A time to see the character of the tree.

December 17

December 17, 2017

A piercing cold afternoon, wading in the snow.

R. Rice was going to Sudbury to put his bees into the cellar for fear they would freeze. He had a small hive; not enough to keep each other warm.

The pitch pine woods on the right of the Corner road.

The pitch pines hold the snow well. It lies now in balls on their plumes and in streaks on their branches, their low branches rising at a small angle and meeting each other.

A certain dim religious light comes through this roof of pine leaves and snow. It is a sombre twilight, yet in some places the sun streams in, producing the strongest contrasts of light and shade.

The winter morning is the time to see the woods and shrubs in their perfection, wearing their snowy and frosty dress. Even he who visits them half an hour after sunrise will have lost some of their most delicate and fleeting beauties. The trees wear their snowy burden but coarsely after midday, and it no longer expresses the character of the tree.

I observed that early in the morning every pine-needle was covered with a frosty sheath, but soon after sunrise it was all gone.

You walk in the pitch pine wood as under a penthouse. The stems and branches of the trees look black by contrast. You wander zigzag through the aisles of the wood, where stillness and twilight reign.

Improve every opportunity to express yourself in writing, as if it were your last.

I do not know but a pine wood is as substantial and as memorable a fact as a friend. I am more sure to come away from it cheered, than from those who come nearest to being my friends.

It is unfortunate for the chopper and the walker when the cold wind comes from the same side with the sun, for then he cannot find a warm recess in which to sit.

It is pleasant to walk now through open and stately white pine woods. Their plumes do not hold so much snow commonly, unless where their limbs rest or are weighed down on to a neighboring tree.

It is cold but still in their midst, where the snow is untracked by man, and ever and anon you see the snow-dust, shone on by the sun, falling from their tops and, as it strikes the lower limbs, producing innumerable new showers. For, as after a rain there is a second rain in the woods, so after a light snow there is a second snow in the woods, when the wind rises.

The branches of the white pine are more horizontal than those of the pitch, and the white streaks of snow on them look accordingly.

I perceive that the young black oaks and the red oaks, too, methinks, still keep their leaves as well as the white.

This piercing wind is so nearly from the west this afternoon that, to stand at once in a sheltered and a sunny place, you must seek the south-southeast side of the woods.

What slight but important distinctions between one creature and another! What little, but essential, advantages one enjoys over another! I noticed this afternoon a squirrel's nest high in the fork of a white pine. Thither he easily ascends, but many creatures strive in vain to get at him.

The lower branches of the hemlock point down, and even trail on the ground, the whole tree making a perfect canopy.

When they who have aspired to be friends cease to sympathize, it is the part of religion to keep asunder.

One of the best men I know often offends me by uttering made words — the very best words, of course, or dinner speeches, most smooth and gracious and fluent repartees, a sort of talking to Buncombe, a dash of polite conversation, a graceful bending, as if I were Master Slingsby of promising parts, from the University. O would you but be simple and downright! Would you but cease your palaver! It is the misfortune of being a gentleman and famous. The conversation of gentlemen after dinner! One of the best of men and wisest, to whom this diabolical formality will adhere. Repeating himself, shampooing himself! Passing the time of day, as if he were just introduced! No words are so tedious. Never a natural or simple word or yawn. It produces an appearance of phlegm and stupidity in me the auditor. I am suddenly the closest and most phlegmatic of mortals, and the conversation comes to naught. Such speeches as an ex-Member of Congress might make to an ex-Member of Parliament.

To explain to a friend is to suppose that you are not  intelligent of one another. If you are not, to what purpose will you explain?

My acquaintances will sometimes wonder why I will impoverish myself by living aloof from this or that company, but greater would be the impoverishment if I should associate with them.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 17, 1851

A squirrel's nest high in the fork of a white pine. Thither he easily ascends. See December 17, 1855 ("A remarkably fine, springlike morning . . . Methinks every squirrel will be out now. "); December 17, 1859 ("I see many tracks of squirrels . . . I see no nests in the trees, but numerous holes through the snow into the earth, whence they have emerged . . . they will dig down through the snow and come right upon a pine cone or a hickory-nut or an acorn, which you and I cannot do")

The pitch pines hold the snow well. It lies now in balls on their plumes and in streaks on their branches. See  January 30, 1841("The snow collects upon the plumes of the pitch pine in the form of a pineapple."); January 31, 1852 ("The value of the pitch pine in winter is that it holds the snow so finely. . . .It makes the most cheerful winter scenery beheld from the window, you know so well the nature of the coverts and the sombre light it makes"); January 19, 1855 ("The snow lay in great continuous masses  . . . On some pitch pines it lay in fruit-like balls as big as one’s head, like cocoanuts.. . . Under one pitch pine, which shut down to the ground on every side, you could not see the sky at all, but sat in a gloomy light as in a tent"); February 16, 1860 ("Snow, lodging on trees, — leaf, bough, and trunk. The pines are well laden with it. How handsome, though wintry, the side of a high pine wood, well grayed with the snow that has lodged on it, and the smaller pitch pines converted into marble or alabaster with their lowered plumes like rams' heads! The character of the wood-paths is wholly changed by the new-fallen snow..") See also December 19, 1851 (" Why should it be so pleasing to look into a thick pine wood where the sunlight streams in and gilds it?")

