The canoe, yellow, and black birches in bloom.

black birch catkins
May 9, 2015

May 17. 

P. M. — Round Walden.

Gold-thread is abundantly out at Trillium Woods. 

The yellow birch catkins, now fully out or a little past prime, are very handsome now, numerous clusters of rich golden catkins hanging straight down at a height from the ground on the end of the pendulous branches, amid the just expanding leaf-buds. It is like some great chandelier hung high over the underwood.

So, too, with the canoe birch. Such black as I see is not quite so forward yet. 

The canoe, yellow, and black birches are among the handsomest trees when in bloom. The bunches of numerous rich golden catkins, hanging straight down on all sides and trembling in the breeze, contrast agreeably with the graceful attitude of the tree, commonly more or less inclined, the leaves not being enough expanded to conceal them in the least. They should be seen against evergreens on a hillside, — something so light and airy, so graceful. What nymphs are they? 

What was that peculiar spawn on a submerged alder stem seen the 13th? It looked like a fresh light-colored fungus, flattish and circular, a third of an inch over, and waving in the water, but, taken out, hung down longer. In the midst of this jelly were minute eggs. 

I just notice the fertile sweet-fern bloom on tall plants, where the sterile catkins are falling off above it. Most plants have none. 

Two cocoons of apparently the Attacus Promethea on a small black birch, the silk wound round the leaf stalk.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 17, 1857

The yellow birch catkins . . .hanging straight down at a height from the ground on the end of the pendulous branches, amid the just expanding leaf-buds.  See May 5, 1859 (“ You see a great tree all hung with long yellow or golden tassels at the end of its slender, drooping spray, in clusters at intervals of a few inches or a foot. These are all dangling and incessantly waving in the wind, — a great display of lively blossoms (lively both by their color and motion) without a particle of leaf”); see also May 13, 1852 (“The white birch with its golden tassels three inches long, hanging directly down, amid the just expanding yellowish-green leaves, their perpendicularity contrasting with the direction of the branches. Geometry mixed with nature.”)

They should be seen against evergreens on a hillside, — something so light and airy, so graceful. See May 17, 1852 (“ dark pines in the distance in the sunshine, contrasting with the light fresh green of the deciduous trees.”); also May 17, 1852 (“The birch leaves are so small that you see the landscape through the tree, and they are like silvery and green spangles in the sun, fluttering about the tree.”); May 17, 1854 (“the wooded shore is all lit up with the tender, bright green of birches fluttering in the wind and shining in the light”)

Two cocoons of apparently the Attacus Promethea on a small black birch, the silk wound round the leaf stalk. See January 19, 1854 ("The A. Promethea is the only moth whose cocoon has a fastening wound round the petiole of the leaf, and round the shoot, the leaf partly folded round it");;  February 19, 1854 (“the light ash-colored cocoons of the A. Promethea, with the withered and faded leaves wrapped around them so artfully and admirably secured by fine silk wound round the leaf-stalk and the twig they are taken at a little distance for a few curled and withered leaves left on.”) ; June 2, 1855 (“that cocoon of the Attacus cecropia”)