July 22.
P. M. – To Annursnack.
The Chenopodium hybridum (?); at least its leaves are dark-green, rhomboidal, and heart-shaped.
The orchis and spikenard at Azalea Brook are not yet open.
The early roses are now about done, — the sweet briar quite, I think.
I see sometimes houstonias still.
The elodea out.
Boehmeria not yet.
On one account, at least, I enjoy walking in the fields less at this season than at any other; there are so many men in the fields haying now.
Observed, on the wild basil on Annursnack, small reddish butterflies which looked like a part of the plant. It has a singularly soft, velvety leaf.
Smooth sumach berries crimson there.
There is a kind of low blackberry which does not bear large fruit but very dense clusters, by wall-sides, shaded by the vine or other plants often, of clammy and strong-tasted berries.
Yellow butterflies in the road.
I find the Campanula Americana of the West naturalized in our garden.
Also a silene (?) without visibly viscid stem and with swollen joints; apparently the snapdragon catchfly otherwise. Leaves opposite, sessile, lanceolate.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 22, 1853
The orchis and spikenard at Azalea Brook are not yet open. See July 12, 1853 ("Spikenard, not quite yet.The green-flowered lanceolate-leafed orchis at Azalea Brook will soon flower.") The locally rare Spikenard (Aralia racemosa) that Thoreau saw near Azalea brook still persisted in 2007.~ Place Names of Henry David Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts(and in Lincoln, Massachusetts) & Other Botanical Sites in Concord compiled by Ray Angelo./ See also May 31, 1853 ("I am going in search of the Azalea nudiflora")
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