Improve every opportunity to express yourself in writing, as if it were your last. See July 7, 1851 ("The writer expressing his thought must be . . .well poised upon the facts, the experience, that secures his whole attention! All the faculties in repose but the one you are using, the whole energy concentrated in that. . . . I express adequately only the thought which I love to express."); August 19, 1851 ("How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!"); September 2, 1851 ("We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. . . . Expression is the act of the whole man. . . A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.”); September 4-7, 1851 (“I feel that the juices of the fruits which I have eaten, the melons and apples, have ascended to my brain and are stimulating it. They give me a heady force. Now I can write.”); November 9, 1851 ("Facts to tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought. . . Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought -- with these I deal."); November 12, 1851 ("Write often, write upon a thousand themes . . .");  February, 5, 1852 ("Time never passes so rapidly and unaccountably as when I am engaged in recording my thoughts"); February 10, 1852 ("Write while the heat is in you.")

After a light snow 

a second snow in the woods

when the wind rises.

Ever and anon 

 snow-dust, shone on by the sun, 

falling from pine tops 

The light of the setting sun suddenly lighting up the needles of the white pine

November 22.

November 22, 2021

The milkweed pods by the roadside are yet but half emptied of their silky contents. For months the gales are dispersing their seeds, though we have had snow.

Saw E. Hosmer this afternoon making a road for himself along a hillside (I being on my way to Saw Mill Brook ).  He turned over a stone, and I saw under it many crickets and ants still lively, which had gone into winter quarters there apparently. There were many little galleries leading under the stone, indenting the hardened earth like veins.  (Mem. Turn over a rock in midwinter and see if you can find them.) That is the reason, then, that I have not heard the crickets lately. I have frequently seen them lurking under the eaves or portico of a stone, even in midsummer.

At the brook the partridge-berries checker the ground with their leaves, now interspersed with red berries.

The cress at the bottom of the brook is doubly beautiful now, because it is green while most other plants are sere. It rises and falls and waves with the current.

There are many young hornbeams there which still retain their withered leaves.

As I returned through Hosmer's field, the sun was setting just beneath a black cloud by which it had been obscured, and as it had been a cold and windy afternoon, its light, which fell suddenly on some white pines between me and it, lighting them up like a shimmering fire, and also on the oak leaves and chestnut stems, was quite a circumstance. 

It was from the contrast between the dark and comfortless afternoon and this bright and cheerful light, almost fire.

The eastern hills and woods, too, were clothed in a still golden light.

The light of the setting sun, just emerged from a cloud and suddenly falling on and lighting up the needles of the white pine between you and it, after a raw and louring afternoon near the beginning of winter, is a memorable phenomenon.

A sort of Indian summer in the day, which thus far has been denied to the year.

After a cold gray day this cheering light almost warms us by its resemblance to fire.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 22, 1851

The milkweed pods by the roadside are yet but half emptied of their silky contents. See September 10, 1860 ("If you sit at an open attic window almost anywhere, about the 20th of September, you will see many a milkweed down go sailing by on a level with you, though commonly it has lost its freight, — notwithstanding that you may not know of any of these plants growing in your neighborhood."); September 21, 1856 ("Asclepias Cornuti discounting."); October 19, 1856 ("The Asclepias Cornuti pods are now apparently in the midst of discounting."); October 23, 1852 ("The milkweed (Syriaca) now rapidly discounting. The lanceolate pods having opened, the seeds spring out on the least jar, or when dried by the sun, and form a little fluctuating white silky mass or tuft, each held by the extremities of the fine threads, until a stronger puff of wind sets them free"); October 25, 1858 ("Near the end of the causeway, milkweed is copiously discounting."); November 20, 1858 ("The common milkweed (Asclepias Cornuti) and some thistles still discounting.") 

Gone into winter quarters there apparently . . . That is the reason, then, that I have not heard the crickets lately. See November 19, 1857 ("Turning up a stone on Fair Haven Hill, I find many small dead crickets about the edges, which have endeavored to get under it and apparently have been killed by the frost.") See also November 8, 1853 ("Perchance I heard the last cricket of the season yesterday. They chirp here and there at longer and longer intervals, till the snow quenches their song."); November 11, 1855 ("Frogs are rare and sluggish, as if going into winter quarters. A cricket also sounds rather rare and distinct. "); November 11, 1858 ("Hear a few of the common cricket on the side of Clamshell. Thus they are confined now to the sun on the south sides of hills and woods. They are quite silent long before sunset."); November 12, 1853 ("The last cricket, full of cheer and faith, piping to himself, as the last man might");November 13, 1851 ("Not a mosquito left. Not an insect to hum. Crickets gone into winter quarters."); November 13, 1858 (Frozen ground, ice, and snow have now banished the few remaining skaters (if there were any ?), crickets, and water-bugs.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Cricket in November (listening for the last cricket)

At the brook the partridge-berries checker the ground with their leaves, now interspersed with red berries. See November 16, 1850 (“The partridge-berry leaves checker the ground on the side of moist hillsides in the woods. Are they not properly called checker-berries ?”);   November 19, 1850 ("The partridge-berry and checkerberry, and winter-green leaves even, are more conspicuous.”); November 27, 1853 ("Checkerberries and partridge-berries are both numerous and obvious now"); December 3, 1853 ("The still green Mitchella repens and checkerberry in shelter, both with fruit"); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Partridge-berry (Mitchella Repens)

