Dog-day weather as for clouds, but less smoky than before the rains of ten days ago.
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| August 19, 2016 |
I see Hypericum Canadense and mutilum abundantly open at 3 P. M. Apparently they did not bear the dry, hot weather of July so well. They are apparently now in prime, but the Sarothra is not open at this hour. The perforatum is quite scarce now, and apparently the corymbosum; the ellipticum quite done. The small hypericums have a peculiar smart, somewhat lemon-like fragrance, but bee-like.
The dangle-berries in Hubbard's Grove have a peculiar, not very pleasant, flavor and a tough skin. I see white buds on swamp-pink, just formed, also green checkerberries about grown.
In the radula swamp the sweet scent of clethra; some peculiarly bright orange toadstools with a wavy edge. Now for spotted aralia leaves, brown pupils with yellow iris amid the green.
The whorled polygala is a plant almost universally dispersed but inconspicuous.
I spent my afternoon among the desmodiums and lespedezas, sociably. The further end of Fair Haven Hill-side is a great place for them. All the lespedezas are apparently more open and delicate in the woods, and of a darker green, especially the violet ones. When not too much crowded, their leaves are very pretty and perfect.
Ivy berries dry and apparently ripe on the rocks (Toxicodendron) .
Low blueberries, though some are a very little wilted, are very sweet and good as well as abundant. Huckleberries getting to be suspected.
What countless varieties of low blackberries! Here, in this open pine grove, I pluck some large fresh and very sweet ones when they are mostly gone without. So they are continued a little longer to us.
Lobelia spicata still.
The wind rises and the pasture thistle down is blown about.
Lespedezas and desmodiums are now generally in prime. The latter are an especially interesting family, with commonly such delicate, spreading panicles, the plants themselves in their distribution so scattered and inobvious, and the open and spreading panicle of commonly verdigris-green flowers (in drying) make them to be unobserved when you are near them. The panicle of flowers often as large or larger than all the rest of the plant, with their peculiar chain-like seed- pods, rhomboidal or semiorbicular, or with concave backs. They love dry hillsides. They are not so abundant, after all, but I feel an agreeable surprise as often as I come across a new locality for desmodiums. Rarely find one kind without one or two more species near, their great spreading panicles, yet delicate, open, and airy, occupying the August air. Like raking masts with countless guys slanted far over the neighboring plants.
Some of these desmodiums, the paniculatum, Marilandicum, nudiflorum, rigidum, and Dillenii, are so fine and inobvious that a careless observer would look through their thin flowery panicles without observing any flower at all.
The flowery beds of D. Marilandicum reveal themselves to me like a blue-green mist or gauze veil spread on the grass. I find them abundant in some places where I am sure there were none last year. They are outsiders, few and far between, further removed from man's walks than most plants, considering that there is such a variety of them. A dry, thin family of many species, nowhere abundant, yet widely dispersed, looking out from dry hillsides and exercising their dry wit on the race of man. The lespedezas and D. Canadense, more stiff and wand-like, nearer to man and his paths. The D. rigidum, Dillenii, etc., etc., more spreading and open, thin and fleeting and dispersed like the aborigines. They occupy the same dry soil, too.
When huckleberries are getting stale on dry hill sides, amid the huckleberry bushes and in sprout-lands and by paths you may observe them. The broad meshes of their panicles rarely catch the eye. There is some thing witch-like about them; though so rare and remote, yet evidently, from those bur-like pods, expecting to come in contact with some travelling man or beast without their knowledge, to be transported to new hill sides; lying in wait, as it were, to catch by the hem of the berry-pickers' garments and so get a lift to new quarters. They occupy a great deal of room, but are the less obvious for it. They put their chains about you, and they cling like savage children to their mother's back or breast. They escape your observation, as it were under bare poles. You only notice as far up as their green sails are set, perchance, or to the cross-trees, not the tall, tapering, raking spars, whence are looped the life-lines and halyards. Or it is like that slanting mast and rigging in navy-yards where masts are inserted.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 19, 1856
I see Hypericum Canadense and mutilum abundantly open at 3 P. M. August 12, 1856 ("11 a. m. — To Hill. The Hypericum mutilum is well out at this hour."); August 15, 1859 ("Hypericum Canadense, Canadian St. John's-wort, distinguished by its red capsules."); August 17, 1856 ("Hypericum Canadense well out at 2 p. m."); August 27, 1856 ("Hypericum Canadense and mutilum now pretty generally open at 4 P.M., thus late in the season"); September 15, 1856 ("The hypericums generally appear to be now about done. I see none."); October 2, 1856 ("Now and then I see a Hypericum Canadense flower still. The leaves, . . . turned crimson."); October 19, 1856 ("The hypericums — the whole plant — have now generally been killed by the frost") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, St. Johns-wort
(Hypericum)
(Hypericum)
The small hypericums have a peculiar smart, somewhat lemon-like fragrance, but bee-like. See July 26, 1856 ("The pod of the ellipticum, when cut, smells like a bee."); August 12, 1856 (“The sarothra — as well as small hypericums generally — has a lemon scent.”); August 30, 1856 ("The sarothra is now apparently in prime on the Great Fields, and comes near being open now, at 3 p. m. Bruised, it has the fragrance of sorrel and lemon, rather pungent or stinging, like a bee.”)
