Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Naming Yellow Birch Swamp.





January 4.  To what I will call Yellow Birch Swamp, E. Hubbard's, in north part of town.




January 4, 2019


Still ice is left on the trees, but to-day is a windy and blustering day.

The quantity of ice on the birches being reduced, they are still more wand- or faery like.

Tall ones, with no limbs for half their height, are grace fully bent over, and are now swaying from side to side in the wind, exactly like waving ostrich-plumes, as delicate as the spray on frosted windows.

The color of these ice-clad trees at a distance is not white, but rather slightly grayish or hoary, which the better merges them in the landscape.

This is the fourth day of the ice.

The landscape is white, not only from the ice on the ground and trees, but from the snow which fell yesterday, though it is not an inch deep.

In respect to snow, the winter appears to be just beginning.

I must call that swamp of E. Hubbard's west of the Hunt Pasture, Yellow Birch Swamp.  There are more of those trees than anywhere else in town that I know.

How pleasing to stand beside a new or rare tree! And few are so handsome as this. Singularly allied to the black birch in its sweet checkerberry scent and its form, and to the canoe birch in its peeling or fringed and tasselled bark. The top is brush-like as the black birch; the bark an exquisite fine or delicate gold-color, curled off partly from the trunk, with vertical clear or smooth spaces, as if a plane had been passed up the tree.

The sight of these trees affects me more than California gold.

I measured one five feet and two inches in circumference at six feet from the ground.

We have the silver and the golden birch. This is like a fair, flaxen haired sister of the dark-complexioned black birch, with golden ringlets. How lustily it takes hold of the swampy soil, and braces itself!

And here flows a dark cherry-wood or wine-colored brook over the iron-red sands in the sombre swamp, -- swampy wine.

In an undress, this tree.

Ah, time will come when these will be all gone. Among the primitive trees. What sort of dryads haunt these? Blond nymphs.

Near by, the great pasture oaks with horizontal boughs.

At Pratt's, the stupendous, boughy, branching elm, like vast thunderbolts stereotyped upon the sky; heaven-defying, sending back dark vegetable bolts, as if flowing back in the channel of the lightning.

The white oaks have a few leaves about the crown of the trunk in the lowest part of the tree, like a tree within a tree. The tree is thus less racked by the wind and ice.

In the twilight I went through the swamp, and yellow birches sent forth a dull-yellow gleam which each time made my heart beat faster.

Occasionally you come to a dead and leaning white birch, beset with large fungi like ears or little shelves, with a rounded edge above.

I walked with the yellow birch.

The prinos is green within.

If there were Druids whose temples were the oak groves, my temple is the swamp.

Sometimes I was in doubt about a birch whose vest was buttoned smooth and dark, till I came nearer and saw the yellow gleaming through, or where a button was off.

The animals do not use fire; man does. At first there was a pile of cold fat pine roots on the icy rock. A match was rubbed, fire elicited, and now this fire is the most emphatic and significant fact hereabouts. Fire slumbers never far off, and the friction of a match can awaken it.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 4, 1853

Yellow Birch Swamp. Also known as "Fever-bush Swamp", “Rattlesnake Fern Swamp”. and "Botrychium Swamp". See   May 5, 1859 ("Am struck by the beauty of the yellow birches, now fairly begun to be in bloom, at Yellow Birch, or Botrychium, Swamp.").See also June 10, 1853 ("What shall this great wild tract over which we strolled be called?. . . It contains what I call the Boulder Field, the Yellow Birch Swamp, the Black Birch Hill, the Laurel Pasture, the Hog-Pasture, the White Pine Grove, the Easterbrooks Place, the Old Lime-Kiln, the Lime Quarries, Spruce Swamp, the Ermine Weasel Woods; also the Oak Meadows, the Cedar Swamp, the Kibbe Place, and the old place northwest of Brooks Clark‘s.Ponkawtasset bounds it on the south. There are a few frog-ponds and an old mill-pond within it, and Bateman‘s Pond on its edge. What shall the whole be called? . . .Shall we call it the Easterbrooks Country?") and   July 13, 1857, September 16, 1857, and Vascular Flora of Concord, Massachusetts ( "Rattlesnake Fern")


as delicate as the spray on frosted windows.
 See December 28, 1859 ("In the morning the windows are like ground glass (covered with frost), and we cannot see out."); January 4, 1856 ("It is snapping cold this night (10 P. M.). I see the frost on the windows sparkle as I go through the passageway with a light ")'; February 5, 1855 ("It was quite cold last evening, and I saw the scuttle window reflecting the lamp from a myriad brilliant points when I went up to bed.")

I measured one five feet and two inches in circumference at six feet from the ground. See May 18, 1857 (“There is a very grand and picturesque old yellow birch in the old cellar northwest the yellow birch swamp.”); September 2, 1857 ("The third, or largest, yellow birch, at the cellar, was. . . ten feet nine inches in circumference.")

Sometimes I was in doubt about a birch whose vest was buttoned smooth and dark, till I came nearer and saw the yellow gleaming through, or where a button was off. See February 18, 1854 ("The curls of the yellow birch bark form more or less parallel straight lines up and down on all sides of the tree, like parted hair blown aside by the wind, or as when a vest bursts and blows open. "); January 26, 1858 ("The yellow birch . . .might be described as a tree whose trunk or bole was covered with golden and silver shavings glued all over it and dangling in curls. ") See also April 25, 1857 ("Suppose we were to drink only the yellow birch sap and mix its bark with our bread, would not its yellow curls sprout from our foreheads, and our breath and persons exhale its sweet aroma? What sappy vigor there would be in our limbs!")

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