The light of the setting sun, just emerged from a cloud and suddenly falling on and lighting up the needles of the white pine. . . .After a cold gray day this cheering light almost warms us by its resemblance to fire. See November 23, 1851 ("Another such a sunset to - night as the last."); November 25, 1851 ("That kind of sunset which I witnessed on Saturday and Sunday is perhaps peculiar to the late autumn. The sun is unseen behind a hill. Only this bright white light like a fire falls on the trembling needles of the pine.") See also  August 28, 1860 ("Just before setting, the sun comes out into a clear space in the horizon and a sudden blaze of light falls on east end of the pond and the hillside. At this angle a double amount of bright sunlight reflects from the water up to the underside of the still very fresh green leaves of the bushes and trees on the shore and on Pine Hill, revealing the most vivid and varied shades of green."); October 21, 1857 (" It has just come out beneath a great cold slate-colored cloud that occupies most of the western sky . . . and now its rays, slanting over the hill in whose shadow I float, fall on the eastern trees and hills with a thin, yellow light like a clear yellow wine, but somehow it reminds me that now the hearth-side is getting to be a more comfortable place than out-of-doors. "); October 28, 1852 (“Suddenly the light of the setting sun yellows and warms all the landscape.”); October 28, 1857 ("All at once a low-slanted glade of sunlight from one of heaven’s west windows behind me fell on the bare gray maples, lighting them up with an incredibly intense and pure white light; then, going out there, it lit up some white birch stems south of the pond, then the gray rocks and the pale reddish young oaks of the lower cliffs, and then the very pale brown meadow-grass, and at last the brilliant white breasts of two ducks, tossing on the agitated surface far off on the pond, which I had not detected before. It was but a transient ray, and there was no sunshine afterward, but the intensity of the light was surprising and impressive, like a halo, a glory in which only the just deserved to live.. . . It was a serene, elysian light, in which the deeds I have dreamed of but not realized might have been performed. At the eleventh hour, late in the year, we have visions of the life we might have lived."); November 9, 1858 (“ We had a true November sunset after a dark, cloudy afternoon. The sun reached a clear stratum just before setting, beneath the dark cloud, though ready to enter another on the horizon’s edge, and a cold, yellow sunlight suddenly illumined the withered grass of the fields around, near and far, eastward. Such a phenomenon as, when it occurs later, I call the afterglow of the year."); November 10, 1858 ("A cool and silvery light is the prevailing one; dark-blue or slate-colored clouds in the west, and the sun going down in them. All the light of November may be called an afterglow. "); November 17, 1858 ("We are interested at this season by the manifold ways in which the light is reflected to us. . . . The setting sun, too, is reflected from windows more brightly than at any other season. “November Lights" would be a theme for me. "); November 17, 1859 (“How fair and memorable this prospect when you stand opposite to the sun, these November afternoons, and look over the red andromeda swamp”); November 18, 1857 ("The sunlight is a peculiarly thin and clear yellow, falling on the pale-brown bleaching herbage of the fields at this season. There is no redness in it. This is November sunlight."); November 20, 1858 ("The glory of November is in its silvery, sparkling lights reflected from a myriad of surfaces. See November 28, 1856 ("3.30 p. m., the sunlight reflected from the many ascending twigs . . . It is a true November phenomenon."); November 29, 1852 ("about 4 o'clock, the sun sank below some clouds, or they rose above it, and it shone out with that bright, calm, memorable light which I have else where described, lighting up the pitch pines and everything. "); November 29, 1853 (Suddenly a glorious yellow sunlight falls on all the eastern landscape. . . I think that we have some such sunsets as this, and peculiar to the season, every year. I should call it the russet afterglow of the year.""); December 25, 1858 ("Now that the sun is setting, all its light seems to glance over the snow-clad pond and strike the rocky shore under the pitch pines at the northeast end. Though the bare rocky shore there is only a foot or a foot and a half high as I look, it reflects so much light that the rocks are singularly distinct") 

After a cold gray day. See November 18, 1852 ("These are cold, gray days.")

My eye rested with pleasure on the white pines.

November 30

A cold afternoon

windy with some snow not yet

melted on the ground.

My eye wanders as

I sit on an oak stump by

an old cellar-hole.

Where is my home now?

Faint as an old cellar hole,

 is where we have lived.

Methinks that in my 

mood I am asking Nature 

to give me a sign.

Transient gladness.

I do not know what it is –

something that I see:

A recognition

from white pines now reflecting

a silvery light.

And by the old site

I sit on the stump of an

oak which once grew here.

November 30, 2016

Sunday. 

A rather cold and windy afternoon, with some snow not yet melted on the ground. 

Under the south side of the hill between Brown's and Tarbell's, in a warm nook, disturbed three large gray squirrels and some partridges, who had all sought out this bare and warm place. While the squirrels hid themselves in the tree-tops, I sat on an oak stump by an old cellar-hole and mused. 

This squirrel is always an unexpectedly large animal to see frisking about. 

My eye wanders across the valley to the pine woods which fringe the opposite side, and in their aspect my eye finds something which addresses itself to my nature. 

Methinks that in my mood I was asking Nature to give me a sign. 

I do not know exactly what it was that attracted my eye. I experienced a transient gladness, at any rate, at something which I saw. 

I am sure that my eye rested with pleasure on the white pines, now reflecting a silvery light, the infinite stories of their boughs, tier above tier, a sort of basaltic structure, a crumbling precipice of pine horizontally stratified. Each pine is like a great green feather stuck in the ground. A myriad white pine boughs extend themselves horizontally, one above and behind another, each bearing its burden of silvery sunlight, with darker seams between them, as if it were a great crumbling piny precipice thus stratified. 

On this my eyes pastured, while the squirrels were up the trees behind me. That, at any rate, it was that I got by my afternoon walk, a certain recognition from the pine, some congratulation. 

