I observed the grass waving to-day for the first time.

 June 3. 

Tuesday.

Lectured in Worcester last Saturday, and walked to As- or Hasnebumskit Hill in Paxton the next day.

Said to be the highest land in Worcester County except Wachusett.

Met Mr. Blake, Brown, Chamberlin, Hinsdale, Miss Butman (?), Wyman, Conant.

Returned to Boston yesterday.

Conversed with John Downes, who is connected with the Coast Survey, is printing tables for astronomical, geodesic, and other uses.

He tells me that he once saw the common sucker in numbers piling up stones as big as his fist (like the piles which I have seen), taking them up or moving them with their mouths.

Dr. Harris suggests that the mountain cranberry which I saw at Ktaadn was the Vaccinium Vitis-Idæa, cow berry, because it was edible and not the Uva-Ursi, or bear-berry, which we have in Concord.

Saw the Uvularia perfoliata, perfoliate bellwort, in Worcester near the hill; an abundance of mountain laurel on the hills, now budded to blossom and the fresh lighter growth contrasting with the dark green; an abundance of very large checkerberries, or partridge berries, as Bigelow calls them, on Hasnebumskit.

Sugar maples about there.

A very extensive view, but the western view not so much wilder as I expected. 

See Barre, about fifteen miles off, and Rutland, etc., etc. Not so much forest as in our neighborhood; high, swelling hills, but less shade for the walker. The hills are green, the soil springier; and it is written that water is more easily obtained on the hill than in the valleys.

Saw a Scotch fir, the pine so valued for tar and naval uses in the north of Europe.

Mr. Chamberlin told me that there was no corporation in Worcester except the banks ( which I suspect may not be literally true ), and hence their freedom and independence. I think it likely there is a gas company to light the streets at least.

John Mactaggart finds the ice thickest not in the largest lakes in Canada, nor in the smallest, where the surrounding forests melt it.

He says that the surveyor of the boundary-line between England and United States on the Columbia River saw pine trees which would require sixteen feet in the blade to a cross-cut saw to do anything with them.

I examined to-day a large swamp white oak in Hubbard's meadow, which was blown down by the same storm which destroyed the lighthouse. At five feet from the ground it was nine and three fourths feet in circumference; the first branch at eleven and a half feet from ground; and it held its size up to twenty-three feet from the ground. Its whole height, measured on the ground, was eighty feet, and its breadth about sixty-six feet.

The roots on one side were turned up with the soil on them, making an object very conspicuous a great distance off, the highest root being eighteen feet from the ground and fourteen feet above centre of trunk. The roots, which were small and thickly interlaced, were from three to nine inches beneath the surface ( in other trees I saw them level with the surface ) and thence extended fifteen to eighteen inches in depth (i. e to this depth they occupied the ground). They were broken off at about eleven feet from the centre of the trunk and were there on an average one inch in diameter, the largest being three inches in diameter.The longest root was broken off at twenty feet from the centre, and was there three quarters of an inch in diameter.

The tree was rotten within. The lower side of the soil (what was originally the lower), which clothed the roots for nine feet from the centre of the tree, was white and clayey to appearance, and a sparrow was sitting on three eggs within the mass. Directly under where the massive trunk had stood, and within a foot of the surface, you could apparently strike in a spade and meet with no obstruction to a free cultivation.

There was no tap root to be seen. The roots were encircled with dark, nubby rings. The tree, which still had a portion of its roots in the ground and held to them by a sliver on the leeward side, was alive and had leaved out, though on many branches the leaves were shrivelled again.

Quercus bicolor of Bigelow, Q. Prinus discolor Mx. f.

June 3, 2016

I observed the grass waving to-day for the first time, the swift Camilla on it. It might have been noticed before. You might have seen it now for a week past on grain-fields.

Clover has blossomed.

I noticed the indigo-weed a week or two ago pushing up like asparagus.

