The royal month of August

August 4.

Now the hardback and meadow-sweet reign. The mayweed, too, dusty by the roadside, and in the fields I scent the sweet-scented life-everlasting, which is half expanded. The yellow Bethlehem-star still, and the yellow gerardia, and a bluish "savory-leaved aster."


The grass is withered by the drought. The potatoes begin generally to flat down. The corn is tasselled out, turnips growing in its midst. The farmer with his barns and cattle and poultry and grain and grass. The smell of his hay.

It is now the royal month of August. 


As my eye rests on the blossom of the meadow-sweet in a hedge, I hear the note of a cricket, and am penetrated with the sense of autumn. I am as dry as the rye which is everywhere cut and housed, though I am drunk with the season's wine. 


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 4, 1851

A bluish"savory-leaved aster. See July 29, 1852 ("That common rigid narrow-leaved faint-purplish aster in dry woods by shrub oak path, Aster linariifolius of Bigelow, but it is not savory leaved. I do not find it in Gray."); December 26, 1855 (“Weeds in the fields and the wood-paths are the most interesting. Here are asters, savory-leaved, whose flat imbricated calyxes, three quarters of an inch over, are surmounted and inclosed in a perfectly transparent icebutton, like a glass knob, through which you see the reflections of the brown calyx.”); see also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Savory-leaved aster

It is now the royal month of August. See August 18, 1852 ("There is indeed something royal about the month of August"); August 10, 1853 ("August, royal and rich")

In the fields I scent the sweet-scented life-everlasting, which is half expanded. See August 4, 1852("I smell the fragrant life-everlasting, now almost out; another scent that reminds me of the autumn.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Aromatic Herbs