pea-vine turns a delicate yellow and is more conspicuous than ever, and in the now neglected gardens the asparagus-beds, greenish without, glow yellow within, as if a fire were bursting out there. 

As I go down the Turnpike past Clintonia Swamp, I am struck by the magical change which has taken place in the red maple swamps, which just a fortnight ago were splendid masses of scarlet and yellow and crimson, rising amid the yet green trees, — pines and oaks, etc., —like immense flower-beds on one side of the town, visible for miles, attracting the eyes of all travellers; now, —though a few late ones are bright as ever in some places, — all their splendor gone, wafted away, as it were, by a puff of wind, and they are the mere ghosts of trees, unnoticed by any, or, if noticed at all, like the smoke that is seen where a blaze is extinguished, or as the red clouds at evening change suddenly to gray and black,— so suddenly their glory departs, — desolate gray twigs.

The Salix alba is a light and silvery green. 

Since the red maples generally fell, the chestnuts have been yellowing, and the oaks reddening and yellowing. The chestnuts are now in their prime, though many leaves are fallen. The forest, which showed but little ripeness ten days ago, except about its edges and here and there as you looked down on it from a height, is now seen to be generally of a mellow brownish yellow, like perfectly ripe fruit, which we know to be more perfectly ripe for being a little specked.

By the brook, witch-hazel, as an underwood, is in the height of its change, but elsewhere exposed large bushes are bare. Rhus Toxicodendron is fallen. The hornbeam is a greenish yellow, or yellow as it were dusted with green. The maple-leaved viburnum, now at its height, varies, with more or less of shade, from dark crimson through a delicate pale crimson to whitish. The sage willow, a light yellow, in prime, though hardly noticed amid the more conspicuous oaks. Larches have begun to change in water. 

As I come through Hubbard’s Woods I see the wintergreen, conspicuous now above the freshly fallen white pine needles. Their shining green is suddenly revealed above the pale-brown ground. I hail its cool unwithering green, one of the humbler allies by whose aid we are to face the winter. 

Saw, October 14th, a snake at Ball’s Hill, like a striped snake, but apparently yellow-spotted above and with a flatter head? 

Noticed a little snake, eight or nine inches long, in the rut in the road in the Lincoln woods. It was brown above with a paler-brown dorsal stripe, which was bounded on each side by a row of dark-brown or blackish dots one eighth inch apart, the opposite rows alternating; beneath, light cream-color or yellowish white. Evidently Storer’s Coluber ordinatus. It ran along in the deep sandy rut and would probably be run over there. 

See larks, with their white tail-feathers, fluttering low over the meadows these days. 

Minott was sitting outside, as usual, and inquired if I saw any game in my walks these days; since, now that he cannot go abroad himself, he likes to hear from the woods. He tried to detain me to listen to some of his hunting-stories, especially about a slut that belonged to a neighbor by the name of Billings, which was excellent for squirrels, rabbits, and partridges, and would always follow him when he went out, though Billings was “plaguy mad about it;” however, he had only to go by Billings’s to have the dog accompany him. B. afterward carried her up country and gave her away, the news of which almost broke Minott’s heart. He said he could have cried when he heard of it, for he had dreamed of her several nights. She was a plaguy good dog for squirrels, etc., but her pups were none of them equal to herself. It was not time for squirrels now, because the leaves were not off enough. 

He used sometimes to take his old king’s-arm on these excursions. It was heavy, but it was sure. His present gun has a flint lock and has often been repaired, and he said he did n’t suppose it would fetch more than a dollar if put up at auction now. But he would n’t take twenty dollars for it. He didn’t want to part with it. He liked to look at it. As leaves fall along the river and in the woods, the squirrels and musquash make haste to shelter and conceal themselves by constructing nests and cabins..

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 18, 1858

Neither the truant nor the studious are at present taught colors in the schools. Compare September 1, 1856 ("When colors come to be taught in the schools, as they should be, both the prism (or the rainbow) and these fungi should be used by way of illustration, and if the pupil does not learn colors, he may learn fungi, which perhaps is better.")


The large sugar maples on the Common are now at the height of their beauty. See October 6, 1858 ("only one of the large maples on the Common is yet on fire. "); October 18, 1856 ("The sugar maples are now in their glory, all aglow with yellow, red, and green.”); October 21, 1858 (“The large sugar maples on the Common are in the midst of their fall to-day.”); October 24, 1855 ("he rich yellow and scarlet leaves of the sugar maple on the Common now thickly cover the grass in great circles about the trees, and, half having fallen, look like the reflection of the trees ")

I am struck by the magical change which has taken place in the red maple swamps like the smoke that is seen where a blaze is extinguished,, — desolate gray twigs. See October 18, 1853 ("The red maples have been bare a good while. In the sun and this clear air, their bare ashy branches even sparkle like silver."); October 18, 1855 ("The maple swamps, bare of leaves, here and there about the meadow, look like smoke blown along the edge of the woods.");  October 16, 1857 ("The red maples are now fairly bare, ")

By the brook, witch-hazel, as an underwood, is in the height of its change, but elsewhere exposed large bushes are bare.  See October 16, 1857 ("Am surprised to find an abundance of witch-hazel, now at the height of its change,. . .. The tallest bushes are bare, though in bloom, but the lowest are full of leaves, many of them green, but chiefly clear and handsome yellow of various shades, from a pale lemon in the shade or within the bush to a darker and warmer yellow with out. Some are even a hue of crimson; some green, with bright yellow along the veins.")

Noticed a little snake brown above with a paler-brown dorsal stripe. See October 18, 1857 (" Snakes lie out now on sunny banks, amid the dry leaves, now as in spring. They are chiefly striped ones.")

See larks, with their white tail-feathers, fluttering low over the meadows these days. See October 18, 1855 ("I scare up a dozen larks at once. ")

I am struck by the 
magical change taken place 
in red maple swamps

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