The colors of the oaks are far more distinct now

October 15. 

October 15, 2018

The balm-of-Gileads are half bare. 

I see a few red maples still bright, but they are commonly yellow ones. [no] 

White pines are in the midst of their fall. 

The Lombardy poplars are still quite green and cool. 

Large rock maples are now perhaps in their prime,— later than I supposed, —though some small ones have begun to fall. Some that were green a week ago are now changed. 

The large white oak by path north of Sleepy Hollow is now all red and at height. 

Perhaps half the white ash trees are yellow, and if the mulberry ones were dulled (?) a week ago, the yellow ones, me thinks, are fresher or brighter than ever, but fast falling. 

White birches, though they have lost many leaves, are still, perhaps, as soft a yellow as ever, a fine yellow imbrication seen against the greener forest. They change gradually and last long. 

P. M. — To Walden. 

White oaks are rapidly withering, — the outer leaves.

The small black oaks, too, are beginning to wither and turn brown. Small red oaks, at least, and small scarlet ones, are apparently in their prime in sprout-lands and young woods. The large leaves of the red oaks are still fresh, of mingled reddish or scarlet, yellow, and green, striking for the size of the leaf, but not so uniformly dark and brilliant as the scarlet. The black oak is yellowish, a half-decayed or brownish yellow, and already becoming brown and crisp, though not so much so as the white. The scarlet is the most brilliant of the oaks, finely fingered, especially noticeable in sprout-lands and young woods. The larger ones are still altogether green, or show a deep cool green in their recesses. 

If you stand fronting a hillside covered with a variety of young oaks, the brightest scarlet ones, uniformly deep, dark scarlet, will be the scarlet oaks; the next most uniformly reddish, a peculiar dull crimson (or salmon ?) red, are the white oaks; then the large-leaved and variously tinted red oaks, scarlet, yellow, and green; and finally the yellowish and half-decayed brown leaves of the black oak. 

The colors of the oaks are far more distinct now than they were before. See that white and that black oak,  side by side, young trees, the first that peculiar dull crimson (or salmon) red, with crisped edges, the second a brownish and greenish yellow, much sun still in its leaves. Looking at a young white oak, you see two distinct colors, the brighter or glossier red of the upper surfaces of the inner leaves, as yet not much affected by frost and wind, contrasting with the paler but still crimson tinged under sides of the outmost leaves, blown up by the wind and perhaps partly crisped.

I notice thorn bushes in sprout-lands quite bare. 

The lower leaves of huckleberry bushes and young wild black cherries fall first, but for the most part the upper leaves of apple trees. 

The high blueberries are still a bright or red scarlet.

Goldenrods now pretty generally show their dirty-white pappus together with the still yellow scales, the last preserving some semblance of the flowers. 

Small hickories are the clearest and most delicate yellow in the shade of the woods. 

Cinnamon ferns in Clintonia Swamp are fast losing their leafets. 

Some large dicksonias on the moist hillside there are quite green yet, though nearly prostrate in a large close patch slanting down the hill, and with some faded nearly white. 

The yellow lily in the brook by the Turnpike is still expanding fresh leaves with wrinkled edges, as in the spring. 

The Salix humilis falls, exposing its great cones like a fruit. 

On the sandy slope of the cut, close by the pond, I notice the chips which some Indian fletcher has made. Yet our poets and philosophers regret that we have no antiquities in America, no ruins to remind us of the past. Hardly can the wind blow away the surface anywhere, exposing the spotless sand, even though the thickest woods have recently stood there, but these little stone chips made by some aboriginal fletcher are revealed. 

With them, too, this time, as often, I find the White man’s arm, a conical bullet, still marked by the groove of the rifle, which has been roughened or rucked up like a thimble on the side by which it struck the sand. As if, by some [un]explained sympathy and attraction, the Indian’s and the white man’s arrowheads sought the same grave at last.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 15, 1858

White pines are in the midst of their fall. See October 14, 1856 (“Pine-needles, just fallen, now make a thick carpet”); October 16, 1854 (“The pines, too, have fallen.”); October 16, 1855 (“How evenly the freshly fallen pine-needles are spread on the ground!”); October 16,1857 (“A great part of the pine-needles have just fallen.”)

Cinnamon ferns in Clintonia Swamp are fast losing their leafets. See October 15, 1856 ("The large ferns are now rapidly losing their leaves except the terminal tuft."); October 17, 1857 ("The cinnamon ferns surrounding the swamp have just lost their leafets, except the terminal ones.")