July 30.
Am glad to press my way through Miles's Swamp. Thickets of choke-berry bushes higher than my head, with many of their lower leaves already red, alternating with young birches and raspberry, high blueberry andromeda (high and low), and great dense flat beds of Rubus sempervirens. Amid these, perhaps in cool openings, stands an island or two of great dark-green high blueberry bushes, with big cool blueberries, though bearing but sparingly this year.
Am glad to press my way through Miles's Swamp. Thickets of choke-berry bushes higher than my head, with many of their lower leaves already red, alternating with young birches and raspberry, high blueberry andromeda (high and low), and great dense flat beds of Rubus sempervirens. Amid these, perhaps in cool openings, stands an island or two of great dark-green high blueberry bushes, with big cool blueberries, though bearing but sparingly this year.
I am surprised and delighted to see this handsome profusion in hollows usually so barren and bushes commonly so fruitless.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 30, 1860
Thickets of choke-berry bushes higher than my head. See July 18, 1854 ("every bush and bramble bears its fruit; the sides of the road are a fruit garden; blackberries, huckleberries, thimble-berries, fresh and abundant, no signs of drought; all fruits in abundance; the earth teems."); July 18, 1852 ("The Cerasus Virginiana, or choke-cherry, is turning, nearly ripe."); August 5, 1856 ("Choke-cherries near . . . begin to be ripe, though still red. They are scarcely edible, but their beauty atones for it. See those handsome racemes of ten or twelve cherries each, dark glossy red, semi- transparent. You love them not the less because they are not quite palatable."); August 5, 1858 (" Choke-berries, fair to the eye but scarcely palatable, hang far above your head, weighing down the bushes."); August 26, 1860 ("I thread my way through the blueberry swamp in front of Martial Miles's. . . . And now a far greater show of choke-berries is here, rich to see.")
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