Frost last night in low ground.
The yards are now full of little spires of June-grass, with a brownish tinge but not quite in flower, trembling in the breeze. You see a myriad of fine parallel perpendicular stems about a foot high against the lighter green ground. It has shot up erect suddenly, and gives a new aspect to our yards.
The earth wears a new and greener vest.
The trees I notice which look late now are not only locusts and Holbrook Hollow aspens but tupelos, white ash, swamp white oaks, buttonwoods, and some elms, and even some red maples.
P. M. — To Gowing's Swamp and Copan.
Quite warm, and I see in the east the first summer shower cloud, a distinct cloud above, and all beneath to the horizon the general slate-color of falling rain, though distant, deepest in the middle.
The scheuchzeria out some days apparently, but only in the open pool in the midst of the swamp.
I see half a dozen heads of tortoises above the sphagnum there in the pool, and they have vermilion spots on the neck or hindhead, — a sort of orange vermilion. Are they the yellow-spot or wood tortoise ?
The European cranberry budded to bloom and grown one inch.
Comandra out, not long.
Red and white oak leafets handsome now.
Pe-pe heard, and probably considerably earlier.
It is remarkable that the aspen on Holbrook's road, though in most places it is the earliest indigenous tree to leaf, is the very latest, and the buds are hardly yet swollen at all. Can it be a distinct variety?
See the effect of frost on the sweet-fern either this morning or the 21st.
It evidently rains around us, and a little falls here, and the air is accordingly cooled by it, and at 5 p. m. the toads ring loud and numerously, as if invigorated by this little moisture and coolness.
Euphorbia cyparissias.
Cherry-birds.
7 p.m. — River one inch below summer level.
The earth wears a new and greener vest. See May 25, 1853 ("If we had leaped from last Wednesday to this, we should have been startled by the change.")
The first summer shower cloud, . . .all beneath to the horizon the general slate-color of falling rain. See note to May 11, 1854 ("There is a low, dark, blue-black arch, crescent-like, in the horizon, sweeping the distant earth there with a dusky, rainy brush.”)
It is remarkable that the aspen on Holbrook's road, though in most places it is the earliest indigenous tree to leaf, is the very latest, and the buds are hardly yet swollen at all. See June 7, 1860(" These poplars, and I think the oaks ... are retarded in their development, just as if they grew in a colder latitude. . .This hollow seems to be peculiar, — a dry depression between Beck Stow’s and the Great Meadows, — to be steadily cold and late")
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