I am struck with the beauty of the sorrel now.

June 12. 

Sunday. P. M. — To Gowing's Swamp. 

I am struck with the beauty of the sorrel now, e. g. Lepidium campestre field. What a wholesome red! It is densest in parallel lines according to the plowing or cultivation. There is hardly a more agreeable sight at this season. 

Maryland yellow-throat four eggs, fresh, in sphagnum in the interior omphalos.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 12, 1859

I am struck with the beauty of the sorrel now. There is hardly a more agreeable sight at this season. See June 12, 1852 ("It helps thus agreeably to paint the earth, contrasting even at a distance with the greener fields, blue sky, and dark or downy clouds. It is red, marbled, watered, mottled, or waved with greenish, like waving grain, — three or four acres of it.")  See also May 22, 1854 ("The sorrel beginning to redden the fields with ruddy health, — all these things make earth now a paradise. How many times I have been surprised thus, on turning about on this very spot, at the fairness of the earth!"); June 5, 1853 ("The distant fields are seen, reddened with sorrel, and the meadows wet green, full of fresh grass, and the trees in their first beautiful, bright, untarnished and unspotted green.");  June 6, 1857 (“A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind. ”); June 11, 1853 ("In the sorrel-fields, also, what lately was the ruddy, rosy cheek of health, now that the sorrel is ripening and dying, has become the tanned and imbrowned cheek of manhood.");  See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Wood Sorrel (Oxalis) and also .June 12, 1854 ("Clover now reddens the fields.."); June 15, 1851 (“the clover gives whole fields a rich appearance, -- the rich red and the sweet-scented white. The fields are blushing with the red species as the western sky at evening.”); June 15, 1853 ("Clover now in its prime. What more luxuriant than a clover-field");  June 15, 1853 ("The rude health of the sorrel cheek has given place to the blush of clover") 

Maryland yellow-throat four eggs, fresh, in sphagnum. See June 7, 1857 ("In a tuft a little from under the east edge of an apple tree, below violet wood-sorrel, a nest well made outside of leaves, then grass, lined with fine grass, very deep and narrow, with thick sides, with four small somewhat cream-colored eggs with small brown and some black spots chiefly toward larger end. . . It was a Maryland yellow-throat. Egg fresh. She is very shy and will not return to nest while you wait, but keeps up a very faint chip in the bushes or grass at some distance."); June 8, 1855 ("What was that little nest on the ridge near by, made of fine grass lined with a few hairs and containing five small eggs (two hatched the 11th), nearly as broad as long, yet pointed, white with fine dull-brown spots especially on the large end—nearly hatched? . . .(June 11.—It is a Maryland yellow-throat.)”); June 10, 1858 ("Perfectly concealed under the loose withered grass at the base of a clump of birches, with no apparent entrance. The usual small deep nest (but not raised up) of dry leaves, fine grass stubble, and lined with a little hair. Four eggs, white, with brown spots, chiefly at larger end, and some small black specks or scratches. The bird flits out very low and swiftly and does not show herself, so that it is hard to find the nest or to identify the bird.”)

The interior omphalos. See May 31, 1857 ("That central meadow and pool in Gowing's Swamp is its very navel, omphalos, where the umbilical cord was cut that bound it to creation's womb.”)