Methinks it must be the small andromeda (?), that dull red mass of leaves in the swamp, mixed perchance with the rhodora, with its dry fruit like appendages, as well as the Andromeda paniculata, else called ligustrina, and the clethra.

It was the golden senecio (Senecio aureus) which I plucked a week ago in a meadow in Wayland. The earliest, methinks, of the aster and autumnal-looking yellow flowers. Its bruised stems enchanted me with their indescribable sweet odor, like I cannot think what.

The Phaseolus vulgaris includes several kinds of bush beans, of which those I raised were one.

  

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 3, 1851

Lectured in Worcester last Saturday[May 31, 1851] See Thoreau's Lectures Before Walden, Lecture 32 (Thoreau read a  version of "Walking or the Wild" to a private audience)

John Downes tells me that he once saw the common sucker in numbers piling up stones as big as his fist (like the piles which I have seen), taking them up or moving them with their mouths. See. June 3, 1857 (" I feel the suckers' nests with my paddle, but do not see them on account of the depth of the river"); May 7, 1853 ("The stone heaps have been formed since I was here before, methinks about a month ag . . . i. e., piles several feet in diameter by a foot high have evidently been made (no doubt commonly on the ruins of old ones) within a month. The stones are less than the size of a hen's egg, down to a pebble;")

Saw the Uvularia perfoliata, perfoliate bellwort, in Worcester near the hill. See May 30, 1857 ("By the path near the northeast shore of Flint's Pond, just before reaching the wall by the brook, I . . .am surprised to find ... the Uvularia perfoliata, which I have not found hereabouts before. . . .. It is considerably past its prime “). Note: Thoreau’s only references to Concord occurrence of the perfoliate bellwort are tsecond-hand, August 22, 1857 and September 22, 1852 ~ Ray Angelo, Vascular Flora of Concord, Massachusetts

I observed the grass waving to-day for the first time. See May 19, 1860 ("[T]hey say of the 19th of April, '75, — that "the apple trees were in bloom and grass was waving in the fields,"); May 23, 1853 ("And buttercups and silvery cinquefoil, and the first apple blossoms, and waving grass beginning to be tinged with sorrel, introduce us to a different season ."); May 30, 1852 (A day for shadows, even of moving clouds, over fields in which the grass is beginning to wave."); June 9, 1852 ("The general leafiness, shadiness, and waving of grass and boughs in the breeze characterize the season.")

I noticed the indigo-weed a week or two ago pushing up like asparagus. See May 6, 1860 ("indigo-weed shoots six inches high"); July 17, 1852 ("Some fields are covered now with tufts or clumps of indigo- weed, yellow with blossoms, with a few dead leaves turned black here and there.")

It was the golden senecio (Senecio aureus). . .earliest, methinks, of the aster and autumnal-looking yellow flowers. See May 23, 1853 ("I am surprised by the dark orange-yellow of the senecio. At first we had the lighter, paler spring yellows of willows, dandelion, cinquefoil, then the darker and deeper yellow of the buttercup; and then this broad distinction between the buttercup and the senecio, as the seasons revolve toward July."); June 6, 1858 ("Golden senecio is not uncommon now"); June 9, 1853 ("The meadows are now yellow with the golden senecio, a more orange yellow, mingled with the light glossy yellow of the buttercup")

Its bruised stems enchanted me with their indescribable sweet odor, like I cannot think what.  See March 4, 1854 (" In the meadow beyond I see everywhere the green and reddish radical leaves of the golden senecio, whose fragrance when bruised carries me back or forward to an incredible season. Who would believe that under the snow and ice lie still — or in midwinter — some green leaves which, bruised, yield the same odor that they do when their yellow blossoms spot the meadows in June? Nothing so realizes the summer to me now."); March 10 1853 ("the fragrance of the senecio, which is decidedly evergreen, which I have bruised, is very permanent and brings round the year again. It is a memorable sweet meadowy fragrance."); August 30, 1857 ("The flower of Cicuta maculata smells like the leaves of the golden senecio.")