Where is my home? It is indistinct as an old cellar-hole, now a faint indentation merely in a farmer's field, which he has plowed into and rounded off its edges years ago, and I sit by the old site on the stump of an oak which once grew there. 

Such is the nature where we have lived. 

Thick birch groves stand here and there, dark brown (?) now with white lines more or less distinct. 

The Lygodium palmatum is quite abundant on that side of the swamp, twining round the goldenrods, etc., etc.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 30, 1851

My eye rested with pleasure on the white pines, now reflecting a silvery light. See November 11, 1851 ("There is a cold, silvery light on the white pines as I go through J.P. Brown's field near Jenny Dugan’s.”); December 21. 1851(“Sunlight on pine-needles is the phenomenon of a winter day.”); February 4, 1852 ("Now the white pine are a misty blue; anon a lively, silvery light plays on them, and they seem to erect themselves unusually. . . The sun loves to nestle in the boughs of the pine and pass rays through them."); February 5, 1852 ("The boughs, feathery boughs, of the white pines, tier above tier, reflect a silvery light against the darkness of the grove, as if both the silvery-lighted and greenish bough and the shadowy intervals of the shade behind belong to one tree.”); December 8, 1855 ("Yet it is cheering to walk there while the sun is reflected from far through the aisles with a silvery light from the needles of the pine.”); December 3, 1856 (“Tthe pine forest's edge seen against the winter horizon. . . .The silvery needles of the pine straining the light.”).

The Lygodium palmatum twining round the goldenrods. [CLIMBING FERN, or Hartford Fern (Lygodium palmatum) . A species of fern found, rarely, from Massachusetts to Kentucky and southward, remarkable for climbing or twining around weeds and shrubs ~ Wikisource.] See October 2, 1859 (“The climbing fern is perfectly fresh, — and apparently therefore an evergreen, — the more easily found amid the withered cinnamon and flowering ferns.”); May 1, 1859 ("The climbing fern is persistent, i. e. retains its greenness still, though now partly brown and withered.")

November 30. A Book of the Seasons,   by Henry Thoreau, November 30

An old cellar hole.

I sit on the stump of an

oak which once grew here.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, My eye rested with pleasure on the white pines.

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

https://tinyurl.com/HDT511130

The gray bodkin-pointed willow

April 8. 

Friday. 

I believe that I rarely hear the nuthatch's note from the elms toward evening, for when I heard it yesterday evening I was surprised. 

P. M. — To epigaea and Well Meadow. 

I see on the west side of the railroad causeway a peculiar early willow, now just beginning to bloom with the common Salix discolor there, perhaps (as I remember) some thirty rods beyond the wall, against A. Wheeler's land.

The catkins (sterile) are peculiarly long and tapering, and grayish or mouse-color, beginning to open low on one side, while the points have comparatively little down on them. I find no description of it. Perhaps rather more than one inch long. The most decidedly opening first on one side near the base of any. Call it the gray bodkin-pointed. 

As I stood by the foot of a middling-sized white pine the other day, on Fair Haven Hill, one of the very windy days, I felt the ground rise and fall under my feet, being lifted by the roots of the pine, which was waving in the wind; so loosely are they planted. 

We have had two more windy days, this and yesterday, though less so than the previous ones. 

We have had, most of the time, during this windy weather for a month past, when the wind was northwest, those peculiar brushy clouds which look as if a little snow or rain was falling in the northwest, but they prove to be wind chiefly. It has not rained, I think, with the wind in that quarter. 

These windy days the sparrows resort to the pines and peach trees on the east side of our house for shelter, and there they sing all together, — tree sparrows, fox-colored sparrows, and song sparrows. The F. hyemalis with them do not sing so much of late. The first two are most commonly heard together, the fine canary like twitter of the tree sparrow appearing to ripen or swell from time to time into the clear, rich whistle of the fox-colored sparrow, so that most refer both notes to one bird. 

What a pitiful business is the fur trade, which has been pursued now for so many ages, for so many years by famous companies which enjoy a profitable mono poly and control a large portion of the earth's surface, unweariedly pursuing and ferreting out small animals by the aid of all the loafing class tempted by rum and money, that you may rob some little fellow-creature of its coat to adorn or thicken your own, that you may get a fashionable covering in which to hide your head, or a suitable robe in which to dispense justice to your fellow-men! Regarded from the philosopher's point of view, it is precisely on a level with rag and bone picking in the streets of the cities. The Indian led a more respectable life before he was tempted to debase himself so much by the white man. Think how many musquash and weasel skins the Hudson's Bay Company pile up annually in their warehouses, leaving the bare red carcasses on the banks of the streams throughout all British America, — and this it is, chiefly, which makes it British America. It is the place where Great Britain goes a-mousing. 

We have heard much of the wonderful intelligence of the beaver, but that regard for the beaver is all a pretense, and we would give more for a beaver hat than to preserve the intelligence of the whole race of beavers. When we see men and boys spend their time shooting and trapping musquash and mink, we cannot but have a poorer opinion of them, unless we thought meanly of them before. Yet the world is imposed on by the fame of the Hudson's Bay and Northwest Fur Companies, who are only so many partners more or less in the same sort of business, with thousands of just such loafing men and boys in their service to abet them. On the one side is the Hudson's Bay Company, on the other the company of scavengers who clear the sewers of Paris of their vermin. 

