I would make a chart of our life,
know why just this circle of creatures completes the world.
Henry Thoreau, April 18, 1852
February 18. Barberries still hang on the bushes, but all shrivelled. I found a bird's nest of grass and mud in a barberry bush filled full with them. It must have been done by some quadruped or bird. February 18, 1854
February 21. It is remarkable how many berries are the food of birds, mice, etc. . . . For example, mountain-ash, prinos skunk-cabbage, sumach, choke cherry, cornels probably, elder-berry, viburnums, rose hips, arum, poke, thorn, barberry , grapes, tupelo, amphicarpæa, thistle-down, bayberry(?), Cornus florida, checkerberry, hemlock, larch, pines, etc., birch, alder, juniper. The berries and seeds of wild plants generally, however little it is suspected by us, are the food of birds, squirrels, or mice . February 21, 1860
February 24. On the side of the meadow moraine just north of the boulder field, I see barberry bushes three inches in diameter and ten feet high. What a surprising color this wood has! It splits and splinters very much when I bend it. I cut a cane and, shaving off the outer bark, it is of imperial yellow, as if painted, fit for a Chinese mandarin. February 24, 1858
April 21. In the pasture beyond the brook, where grow the barberries, huckleberries, — creeping juniper, etc., are half a dozen huge boulders, which look grandly now in the storm, covered with greenish-gray lichens, alternating with the slatish-colored rock. Slumbering, silent . . . A certain personality, or at least brute life, they seem to have. C. calls it Boulder Field. April 21, 1852
May 28. Barberry open (probably two or more days at Lee’s). May 28, 1855
May 29. Barberry in bloom, wild pinks, and blue-eyed grass. May 29, 1852
May 29. I perceive the buttery-like scent of barberry bloom from over the rock. May 29, 1857
May 29. I mistook dense groves of little barberries in the droppings of cows in the Boulder Field for apple trees at first. So the cows eat barberries, and help disperse or disseminate them exactly as they do the apple! That helps account for the spread of the barberry, then. May 29, 1858
June 10. Shall we call it the Easterbrooks Country? . . . Plenty of huckleberries and barberries here. June 10, 1853
June 14. Miss Pratt brings me the fertile barberry from northeast the great yellow birch. The staminate is apparently effete. June 14, 1856
June 28. I see in many places little barberry bushes just come up densely in the cow-dung, like young apple trees, the berries having been eaten by the cows. Here they find manure and an open space for the first year at least, when they are not choked by grass or weeds. In this way, evidently, many of these clumps of barberries are commenced . . . There are fertile bayberry bushes fifteen rods east of yellow birch and six south of apple tree. June 28, 1858
August 3. Took that interesting view from one of the boulder rocks toward Lincoln Hills, between Hubbard's Hill and Grove and Barrett's, whose back or north and wooded side is in front, a few oaks and elms in front and on the right, and some fine boulders slumbering in the foreground. It is a peculiar part of the town, -- the old bridle-road plains further east. A great tract here of unimproved and unfrequented country, the boulders sometimes crowned with barberry bushes. August 3, 1852
August 6. I then looked for the little groves of barberries which some two months ago I saw in the cow-dung thereabouts, but to my surprise I found some only in one spot after a long search. They appear to have generally died, perhaps dried up. These few were some two inches high; the roots yet longer, having penetrated to the soil beneath. Thus, no doubt, some of those barberry clumps are formed; but I noticed many more small barberry plants standing single, most commonly protected by a rock. August 6, 1858
August 23. Barberries have begun to redden. August 23, 1853
September 1. If you would study the birds now, go where their food is, i. e. the berries, especially to the wild black cherries, elder-berries, poke berries, mountain-ash berries, and ere long the barberries. September 1, 1859
September 12. The pendulous, drooping barberries are pretty well reddened. I am glad when the berries look fair and plump. September 12, 1851
September 13. The barberries, now reddening. September 13, 1852
September 13. The barberries are abundant there, and already handsomely red, though not much more than half turned. September 13, 1856
September 16. The jay screams; the goldfinch twitters; the barberries are red. The corn is topped. I hear a warbling vireo in the village, which I have not heard for long. September 16, 1852
September 16. Barberries very handsome now. See boys gathering them in good season September 16. 1857
September 18. By boat to Conantum, barberrying . . .The barberries are not fairly turned, but I gather them that I may not be anticipated, — a peck of large ones. I strip off a whole row of racemes at one sweep, bending the prickles and getting as few leaves as possible, so getting a handful at once. The racemes appear unusually long this season, and the berries large, though not so thick as I have seen them. I consider myself a dextrous barberry-picker, as if I had been born in the Barberry States. A pair of gloves would be convenient, for, with all my knack, it will be some days before I get all the prickles out of my fingers. I get a full peck from about three bushes. September 18, 1856
September 19. Gather just half a bushel of barberries on hill in less than two hours, or three pecks to-day and yesterday in less than three hours. It is singular that I have so few, if any, competitors. I have the pleasure also of bringing them home in my boat. They will be more valuable this year, since apples and cranberries are scarce. These barberries are more than the apple crop to me, for we shall have them on the table daily all winter, while the two barrels of apples which we lay up will not amount to so much. September 19, 1856
September 22. The fragrance of grapes is on the breeze and the red drooping barberries sparkle amid the leaves. September 22, 1851
September 23 The barberry bushes in Clematis Hollow are very beautiful now, with their wreaths of red or scarlet fruit drooping over a rock. September 23, 1852
September 24. Where Grapes are ripe and already shrivelled by frost; barberries also. September 24, 1851
