September 18.
Dr. Bartlett handed me a paper to-day, desiring me to subscribe for a statue to Horace Mann. I declined, and said that I thought a man ought not take up any more room in the world after he was dead. We shall lose one advantage of a man's dying if we are to have a statue of him forthwith.
This is probably meant to be an opposition statue to that of Webster. At this rate they will crowd the streets with them. A man will have to add a clause to his will, " No statue to be made of me."
There is an abundant crop of cones on the white pines this year, and they are now for the most part brown and open. They make a great show even sixty rods off. The tops of the high trees for six or ten feet downward are quite browned with them, hanging straight downward. It is worth the while to observe this evidence of fertility, even in the white pine, which commonly we do not regard as a fruit-bearing tree. It is worth a long walk to look from some favorable point over a pine forest whose tops are thus covered with the brown cones just opened, — from which the winged seeds have fallen or are ready to fall. It is really a rich and interesting sight.
How little observed are the fruits which we do not use! How few attend to the ripening and dispersion of the pine seed!
From the observation of this year I should say that the fringed gentian opened before the witch-hazel, for though I know many more localities of the last than the first, I do not find the last out till to-day, and it cannot have been out but a day or two.
The witch-hazel fruit appears to be now opening. The double-fruited stone splits and reveals the two shining black oblong seeds. It has a peculiarly formed nut, in pretty clusters, clothed, as it were, in close-fitting buckskin, amid the now yellowing leaves.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 18, 1859
[A bronze statue of Henry David Thoreau now stands in front of a replica of the cabin in which he lived at Walden Pond. ~ ZPHX 9/18/2009]
How little observed are the fruits which we do not use! See
September 3, 1853 ("Now is the season for those comparatively rare but beautiful wild berries which are not food for man"If we so industriously collect those berries which are sweet to the palate, it is strange that we do not devote an hour in the year to gathering those which are beautiful to the eye. It behooves me to go a-berrying in this sense once a year at least. To fill my basket with the neglected but beautiful fruit of the various species of cornels and viburnums, poke, arum, medeola, thorns, etc. Berries which are as beautiful as flowers, but far less known, the fruit of the flower");
September 3, 1856 ("Gather four or five quarts of
Viburnum nudum berries, now in their prime, attracted more by the beauty of the cymes than the flavor of the fruit.");
September 26, 1859 ("Is it not a reproach that so much that is beautiful is poisonous to us?. . . But why should they not be poisonous? Would it not be in bad taste to eat these berries which are ready to feed another sense? ")
How few attend to the ripening and dispersion of the pine seed!. . . . See November 4, 1855 ("I have failed to find white pine seed this year, though I began to look for it a month ago. The cones were fallen and open. Look the first of September. "); October 8, 1856 ("At length I discover some white pine cones, a few, on Emerson Heater Piece trees. They are all open, and the seeds, all the sound ones but one, gone. So September is the time to gather them."); September 9, 1857 ("To the Hill for white pine cones. Very few trees have any. I can only manage small ones, fifteen or twenty feet high, climbing till I can reach the dangling green pickle-like fruit in my right hand, while I hold to the main stem with my left"); September 16, 1858 ("
I see green and closed cones beneath, which the squirrels have thrown down. On the trees many are already open. Say within a week have begun.");
September 18, 1860 (". White pine cones (a small crop), and all open that I see.")
