Misty muggy musty dog-day mushrooms

August 14.

To Cliffs. I perceive the scent of the earliest ripe apples in my walk. How it surpasses all their flavors! When I come out on to the wet rock by the juniper, all green with moss and with the driving mists beneath me, — for the sun did not come out till seven, — it reminds me of mountain-tops which I have visited.

In the low woodland paths full of rank weeds, there are countless great fungi of various forms and colors, the produce of the warm rains and muggy weather of a week ago, now rapidly dissolving. The ground is covered with foul spots where they have dissolved, and for most of my walk the air is tainted with a musty, carrion like odor, in some places very offensive, so that I at first suspected a dead horse or cow. They impress me like humors or pimples on the face of the earth, toddy- blossoms, by which it gets rid of its corrupt blood. A sort of excrement they are.

It never occurred to me before to-day that those different forms belong to one species. Some I see just pushing up in the form of blunt cones, thrusting the leaves aside, and, further along, some which are perfectly flat on top, probably the same in full bloom, and others decaying and curved up into a basin at the edges.

This misty and musty dog-day weather has lasted now nearly a month. 

 Locust days, — sultry and sweltering. I hear them even till sunset. The usually invisible but far-heard locust. The toads probably ceased about the time I last spoke of them. Bullfrogs, also, I have not heard for a long time. I hear no wood thrushes for a week. The pea-wai still, and sometimes the golden robin. Methinks the reign of the milkweeds is over.

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

I perceive the scent of the earliest ripe apples in my walk. See August 18, 1852 ("Ripe apples here and there scent the air.”); August 9, 1851 ("Now the earliest apples begin to be ripe, but none are so good to eat as some to smell.”)

In the low woodland paths full of rank weeds, there are countless great fungi of various forms and colors. See August 14, 1856 ("The low wood-paths are strewn with toadstools now.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Season for Fungi  

 
This misty and musty dog-day weather has lasted now nearly a month. See August 14, 1852 ("There is such a haze that I cannot see the mountains.”); July 30, 1856 (“The atmosphere thick, mildewy, cloudy. It is difficult to dry anything. The sun is obscured, yet we expect no rain”)

August 14, 2013

The whole earth is fragrant as a bouquet

May 16

 May 16. The last four days have been a May storm, and this day is not quite fair yet. As I remember, there was the long storm and freshet near the end of April, then the warm, pleasant, hazy days, then this May storm, cooler but not cold as the first. 

The air is sweet with fragrance.  

There are many insects now. I hear a hummingbird about the columbines. 

Methinks the columbine here is more remarkable for growing out of the seams of the rocks than the saxifrage, and perhaps better deserves the latter name. It is now in its prime, ornamental for nature's rockwork. 

Avesong May 14, 2023

It is a beautiful sight to see large clusters of splendid scarlet and yellow flowers growing out of a seam in the side of this gray cliff. 

Avesong April 24,  2023

The sessile-leaved bellwort, with three or four delicate pale-green leaves with reflexed edges, on a tender-looking stalk, the single modest-colored flower gracefully drooping, neat, with a fugacious, richly spiced fragrance, facing the ground, the dry leaves, as if unworthy to face the heavens. It is a beautiful sight, a pleasing discovery,  the first of the season, -- growing in a little straggling company, in damp woods or swamps. When you turn up the drooping flower, its petals make a perfect geometrical figure, a six-pointed star. 

These faint, fugacious fragrances are pleasing. You are not always quite sure that you perceive any.

The earth reflects the heavens in violets.

I can now pluck a sprig of fresh sweet-briar and feed my senses with that. 

The whole earth is fragrant as a bouquet held to your nose.  

Here on this causeway is the sweetest fragrance I have perceived this season, blown from the newly flooded meadows. I cannot imagine what there is to produce it. No nosegay can equal it. It is ambrosially, nectareally, fine and subtile, for you can see naught but the water, with green spires of meadow grass rising above it. Yet no flower from the Islands of the Blessed could smell sweeter. Yet I shall never know whence it comes . . . A fine, delicious fragrance, which will come to the senses only when it will . . .

I hear the peepers and toads again this evening. It gradually clears up at the end of this May storm. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 16, 1852

Methinks the columbine here is more remarkable for growing out of the seams of the rocks than the saxifrage, and perhaps better deserves the latter name . . .[ Latin, saxifragus breaking rocks, from saxum rock + frangere to break]. . . See May 12, 1855 ("Under Lee’s Cliff, . . . am surprised to find some pale-yellow columbines. . .")

The sessile-leaved bellwort . . . a beautiful sight, a pleasing discovery, the first of the season. See .May 14, 1852 ("The Uvularia sessilifolio, a drooping flower with tender stems and leaves; the latter curled so as to show their under sides hanging about the stems, as if shrinking from the cold"); May 16, 1858 (" The Uvularia perfoliata, which did not show itself at all on the 3d, is now conspicuous") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Bellworts

The whole earth is fragrant as a bouquet held to your nose. See See May 16, 1854 ("The earth is all fragrant as one flower. And bobolinks tinkle in the air. Nature now is perfectly genial to man.”)