The increasing scarlet and yellow tints around the meadows and river .

September 26


Dreamed of purity last night. The thoughts seemed not to originate with me, but I was invested, my thought was tinged, by another's thought. It was not I that originated, but I that entertained the thought.

The river is getting to be too cold for bathing. There are comparatively few weeds left in it.

It is not in vain, perhaps, that every winter the forest is brought to our doors, shaggy with lichens. Even in so humble a shape as a wood-pile, it contains sermons for us.

P. M. — To Ministerial Swamp.

The small cottony leaves of the fragrant everlasting in the fields for some time, protected, as it were, by a little web of cotton against frost and snow, — a little dense web of cotton spun over it, — entangled in it, — as if to restrain it from rising higher.

The increasing scarlet and yellow tints around the meadows and river remind me of the opening of a vast flower-bud; they are the petals of its corolla, which is of the width of the valleys. It is the flower of autumn, whose expanding bud just begins to blush. As yet, however, in the forest there are very few changes of foliage.

September 26, 2017

The Polygonum articulatum, giving a rosy tinge to Jenny's Desert and elsewhere, is very interesting now, with its slender dense racemes of rose-tinted flowers, apparently without leaves, rising cleanly out of the sand. It looks warm and brave; a foot or more high, and mingled with deciduous blue-curls. It is much divided, into many spreading slender-racemed branches, with inconspicuous linear leaves, reminding me, both by its form and its color, of a peach orchard in blossom, especially when the sunlight falls on it.

Minute rose-tinted flowers that brave the frosts and advance the summer into fall, warming with their color sandy hill sides and deserts, like the glow of evening reflected on the sand. Apparently all flower and no leaf.

A warm blush on the sands, after frosty nights have come. Perhaps it may be called the "evening red." Rising, apparently, with clean bare stems from the sand, it spreads out into this graceful head of slender rosy racemes, wisp-like. This little desert of less than [an] acre blushes with it.

I see now ripe, large (three-inch), very dark chocolate(?)-colored puffballs. Are then my five-fingers puffballs?
The tree fern is in fruit now, with its delicate, tendril-like fruit climbing three or four feet over the asters, goldenrods, etc., on the edge of the swamp. The large ferns are yellow or brown now.

Larks, like robins, fly in flocks.

Dogsbane leaves a clear yellow.

Succory in bloom at the Tommy Wheeler house. It bears the frost well, though we have not had much. Set out for use.

The Gnaphalium plantaginifolium leaves, green above, downy beneath.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 26, 1852

The river is getting to be too cold for bathing. See September 26 1854 ("Took my last bath the 24th . Probably shall not bathe again this year. It was chilling cold."); September 27, 1856 ("Bathed at Hubbard's Bath, but found the water very cold. Bathing about over”)  See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Luxury of Bathing

The small cottony leaves of the fragrant everlasting in the fields for some time, protected, as it were, by a little web of cotton against frost and snow. See August 29, 1856 ("Fragrant everlasting in prime and very abundant, whitening Carter's pasture.”); February 25, 1857 (“The fragrant everlasting has retained its fragrance all winter.”)

The increasing scarlet and yellow tints remind me of the opening of a vast flower-bud; they are the petals of its corolla, the flower of autumn. See August 6, 1852 ("We live, as it were, within the calyx of a flower."); June 5, 1853 (“The heavens and the earth are one flower. The earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla.”); November 1, 1858 ("A man dwells in his native valley like a corolla in its calyx.")

I see now ripe, large (three-inch), very dark chocolate-colored puffballs. See October 2, 1858 ("A large chocolate-colored puffball “smokes.”")

Larks, like robins, fly in flocks. See August 27, 1858 ("Robins fly in flocks."); September 18, 1852 ("The robins of late fly in flocks, and I hear them oftener."); September 19, 1854 ("I see large flocks of robins keeping up their familiar peeping and chirping."); September 20, 1855 ("See larks in flocks on meadow."); October 1, 1858 ("See larks in small flocks."); October 13, 1855 ("Larks in flocks in the meadows, showing the white in their tails as they fly, sing sweetly as in spring.")

Dogsbane leaves a clear yellow See August 21, 1852 (“The leaves of the dogsbane are turning yellow”); See August 16, 1856 ("I find the dog's-bane (Apocynum androsoemifolium) bark not the nearly so strong as that of the A. cannabinum”). Note "Apocynum" means "poisonous to dogs".

See July 9, 1851 ("The handsome blue flowers of the succory or endive (Cichorium Intybus)."); October 2, 1856 ("Succory still, with its cool blue, here and there"); October 14, 1856 ("Any flowers seen now may be called late ones. I see perfectly fresh succory, not to speak of yarrow, a Viola ovata, . . .etc., etc.")