The autumnal tints are brightest .

October 6. 

October 6, 2018

P. M. — To Saw Mill Brook and Flint’s Pond. 

Now, methinks, the autumnal tints are brightest in our streets and in the woods generally. 

In the streets, the young sugar maples make the most show. The street is never more splendid. As I look up the street from the Mill-Dam, they look like painted screens standing before the houses to celebrate a gala-day. One half of each tree glows with a delicate scarlet. 

But only one of the large maples on the Common is yet on fire. The butternuts on the street are with, or a little later than, the walnuts. The three-thorned acacias have turned (one half) a peculiarly clear bright and delicate yellow, peculiar also for the smallness of the leaf. 

Asparagus-beds are a soft mass of yellow and green. Buttonwoods have no bright colors, but are a brownish and yellowish green, some what curled and crisp and looking the worse for the wear. 

Stand where half a dozen large elms droop over a house. It is as if you stood within a ripe pumpkin rind, and you feel as mellow as if you were the pulp.

In Saw Mill Brook Path, and in most wood-paths, the Aster undulatus is now very fair and interesting. Generally a tall and slender plant with a very long panicle of middle-sized lilac or paler purple flowers, bent over to one side the path. 

The Rhus Toxicodendron leaves are completely changed and of very various colors, pale yellow to deep scarlet and delicate. The leaf-stalks are commonly drooping, being bent short downward near the base in a peculiar manner. 

Several species of ferns are faded quite white in the swamp, — dicksonia and another, and some brakes, — for in moist woods and swamps they are preserved longer than in dry places. 

Solidago latifolia in bloom still, but always sparingly. 

Cinnamon ferns are generally crisped, but in the swamp I saw some handsomely spotted green and yellowish, and one clump, the handsomest I ever saw, perfect in outline, falling over each way from the centre, of a very neat drab color, quaker-like, fit to adorn an Oriental drawing-room. 

The evergreens seem positively greener, owing to the browning of other leaves. 

I should not suspect that the white birches had changed so much and lost so many leaves, if I did not see them against the unchanged pitch pines on the hillside. 

I notice Hieracium paniculatum and scabrum in dark, low wood-paths, turned a hoary white. 

The medeola leaves are a pale straw-color with a crimson centre; perhaps getting stale now. 

The tupelo at Wharf Rock is completely scarlet, with blue berries amid its leaves. 

Leaves now have fairly begun to rustle under foot in wood-paths, especially in chestnut woods, scaring the ducks as you approach the ponds. And what is that common scent there so much like fragrant everlasting? 

The smooth sumachs, which are in their prime, or perhaps a little past, are, methinks, the most uniform and intense scarlet of any shrub or tree. They stand perfectly distinct amid the pines, with slender spreading arms, their leafets drooping and somewhat curled though fresh. Yet, high-colored as they are, from their attitude and drooping, like scarfs, on rather bare and dark stems, they have a funereal effect, as if you were walking in the cemetery of a people who mourned in scarlet. 

Most S. nemoralis, and most other goldenrods, now look hoary, killed by frost. 

The corn stands bleached and faded — quite white in the twilight — in the fields. No greenness there has the frost and sun left. Seen against the dark earth. 

My phosphorescent wood still glows a little, though it has lain on my stove all day, and, being wet, it is much improved still.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 6, 1858

Autumnal tints are brightest in our streets and in the woods generally. See October 6, 1857 (“We are not prepared to believe that the earth is now so parti-colored, and would present to a bird's eye such distinct masses of bright color. A great painter is at work.”)

In most wood-paths the Aster undulatus is now very fair and interesting. . . . Most S. nemoralis, and most other goldenrods, now look hoary, killed by frost. See October 3, 1852 ("The Aster undulates is common and fresh, also the Solidago nemoralis of Gray.”)

Where half a dozen large elms droop over a houseit is as if you stood within a ripe pumpkin rind. See October 9, 1857 ("As I look down our street, which is lined with them, now clothed in their very rich brownish-yellow dress, they remind me of yellowing sheaves of grain, as if the harvest had come to the village itself”)

Leaves now have fairly begun to rustle under foot in wood-paths, scaring the ducks as you approach the ponds. See October 10, 1851 ("You make a great noise now walking in the woods.”); October 22, 1857 (“As I go through the woods now, so many oak and other leaves have fallen the rustling noise somewhat disturbs my musing. However, Nature in this may have intended some kindness to the ducks, which are now loitering hereabouts on their migration south ward, mostly young and inexperienced birds, for, as they are feeding [in] Goose Pond, for instance, the rustling of the leaves betrays the approach of the sports man and his dog, or other foe; so perhaps the leaves on the ground protect them more than when on the trees. ”); and note to October 22, 1854 ("Now they rustle as you walk through them in the woods.”)

I notice Hieracium paniculatum and scabrum in dark, low wood-paths, turned a hoary white. See August 6, 1856 ("Hieracium scabrous.”) See July 21, 1851 ("The rough hawkweed, too, resembling in its flower the autumnal dandelion.”); August21, 1851 ("Hieracium paniculatum, a very delicate and slender hawkweed. I have now found all the hawkweeds. Singular these genera of plants, plants manifestly related yet distinct. They suggest a history to nature, a natural history in a new sense.”)