September 24. Where you put off worldly thoughts; where you do not carry a watch, nor remember the proprietor; where the proprietor is the only trespasser . . . where fifty may be a-barberrying and you do not see one. It is an endless succession of glades where the barberries grow thickest, successive yards amid the barberry bushes where you do not see out. There I see Melvin and the robins, and many a nut-brown maid sashe-ing to the barberry bushes in hoops and crinoline, and none of them see me . . . After four days cloud and rain we have fair weather. A great many have improved this first fair day to come a-barberrying to the Easterbrooks fields. These bushy fields are all alive with them, though I scarcely see one. I meet Melvin loaded down with barberries, in bags and baskets, so that he has to travel by stages and is glad to stop and talk with me. It is better to take thus what Nature offers, in her season, than to buy an extra dinner at Parker's. September 24, 1859
September 25. Carry Aunt and Sophia a-barberrying to Conantum . . . We get about three pecks of barberries from four or five bushes, but I fill my fingers with prickles to pay for them. With the hands well defended, it would be pleasant picking, they are so handsome, and beside are so abundant and fill up so fast. I take hold the end of the drooping twigs with my left hand, raise them, and then strip downward at once as many clusters as my hand will embrace, commonly bringing away with the raceme two small green leaves or bracts, which I do not stop to pick out. When I come to a particularly thick and handsome wreath of fruit, I pluck the twig entire and bend it around the inside of the basket. Some bushes bear much larger and plumper berries than others. Some also are comparatively green yet. September 25, 1855
September 28. Children are now gathering barberries, — just the right time. September 28, 1852
September 28. How many fruits are scarlet now! — barberries, prinos, etc. September 28, 1856
September 29. Barberry ripe. September 29, 1853
September 29. Now is the time to gather barberries. September 29, 1854
October 1. A-barberrying by boat to Conantum, carrying Ellen, Edith, and Eddie . . . Got three pecks of barberries. October 1, 1853
October 5. Many are now gathering barberries . . . I found on the 4th, at Conantum, a half-bushel of barberries on one clump about four feet in diameter at base, falling over in wreaths on every side. I filled my basket, standing behind it without being seen by other pickers only a dozen rods off. Some great clumps on Melvin's preserve, no doubt, have many more on them. October 5, 1857
October 18. I see many robins on barberry bushes, probably after berries.October 18, 1857
October 20 The barberry bushes are now alive with, I should say, thousands of robins feeding on them. They must make a principal part of their food now . . . Warren Brown, who owns the Easterbrooks place, the west side the road, is picking barberries. Allows that the soil thereabouts is excellent for fruit, but it is so rocky that he has not patience to plow it. That is the reason this tract is not cultivated . . . There was Melvin, too, a-barberrying and nutting. He had got two baskets, one in each hand, and his game-bag, which hung from his neck, all full of nuts and barberries, and his mouth full of tobacco. Trust him to find where the nuts and berries grow. He is hunting all the year and he marks the bushes and the trees which are fullest, and when the time comes, for once leaves his gun, though not his dog, at home, and takes his baskets to the spot . . . What a wild and rich domain that Easterbrooks Country! Not a cultivated, hardly a cultivatable field in it, and yet it delights all natural persons, and feeds more still. Such great rocky and moist tracts, which daunt the farmer, are reckoned as unimproved land, and therefore worth but little; but think of the miles of huckleberries, and of barberries, and of wild apples, so fair, both in flower and fruit, resorted to by men and beasts; Clark, Brown, Melvin, and the robins, these, at least, were attracted thither this afternoon. There are barberry bushes or clumps there, behind which I could actually pick two bushels of berries with out being seen by you on the other side. And they are not a quarter picked at last, by all creatures to gether. I walk for two or three miles, and still the clumps of barberries, great sheaves with their wreaths of scarlet fruit, show themselves before me and on every side. October 20, 1857
October 24. Barberries green, reddish, or scarlet. Cranberry beds at distance in meadows (from hill) are red, for a week or more. October 4, 1852
November 3. I see on many rocks, etc., the seeds of the barberry, which have been voided by birds, – robins, no doubt, chiefly. How many they must thus scatter over the fields, spreading the barberry far and wide! That has been their business for a month. November 3, 1857
December 2. The barberries are shrivelled and dried. I find yet cranberries hard and not touched by the frost. December 2, 1850
January 22. Somebody has been fishing in the pond this morning, and the water in the holes is beginning to freeze. I see the track of a crow . . . I am pretty sure that this bird was after the bait which is usually dropped on the ice or in the hole . . . I bring home and examine some of the droppings . . . They are brown and dry, though partly frozen. After long study with a microscope, I discover that they consist of the seeds and skins and other indigestible parts of red cedar berries and some barberries (I detect the imbricated scale-like leaves of a berry stem and then the seeds and the now black skins of the cedar berries, but easily the large seeds of the barberries) and perhaps something more, and I know whence it has probably come, i. e. from the cedar woods and barberry bushes by Flint’s Pond. These, then, make part of the food of crows in severe weather when the snow is deep, as at present. January 22, 1856
January 24. I knew that a crow had that day plucked the cedar berries and barberries by Flint’s Pond and then flapped silently through the trackless air to Walden, where it dined on fisherman’s bait, though there was no living creature to tell me. January 24, 1856
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Common Barberry
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 © 2009-2022
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