I spent my afternoon among the desmodiums and lespedezas, sociably.

August 19, 2016

August  19.

P. M. — To Fair Haven Hill. 

Dog-day weather as for clouds, but less smoky than before the rains of ten days ago. 

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

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.”); 

August 19. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, August 19

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 © 2009-2021