This is the way forests are planted.

September 24. 

Thursday. A. M. — Up the Assabet. 

The river is considerably raised and also muddied by the recent rains. 

I saw a red squirrel run along the bank under the hemlocks with a nut in its mouth. He stopped near the foot of a hemlock, and, hastily pawing a hole with his fore feet, dropped the nut, covered it up, and re treated part way up the trunk of the tree, all in a few moments. 

I approached the shore to examine the deposit, and he, descending betrayed no little anxiety for his treasure and made two or three motions to recover the nut before he retreated. Digging there, I found two pignuts joined together, with their green shells on, buried about an inch and a half in the soil, under the red hemlock leaves. 

This, then, is the way forests are planted. This nut must have been brought twenty rods at least and was buried at just the right depth. If the squirrel is killed, or neglects its deposit, a hickory springs up.


P. M. — I walk to that very dense and handsome white pine grove east of Beck Stow’s Swamp. It is about fifteen rods square, the trees large, ten to twenty inches in diameter. It is separated by a wall from another pine wood with a few oaks in it on the south east, and about thirty rods north and west are other pine and oak woods. 

Standing on the edge of the wood and looking through it,—for it is quite level and free from underwood, mostly bare, red-carpeted ground, you would have said that there was not a hardwood tree in it, young or old, though I afterward found on one edge a middling-sized sassafras, a birch, a small tupelo, and two little scarlet oaks, but, what was more interesting, I found, on looking closely over its floor, that, alternating with thin ferns and small blueberry bushes, there was, as often as every five feet, a little oak, three to twelve inches high, and in one place I found a green acorn dropped by the base of a tree. 

I was surprised, I confess, to find my own theory so perfectly proved. These oaks, apparently, find such a locality unfavorable to their growth as long as the pines stand. I saw that some had been browsed by the cows which resort to the wood for shade. As an evidence that hardwood trees would not flourish under those circumstances, I found a red maple twenty five feet high recently prostrated, as if by the wind, but still covered with green leaves, the only maple in the wood, and also two birches decaying in the same position.

The ground was completely strewn with white pine cones, apparently thrown down by the squirrels, still generally green and closed, but many stripped of scales, about the base of almost every pine, sometimes all of them. Now and for a week a good time to collect them. You can hardly enter such a wood but you will hear a red squirrel chiding you from his concealment in some pine-top. It is the sound most native to the locality.

Minott tells of their finding near a bushel of chestnuts in a rock, when blasting for the mill brook, at that ditch near Flint's Pond. He said it was a gray squirrel's depot. 

I find the Lycopodium dendroideum, not quite out, just northwest of this pine grove, in the grass. It is not the variety obscurum, which grows at Trillium Wood, is more upright-branched and branches round.

H.. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 24, 1857

I was surprised, I confess, to find my own theory so perfectly proved. See June 3, 1856 (“As I have said before, it seems to me that the squirrels, etc., disperse the acorns, etc., amid the pines,  . . .  If the pine wood had been surrounded by white oak, probably that would have come up after the pine.”) and The succession of forest trees (“If a pine wood is surrounded by a white-oak one chiefly, white-oaks may be expected to succeed when the pines are cut.”)

Now and for a week a good time to collect them. See September 16, 1857 ("On the trees many are already open. Say within a week have begun.”); October  16, 1855 “(P. M. —To the white pine grove beyond Beck Stow’s. What has got all the cones?”) and note to September 9, 1857 (“To the Hill for white pine cones.”)