There is a good excuse for smoking out or poisoning rats which infest the house, but when they are as far off as Hudson's Bay, I think that we had better let them alone. To such an extent do time and distance, and our imaginations, consecrate at last not only the most ordinary, but even vilest pursuits. The efforts of legislation from time to time to stem the torrent are significant as showing that there is some sense and conscience left, but they are insignificant in their effects. We will fine Abner if he shoots a singing bird, but encourage the army of Abners that compose the Hudson's Bay Company. One of the most remarkable sources of profit opened to the Yankee within a year is the traffic in skunk- skins. I learn from the newspapers — as from other sources (vide Journal of Commerce in Tribune for April 5, 1859) — that "the traffic in skunk-skins has suddenly become a most important branch of the fur trade, and the skins of an animal which three years ago were deemed of no value whatever, are now in the greatest demand.”

"The principal markets are Russia and Turkey, though some are sent to Germany, where they are sold at a large profit." Furs to Russia ! " The black skins are valued the most, and during the past winter the market price has been as high as one dollar per skin, while mottled skins brought only seventy cents." "Upward of 50,000 of these skins have been shipped from this city [New York] alone within the past two months." Many of them "are designed for the Leipsic sales, Leipsic being next to Novgorod, in Russia, the most important fur entrepot in Europe. 

The first intimation received in this market of the value of this new description of fur came from the Hudson's Bay Company, which, having shipped a few to Lon don at a venture, found the returns so profitable that they immediately prosecuted the business on an extensive scale." "The heaviest collections are made in the Middle and Eastern States, in some parts of which the mania for capturing these animals seems to have equalled the Western Pike's Peak gold excitement, men, women, and children turning out en masse for that purpose." And beside, "our fur dealers also receive a considerable sum for the fat of these animals!!"

Almost all smile, or otherwise express their contempt, when they hear of this or the rat-catching of Paris, but what is the difference between catching and skinning the skunk and the mink? It is only in the name. 

When you pass the palace of one of the managers of the Hudson's Bay Company, you are reminded that so much he got for his rat-skins. In such a snarl and contamination do we live that it is almost impossible to keep one's skirts clean. Our sugar and cotton are stolen from the slave, and if we jump out of the fire, it is wont to be into the frying-pan at least. It will not do to be thoughtless with regard to any of our valuables or property. When you get to Europe you will meet the most tender-hearted and delicately bred lady, perhaps the President of the Antislavery Society, or of that for the encouragement of humanity to animals, marching or presiding with the scales from a tortoise's back — obtained by laying live coals on it to make them curl up — stuck in her hair, rat-skin fitting as close to her fingers as erst to the rat, and, for her cloak, trimmings perchance adorned with the spoils of a hundred skunks, — rendered inodorous, we trust. Poor misguided woman! Could she not wear other armor in the war of humanity? When a new country like North America is discovered, a few feeble efforts are made to Christianize the na tives before they are all exterminated, but they are not found to pay, in any sense. But the energetic traders of the discovering country organize themselves, or rather inevitably crystallize, into a vast rat-catching society, tempt the natives to become mere vermin-hunters and rum-drinkers, reserving half a continent for the field of their labors. Savage meets savage, and the white man's only distinction is that he is the chief. She says to the turtle basking on the shore of a dis tant isle, " I want your scales to adorn my head " (though fire be used to raise them); she whispers to the rats in the wall, " I want your skins to cover my delicate fingers;" and, meeting an army of a hundred skunks in her morning walk, she says, "worthless vermin, strip off your cloaks this instant, and let me have them to adorn my robe with;" and she comes home with her hands muffled in the pelt of a gray wolf that ventured abroad to find food for its young that day. When the question of the protection of birds comes up, the legislatures regard only a low use and never a high use; the best-disposed legislators employ one, perchance, only to examine their crops and see how many grubs or cherries they contain, and never to study their dispositions, or the beauty of their plumage, or listen and report on the sweetness of their song. The legislature will preserve a bird professedly not because it is a beautiful creature, but because it is a good scavenger or the like. This, at least, is the defense set up. It is as if the question were whether some celebrated singer of the human race — some Jenny Lind or an other — did more harm or good, should be destroyed, or not, and therefore a committee should be appointed, not to listen to her singing at all, but to examine the contents of her stomach and see if she devoured any thing which was injurious to the farmers and gardeners, or which they cannot spare.1 

Cold as it is, and has been for several weeks, in all exposed places, I find it unexpectedly warm in perfectly sheltered places where the sun shines. And so it always is in April. The cold wind from the northwest seems distinct and separable from the air here warmed by the sun, and when I sit in some warm and sheltered hollow in the woods, I feel the cold currents drop into it from time to time, just as they are seen to ripple a small lake in such a situation from time to time. 

The epigaea is not quite out. The earliest peculiarly woodland herbaceous flowers are epigaea, anemone, thalictrum, and — by the first of May — Viola pedata. These grow quite in the woods amid dry leaves, nor do they depend so much on water as the very earliest flowers. 

I am, perhaps, more surprised by the growth of the Viola pedata leaves, by the side of paths amid the shrub oaks and half covered with oak leaves, than by any other growth, the situation is so dry and the surrounding bushes so apparently lifeless.

I noticed the other day a leaf on a young oak very rapidly revolving like a windmill, in the wind, not around its midrib for an axis, but about its broken stem, and I saw that this was the way those curiously broken and twisted and splintered petioles were made. It went round so fast as almost to appear like a circular figure.

 I find that the cress (Cardamine hirmta) which was so forward at Well Meadow a fortnight ago has been almost entirely browsed off by some creature, so that, if I had not detected it, I might have been surprised that it made no more show. 

