Behind a picture in R. W. E.'s dining-room.

August 10. 

2 p.m. — Air, 84°; Boiling Spring this after noon., 46°; Brister's, 49°; or where there is little or no surface water the same as in spring. Walden is at surface 80° (air over it 76). 

Aster dumosus and pennyroyal out; how long? 

Sand cherry is well ripe — some of it — and tolerable, better than the red cherry or choke-cherry. 

Juncus acuminatus aka paradoxus

Juncus paradoxus, that large and late juncus (tailed), as in Hubbard's Close and on island above monument and in Great Meadows, say ten days. 

Saw yesterday in Fitzwilliam from the railroad a pond covered with white lilies uniformly about half the size of ours! 

Saw this evening, behind a picture in R. W. E.'s dining-room, the hoary bat. First heard it fluttering at dusk, it having hung there all day. Its rear parts covered with a fine hoary down.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 10, 1860

Aster dumosus and pennyroyal out; how long? See August 5, 1856 ("Aster dumosus, apparently a day or two, with its large conspicuous flower-buds at the end of the branchlets and linear-spatulate involucral scales."); August 11, 1853 ("Evening draws on while I am gathering bundles of pennyroyal on the further Conantum height. I find it amid the stubble mixed with blue-curls and, as fast as I get my hand full, tie it into a fragrant bundle.”)

Sand cherry is well ripe. July 28, 1856 ("Sand cherry ripe. The fruit droops in umble-like clusters, two to four peduncles together, on each side the axil of a branchlet or a leaf. . . . It is black when ripe.")

Juncus paradoxus, that large and late juncus (tailed), as in Hubbard's Close and on island. See August 30, 1858 ("Juncus paradoxus, with seeds tailed at both ends, (it is fresher than what I have seen before, and smaller), not done. Some of it with few flowers! A terete leaf rises above the flower. It looks like a small bayonet rush.")

August 10. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau , August 10

 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021