You have now forgotten winter and its fashions, and have learned new summer fashions.

August 24.

August 24, 2019

Mollugo verticillata, carpet-weed, flat, whorl-leaved weed in gardens, with small white flowers.

Portulaca oleracea, purslane, with its yellow blossoms.

Chelone glabra.

I have seen the small mulleins as big as a ninepence in the fields for a day or two? 

The weather is warmer again after a week or more of cool days. There is greater average warmth, but not such intolerable heats as in July.

The nights especially are more equably warm now, even when the day has been comparatively rather cool. There are few days now, fewer than in July, when you cannot lie at your length on the grass.

You have now forgotten winter and its fashions, and have learned new summer fashions. Your life may be out-of-doors now mainly.

Rattlesnake grass is ripe.

The pods of the Asclepias pulchra stand up pointedly like slender vases on a salver, an open salver truly! Those of the Asclepias Syriaca hang down.

The interregnum in the blossoming of flowers being well over, many small flowers blossom now in the low grounds, having just reached their summer.  It is now dry enough, and they feel the heat their tenderness required.

The autumnal flowers, — goldenrods, asters, and johnswort, — though they have made demonstrations, have not yet commenced to reign.

The tansy is already getting stale; it is perhaps the first conspicuous yellow flower that passes from the stage.

In Hubbard's Swamp, where the blueberries, dangle berries, and especially the pyrus or choke-berries were so abundant last summer, there is now perhaps not one (unless a blueberry) to be found. Where the choke berries held on all last winter, the black and the red.

The common skullcap (Scutellaria galericulata), quite a handsome and middling - large blue flower.

Lobelia pallida still.

Pointed cleavers or clivers (Galium asprellum).

Is that the naked viburnum, so common, with its white, red, then purple berries, in Hubbard's meadow? 

Did I find the dwarf tree-primrose in Hubbard's meadow to-day?

Stachys aspera, hedge-nettle or wound wort, a rather handsome purplish flower.

The capsules of the Iris versicolor, or blue flag, are now ready for humming [?].

Elderberries are ripe.

H. D. Thoreeau, Journal, August 24, 1851

The pods of the Asclepias pulchra stand up pointedly like slender vases on a salver, an open salver truly! Those of the Asclepias Syriaca hang down. See July 16, 1851 ("The milkweeds, or silkweeds, are rich flowers, now in blossom. The Asclepias syriaca, or common milkweed; its buds fly open at a touch. I see the yellow butterflies now gathered in fleets in the road, and on the flowers of the milkweed (Asclepias pulchra) by the roadside, a really handsome flower; also the smaller butterfly, with reddish wings, and a larger, black or steel-blue, with wings spotted red on edge, and one of equal size, reddish copper-colored.");  August 14, 1853 ("Methinks the reign of the milkweeds is over"); October 23, 1852 ("The milkweed (Syriaca) now rapidly discounting. The lanceolate pods having opened, the seeds spring out on the least jar, or when dried by the sun, and form a little fluctuating white silky mass or tuft, each held by the extremities of the fine threads, until a stronger puff of wind sets them free. It is a pleasant sight to see it dispersing its seeds")

The interregnum in the blossoming of flowers being well over, many small flowers blossom now. See June 17, 1854 (“Already the season of small fruits has arrived. .”) July 6, 1851 ("June, the month for grass and flowers, is now past. . . . Now grass is turning to hay, and flowers to fruits."); July 7, 1852 ("And now that there is an interregnum in the blossoming of flowers, so is there in the singing of the birds."); July 13, 1854 ("If there is an interregnum in the flowers, it is when berries begin");  August 6, 1852 ("Methinks there are few new flowers of late. An abundance of small fruits takes their place. Summer gets to be an old story. Birds leave off singing, as flowers blossoming."); August 9, 1853 ("This is the season of small fruits".); August 18, 1853 (“The season of flowers or of promise may be said to be over, and now is the season of fruits?”);


You have now forgotten winter.  See July 5, 1852 ("We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity."); August 6, 1852 (" Summer gets to be an old story.")

Is that the naked viburnum, so common, with its white, red, then purple berries, in Hubbard's meadow? See August 24, 1852 ("The Viburnum nudum shows now rich, variegated clusters amid its handsome, firm leaves, bright rosy-cheeked ones mingled with dark-purple.  All do not appear to turn purple.") See also note to September 11, 1851 ("The white-red-purple-berried bush in Hubbard's Meadow, whose berries were fairest a fortnight ago, appears to be the Viburnum nudum, or withe-rod.")

Elderberries are ripe. See August 11, 1856 ("Elder-berries in a day or two."); August 15, 1852 ("Elder-berry ripe."); August 22, 1852 ("The elder bushes are weighed down with fruit partially turned, and are still in bloom at the extremities of their twigs."); August 29, 1854 ("The cymes of elder-berries, black with fruit, are now conspicuous."); August 29, 1859 ("Elder-berry clusters swell and become heavy and therefore droop, bending the bushes down, just in proportion as they ripen. Hence you see the green cymes perfectly erect, the half-ripe drooping, and the perfectly ripe hanging straight down on the same bush."); August 31, 1853 ("Great black cymes of elder berries now bend down the bushes.")September 1, 1859 ("The elder-berry cyme, held erect, is of very regular form, four principal divisions drooping toward each quarter around an upright central one.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Elder-berries