What countless varieties of low blackberries! . . . they are continued a little longer to us. See July 31, 1856 ("How thick the berries — low blackberries, Vaccinium vacillans, and huckleberries — on the side of Fair Haven Hill ! The berries are large, for no drought has shrunk them. They are very abundant this year to compensate for the want of them the last."); August 10, 1856 ("There are more varieties of blackberries between the low and the high than I take notice of. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Blackberries
Desmodiums . . . are an especially interesting family, with commonly such delicate, spreading panicles. . . unobserved when you are near them. See July 31, 1853 ("Desmodium nudiflorum, naked-flowered tick-trefoil, some already with loments round-angled; probably more than a week; the tall, naked flowering stems, some-times more than two feet high . . . on the south side of Heywood Peak, a warm dry sprout-land, where I suspect they were not to be found before the wood was cut."); August 7, 1856 ("At Blackberry Steep, apparently an early broad-leafed variety of Desmodium paniculatum, two or three days. This and similar plants are common there"); August 6, 1856 (“Desmodium rotundifolium, some days at least.”); August 7, 1856 (“At Blackberry Steep . . . D. rotundifoliumis there abundant;. . . as also at Heywood Peak. All these plants seem to love a dry open hillside, a steep one.”); August 26, 1856 ("These desmodiums are so fine and inobvious that it is difficult to detect them. I go through a grove in vain, but when I get away, find my coat covered with their pods. They found me, though I did not them.”); September 5, 1860 ("Having walked through a quantity of desmodium under Ball's Hill we found our pants covered with its seeds to a remarkable and amusing degree."); September 10, 1851 ("The Desmodium paniculatum . . .tick-trefoil, with still one blossom, by the path-side up from the meadow. The rhomboidal joints of its loments adhere to my clothes. One of an interesting family that thus disperse themselves."); September 29, 1856 ("How surely the desmodium, growing on some rough cliff-side, or the bidens, on the edge of a pool, prophesy the coming of the traveller, brute or human, that will transport their seeds on his coat!"); October 2, 1852 ("I also find the desmodium sooner thus. . . than if I used my eyes alone.")
All the lespedezas are apparently more open and delicate in the woods, and of a darker green, especially the violet ones. See August 4, 1856 ("Lespedeza violacea, perhaps the largest-leafed variety . . . well out.”); August 5, 1855 ("The common small violet lespedeza out, elliptic leaved, one inch long.”); August 7, 1856 (“At Blackberry Steep . . Lespedeza hirta and capitata, the elliptic-oblong L. violacea and the angustata, as also at Heywood Peak. All these plants seem to love a dry open hillside, a steep one. Are rarely upright, but spreading, wand-like.”); August 13, 1856 (“In Bittern Cliff Woods that (apparently) very oblong elliptical leafed Lespedeza violacea, growing very loose and open on a few long petioles, one foot high by four or five inches wide.”); August 14, 1856 ('A short elliptic-leaved Lespedeza violacea, loose and open in Veery Nest Path "); August 17, 1852 ("Lespedeza violacea var. (apparently) angustifolia (?), sessiliflora of Bigelow.")
August 19. See A Book of the Seasons,by Henry Thoreau, August 19
My afternoon spent
among the desmodiums
and lespedezas.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, I spent my afternoon sociably.
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 © 2009-2026
https://tinyurl.com/hdt-560819
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