The skunk-cabbage leaf-buds, which have just begun to unroll, also have been extensively eaten off as they were yet rolled up like cigars. These early greens of the swamp are thus kept down. Is it by the rabbit? 

I could see the tracks of some animal, apparently as large, very indistinct in the mud and water. Also an early kind of sedge there was cropped. 

The only animals at all likely to have done this are rabbits, musquash, woodchuck (though I doubt if the last has been about here long enough), and geese. Of these, I think it most likely to have been the first, and probably it was the same that gnawed the spathes and ate up the spadix of the cabbage some weeks ago. Woodchucks might nibble some plants now in warmer and drier places. These earliest greens must be very acceptable to these animals. Do partridges ever eat these things ? 

The Alnus serrulata is evidently in its prime considerably later than the incana, for those of the former which I notice to-day have scarcely begun, while the latter chance to be done. The fertile flowers are an interesting bright crimson in the sun. 

C. says that he found a musquash's skull (which he showed me) at the fox-burrow in Laurel Glen, from which it would appear that they kill the musquash. 

See the first bay-wing hopping and flitting along the railroad bank, but hear no note as yet. 

I saw Heavy Haynes fishing for trout down the Mill Brook this morning, cold and blustering as it was. He caught two. He is splitting pine-knots at the alms house door for spearing. Has already been spearing in Walden, and got some pickerel, all in the two little meadows there, and saw some pouts and perch. So the pickerel have come into those meadows, probably since January, for the bars were dry before. Perhaps they lie in shallow water, not for warmth, — for it is coldest there by night now, — but for food, the early insects and frogs which may soonest be found there!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 8, 1859

These windy days the sparrows resort to the pines and peach trees on the east side of our house for shelter, and there they sing all together, — tree sparrows, fox-colored sparrows, and song sparrows. See April 8, 1855 ("Also song sparrows and tree sparrows and F. hyemalis are heard in the yard. The fox-colored sparrow is also there”); and note to April 6, 1859 ("Tree sparrows, F. hyemalis, and fox-colored sparrows in company").  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Tree Sparrow;  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Fox-colored Sparrow;  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Dark-eyed Junco;   A Book of the Seasons, by  Henry Thoreau, the Song Sparrow (Fringilla melodia)

The first two are most commonly heard together so that most refer both notes to one bird.  See March 23, 1858 ("See a large flock of fox-colored sparrows flits by along an alder-row, uttering a faint chip like that of the tree sparrow.")  April 3, 1859 ("Their [fox-tailed sparrow's] note to-day is the chip much like a tree sparrow's")

Cold as it is, and has been for several weeks, in all exposed places, I find it unexpectedly warm in perfectly sheltered places where the sun shines. And so it always is in April. The cold wind from the northwest seems distinct and separable from the air here warmed by the sun. See April 13, 1855 ("A fair day, but a cool wind still, from the snow covered country in the northwest. It is, however, pleasant to sit in the sun in sheltered places."); April 26, 1857 ("How well adapted we are to our climate! In the winter we sit by fires in the house; in spring and fall, in sunny and sheltered nooks; in the summer, in shady and cool groves, or over water where the breeze circulates."); See also note to November 18, 1857 (“Now, as in the spring, we rejoice in sheltered and sunny places. ”)


The Alnus serrulata is evidently in its prime considerably later than the incana See April 8, 1855 ("I find also at length a single catkin of the Alnus incana, . . . Though I have looked widely, I have not found the alder out before."): See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Alders

I go looking for green radical leaves while the storm blows overhead, and I forget how the time is passing.

March 8. 

March 8, 2019

A rainy day. P. M. — To Hill in rain.

To us snow and cold seem a mere delaying of the spring. How far we are from understanding the value of these things in the economy of Nature! The earth is still mostly covered with ice and snow. 

As usual, I notice large pools of greenish water in the fields, on an icy bottom, which cannot owe their greenness to the reflected blue mingled with the yellowish light at sundown, as I supposed in the case of the green ice and water in clear winter days, for I see the former now at midday and in a rain-storm, when no sky is visible. I think that these green pools over an icy bottom must be produced by the yellow or common earth stain in the water mingling with the blue which is reflected from the ice. Many pools have so large a proportion of this yellow tinge as not to look green but yellow. The stain, the tea, of withered vegetation — grass and leaves — and of the soil supplies the yellow tint. 

But perhaps those patches of emerald sky, sky just tinged with green, which we sometimes see, far in the horizon or near it, are produced in the same way as I thought the green ice was, — some yellow glow reflected from a cloud mingled with the blue of the atmosphere. One might say that the yellow of the earth mingled with the blue of the sky to make the green of vegetation.

I see, under the pitch pines on the southwest slope of the hill, the reddish bud-scales scattered on the snow which fell on the 4th, and also settled an inch into it, and, examining, I find that in a great many cases the buds have been eaten by some creature and the scales scattered about, or, being opened, have closed over a cavity. 

Many scales rest amid the needles. 

There is no track on the snow, which is soft, but the scales must have been dropped within a day or two. I see near one pine, however, the fresh track of a partridge and where one has squatted all night. Tracks might possibly have been obliterated by the rapid melting of the snow the last day or two. 

Yet I am inclined to think that these were eaten by the red squirrel; or was it the crossbill? for this is said to visit us in the winter. Have I ever seen a squirrel eat the pine buds?

There is a fine freezing rain with strong wind from the north; so I keep along under shelter of hills and woods, along their south sides, in my india-rubber coat and boots. 

