The different colors of the various parts of this bark, at various times.

June 8.

Sunday. 

June 8, 2024

In F. A. Michaux's, i. e. the younger Michaux's “Voyage à l'ouest des Monts Alléghanys, 1802,” printed at Paris, 1808: 

. . . A Vermonter told him that the expense of clearing land in his State was always defrayed by the potash obtained from the ashes of the trees which were burnt, and sometimes people took land to clear on condition that they should have what potash they could make. 

June 8, 2017

***

Gathered the first strawberries to-day. 

Observed on Fair Haven a tall pitch pine, such as some call yellow pine, very smooth, yellowish, and destitute of branches to a great height. The outer and darker-colored bark appeared to have scaled off, leaving a fresh and smooth surface. At the ground, all round the tree, I saw what appeared to be the edges of the old surface scales, extending to two inches more in thickness. The bark was divided into large, smooth plates, one to two feet long and four to six inches wide.

I noticed that the cellular portion of the bark of the canoe birch log from which I stripped the epidermis a week or two ago was turned a complete brick-red color very striking to behold and reminding me of the red man and all strong, natural things, — the color of our blood somewhat. Under the epidermis it was still a sort of buff. The different colors of the various parts of this bark, at various times, fresh or stale, are extremely agreeable to my eye.

I found the white-pine-top full of staminate blossom buds not yet fully grown or expanded, with a rich red tint like a tree full of fruit, but I could find no pistillate blossom. 

The fugacious-petalled cistus, and the pink, and the lupines of various tints are seen together.

***

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 8, 1851

The different colors of the various parts of this bark, at various times, fresh or stale, are extremely agreeable to my eye. See  May 18, 1851 ("The log of a canoe birch on Fair Haven, cut down the last winter . . . all parts of the epidermis exposed to the air and light were white, but the inner surfaces freshly exposed, were a buff or salmon-color."); January 24, 1858 ("The sprouts of the canoe birch are not reddish like the white, but a yellowish brown.); January 9, 1860 ("There is an interesting variety in the colors of their bark, passing from bronze at the earth, through ruddy and copper colors to white higher up, with shreds of different color from that beneath peeling off.")

I found the white-pine-top full of staminate blossom buds not yet fully grown or expanded, with a rich red tint like a tree full of fruit, but I could find no pistillate blossom. See June 21, 1860 ("In the white pine it is a dense cluster of twenty or thirty little flowers about the base of this year's shoot."); June 25, 1852 ("I am too late for the white pine flowers. The cones are half an inch long and greenish, and the male flowers effete."); July 1, 1852 ("The path by the wood-side is red with the effete staminiferous flowers of the white pine. ") See also A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The White Pines

June 8. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 8

This white-pine-top full

of staminate blossom buds

with a rich red tint .

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