The warmth of the sun is just beginning to be appreciated again on the advent of cooler days.

September 21. 

Monday. P. M. – To Corallorhiza Rock. and Tobacco-pipe Wood, northeast of Spruce Swamp. 

Peaches are now in their prime. 

Came through that thick white pine wood on the east of the spruce swamp. This is a very dense white pine grove, consisting of tall and slender trees which have been thinned, yet they are on an average only from three to six feet asunder. Perhaps half have been cut. It is a characteristic white pine grove, and I have seen many such. The trees are some ten inches in diameter, larger or smaller, and about fifty feet high. They are bare for thirty-five or forty feet up, — which is equal to at least twenty-five years of their growth, or with only a few dead twigs high up. Their green crowded tops are mere oval spear-heads in shape and almost in proportionate size, four to eight feet wide, – not enough, you would think, to keep the tree alive, still less to draw it upward. In a dark day the wood is not only thick but dark with the boles of the trees. 

Under this dense shade, the red-carpeted ground is almost bare of vegetation and is dark at noon. There grow Goodyera pubescens and repens, Corallorhiza multiflora (going to seed), white cohosh berries, Pyrola secunda, and, on the low west side and also the east side, an abundance of tobacco-pipe, which has begun to turn black at the tip of the petals and leaves. 

The Solidago casia is very common and fresh in copses, perhaps the prevailing solidago now in woods. 

Rudbeckia laciniata done, probably some time. 

The warmth of the sun is just beginning to be appreciated again on the advent of cooler days. 

Measured the large white willow north the road near Hildreth's. At a foot and a half from the ground it is fourteen feet in circumference; at five feet, the smallest place, it is twelve feet in circumference. It was once still larger, for it has lost large branches.[Cut down in '59.]

H. D. Thoereau, Journal, September 21, 1857


Corallorhiza Rock. See August 29, 1857 ("Nearby, north [of Indian Rock, west of the swamp], is a rocky ridge, on the east slope of which the Corallorhiza multiflora is very abundant.")

Corallorhiza multiflora [spotted coral root] (going to seed)... See note to August 13, 1857

Under this dense shade, the red-carpeted ground is almost bare of vegetation and is dark at noon. There grow Goodyera pubescens and repens See August 20, 1857 ("The Goodyera repens grows behind the spring where I used to sit, amid the dead pine leaves") and note to August 27, 1856 (“Goodyera pubescens, rattlesnake-plantain, is apparently a little past its prime. It is very abundant on Clintonia Swamp hillside. . .”)

An abundance of tobacco-pipe, which has begun to turn black . . . See July 24, 1856 ("Tobacco-pipe much blackened, out a long time.")

The Solidago casia is very common and fresh in copses, perhaps the prevailing solidago now in woods. See October 8, 1856 ("S. casia, much the worse for the wear, but freshest of any [goldenrod] seen.")

The warmth of the sun is just beginning to be appreciated again on the advent of cooler days. See  September 18, 1860 ("This is a beautiful day, warm but not too warm, a harvest day . . ."If you are not happy to-day you will hardly be so to-morrow.”); August 29, 1854 ("I enjoy the warmth of the sun now that the air is cool, and Nature seems really more genial. ")