Under the south edge of Woodis Park, in the low ground, I see many radical leaves of the Solidago altissima and another — I am pretty sure it is the S. stricta — and occasionally also of the Aster imdulatus, and all are more or less lake beneath. The first, at least, have when bruised a strong scent. Some of them have recently grown decidedly. 

So at least several kinds of goldenrods and asters have radical leaves lake-colored at this season. 

The common strawberry leaves, too, are quite fresh and a handsome lake- color beneath in many cases. 

There are also many little rosettes of the radical leaves of the Epilobium coloratum, half brown and withered, with bright-green centres, at least. And even the under side of some mullein leaves is lake or crimson also. 

There is but a narrow strip of bare ground reaching a few rods into the wood along the south edge, but the less ground there is bare, the more we make of it. 



Such a day as this, I resort where the partridges, etc., do — to the bare ground and the sheltered sides of woods and hills — and there explore the moist ground for the radical leaves of plants, while the storm blows overhead, and I forget how the time is passing. If the weather is thick and stormy enough, if there is a good chance to be cold and wet and uncomfortable, in other words to feel weather-beaten, you may consume the afternoon to advantage thus browsing along the edge of some near wood which would scarcely detain you at all in fair weather, and you will be as far away there as at the end of your longest fair-weather walk, and come home as if from an adventure. 

There is no better fence to put between you and the village than a storm into which the villagers do not venture out. 

I go looking for green radical leaves.

What a dim and shadowy existence have now to our memories the fair flowers whose localities they mark! How hard to find any trace of the stem now, after it has been flattened under the snows of the winter! I go feeling with wet and freezing fingers amid the withered grass and the snow for these prostrate stems, that I may reconstruct the plant. 

But greenness so absorbs our attention that sometimes I do not see the former rising from the midst of those radical leaves when it almost puts my eyes out.

The shepherd's-purse radical leaves are particularly bright. 

I see there a dead white pine, some twenty-five feet high, which has been almost entirely stripped of its bark by the woodpeckers. 

Where any bark is left, the space between it and the wood is commonly closely packed with the gnawings of worms, which appear to have consumed the inner bark. But where the bark is gone, the wood also is eaten to some depth, and there are numerous holes penetrating deep into the wood. 

Over all this portion, which is almost all the tree, the woodpeckers have knocked off the bark and enlarged the holes in pursuit of the worms.

The fine rain with a strong north wind is now forming a glaze on my coat. When I get home the thermometer is at 29°. So a glaze seems to be formed when a fine rain is falling with the thermometer very little below the freezing-point.

Men of science, when they pause to contemplate "the power, wisdom, and goodness" of God, or, as they sometimes call him, "the Almighty Designer," speak of him as a total stranger whom it is necessary to treat with the highest consideration. They seem suddenly to have lost their wits.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 8, 1859


I see near one pine, however, the fresh track of a partridge and where one has squatted all night. See March 8, 1857  ("A partridge goes off from amid the pitch pines.")

Such a day as this, I explore the moist ground for the radical leaves of plants, while the storm blows overhead, and I forget how the time is passing. See February, 5, 1852 ("Time never passes so rapidly and unaccountably as when I am engaged in recording my thoughts. The world may perchance reach its end for us in a profounder thought, and Time itself run down.”); January 27, 1858 ("Time never passes so quickly and unaccountably, as when I am engaged in composition, i. e. in writing down my thoughts. Clocks seem to have been put forward."); see April 29, 1852 (“The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.”)

If there is a good chance to be cold and wet and uncomfortable, in other words to feel weather-beaten, you may consume the afternoon to advantage. See December 25, 1856 ("Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary."); February 28, 1852 (“To get the value of the storm we must be out a long time and travel far in it, so that it may fairly penetrate our skin, . . . and there be no part in us but is wet or weather beaten, - so that we become storm men instead of fair weather men.”)

The shepherd's-purse radical leaves are particularly bright. See January 23, 1855 ("The radical leaves of the shepherd’s-purse, seen in green circles on the water-washed plowed grounds, remind me of the internal heat and life of the globe, anon to burst forth anew")

Men of science speak of him as a total stranger whom it is necessary to treat with the highest consideration. They seem suddenly to have lost their wits. See March 5, 1852 ("It is encouraging to know that, though every kernel of truth has been carefully swept out of our churches, there yet remains the dust of truth on their walls, so that if you should carry a light into them they would still, like some powder-mills, blow up at once.")

The best fence between

you and the village – a storm

they will not venture.

Two Mountain-ash.

June 25.

 

June 25, 2017

Most of the mountain-ash trees on the street are the European, as Prichard's, Whiting's, etc. (Pyrus Aucuparia is the European). The American ones in Cheney's (from Winchendon) row have only opened within a day or two; that American one in Mrs. Hoar's yard, apparently a week. The fruit of the European one is as large as small peas already.

P. M. — To Gowing's Swamp.

 

June 25, 2017 

White pine effete.

Gaylussacia dumosa apparently in a day or two.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 25, 1857

The mountain-ash trees. See June 12, 1857 ("The American mountain-ash not yet out . . . Nuttall says its leaves are at last very smooth. I have hitherto observed the Pyrus aucuparia, or European, at Prichard's, Whiting's, etc.”)

White pine effete. See 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, 1858 ("The ground under the white pines is now strewn with the effete flowers, like an excrement.”) and note to June 21, 1856 (“Much pine pollen is washed up on the northwest side of the pond.”); July 1, 1852 ("The path by the wood-side is red with the effete staminiferous flowers of the white pine.")

July 25. See A Book of the Seasons,, by Henry Thoreau, June 25

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 © 2009-2021

To Mt. Misery, counting tree rings.

November 13.

A white birch (Betula alba) west edge of Trillium Wood, two feet seven inches circumference at three feet.

On the Moore and Hosmer lot, cut in’52 (I think), west of railroad, south of Heywood’s meadow, an oak stump fifteen and a half inches in diameter, ninety three rings; another, white oak, fourteen and a half inches in diameter, ninety-four rings.

In the first case there were two stumps of same age, evidently sprouts from an older stock, they curving around it, but I observed only a slight hollow where apparently the old stump had been.

In the second case there was but one stump, but that rather concave on one side where there was a deep hollow in the earth.

In both of these cases the tenacious mould, covered slightly with a fine greenish lichen, appeared heaved up about where the old stump had been.

It was a good hundred years since that old stump was cut.

The inmost rings of the recent stumps were coarse, as with sprouts.

Near these apparently a black (?) oak, or maybe a chestnut (?), twenty inches in diameter and seventy four rings, but the centre was within four inches of the westerly side.

A white oak standing by the fence west of Spanish Brook dam on Morse’s lot, circumference six feet and two twelfths at three feet.

Near by a hornbeam a foot and a half in circumference at three feet.

J. Baker’s pitch pines south of upper wood-path north of his house abundantly confirm the rule of young white pines under pitch pines. That fine young white pine wood west of this is partly of these which were left when the pitch pines were cut.

Baker’s hill between farm and Pleasant Meadow, oak (apparently a black), diameter twenty-six, seventy one rings.

The stumps here were cut some five or six years ago and have fifty to sixty rings.

Commonly no sprouts from those of this age here.

On top of Mt. Misery, looked again at those old stumps (of the 8th).

There are three or four quite plain, just showing themselves above the surface, with rounded, flaky, decaying and crumbling edge, close to the recent stump of the shoot or shoots which sprang from them and which were cut last winter.

One of these recent stumps, counted to-night, gives sixty years, but the first two or three are uncertain.

Hence this old stump is as old as the century.

There are several perfectly dry and exposed stumps on bare rocky shelves, or else lying on rocks on their sides, quite well preserved and showing the marks of the axe, which I have but little doubt are of the same age , preserved by being tipped out of the earth many years ago .

Am surprised at the very slow growth of some hickory (stumps) along the wall on the top of this hill, — so fine I did not count quite accurately.

One was 10 inches in diameter with 104 rings
               6 1/2 "                        about 115
             14 1/2 "                                   84  
             11 3/4 "                                 121 


I think that the oak stumps have lasted unusually long on this hill, on account of their having originally grown slowly here and since been so much exposed to the light and air over and amid the rocks.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 13, 1860

A white birch two feet seven inches circumference at three feet. See September 2, 1857 ("The third, or largest, yellow birch, at the cellar, was, at three feet from the ground . . . ten feet nine inches in circumference"); July 24, 1857 ("I measured a canoe birch, five and a half feet in circumference at two and a half from the ground.")

J. Baker’s pitch pines south of upper wood-path north of his house abundantly confirm the rule of young white pines under pitch pines. See April 28, 1856 ("Let me look at the site of some thick pine woods. . .and see what has sprung up. . ."); May 10, 1856 ("Where the pitch pines were cut some years ago on Thrush Alley, I now see birches, oaks, and pitch and white pines."); October 29, 1860 ("Henry Shattuck’s is a new pitch pine wood, say thirty years old. . . .It is a remarkable proof of my theory, for it contains thousands of little white pines but scarcely one little pitch pine. It is also well stocked with minute oak seedlings."); ; November 19, 1869 ("My rule of small white pines under pitch pines is so true of E. Hoar's land that he very easily got a hundred white pines there to set by his house. "); November 26, 1860 (" But where did the pitch pines stand originally? Who cleared the land for its seedlings to spring up in? Who knows but the fires or clearings of the Indians may have to do with the presence of these trees there?"); November 29, 1860 ("The small pitch pine grove above the western Fair Haven spring fully proves my theory of white pines in pitch pine. . . Young white pines are rapidly spreading up Fair Haven Hill-side, though the nearest seed- bearing white pines are across the river, thirty to sixty rods off. ")

Apple time

September 28

At Cattle-Show today I noticed that the ladies' apple (small, one side green, the other red, glossy) and maiden's-blush (good size, yellowish-white with a pink blush) were among the handsomest.

The pumpkin-sweet one of the largest exhibited. The ram's horn was a handsome uniformly very dark purple or crimson. 

The white pine seed is very abundant this year, and this must attract more pigeons. Coombs tells me that he finds the seed in their crops. Also that he found with in a day or two a full-formed egg with shell in one. 

In proportion as a man has a poor ear for music, or loses his ear for it, he is obliged to go far for it or fetch it from far, and pay a great price for such as he can hear. Operas, ballet-singers, and the like only affect him. It is like the difference between a young and healthy appetite and the appetite of an epicure, between a sweet crust and a mock-turtle soup.

As the lion is said to lie in a thicket or in tall reeds and grass by day, slumbering, and sallies at night, just so with the cat. She will ensconce herself for the day in the grass or weeds in some out-of-the-way nook near the house, and arouse herself toward night.


H.D. Thoreau, Journal September 28, 1859

September 28.  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, September 28

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Scarlet berry season.

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