Cloudy still and, in the afternoon, rain, the ninth day.
The sugar maple and elm leaves are fallen, but I still see
many large oaks, especially scarlet ones, which have lost very few leaves.
Some scarlet oaks are pretty bright yet.
The white birches, too, still retain many yellow leaves at
their very tops, having a lively flame-like look when seen against the woods.
***
Aspidium spinulosum
In the Lee farm swamp, by the old Sam Barrett mill site, I
see two kinds of ferns still green and much in fruit, apparently the Aspidium
spinulosum (?) and cristatum (?).
They are also common in other swamps now. They are quite fresh in those cold and wet places and almost flattened down now. The atmosphere of the house is less congenial to them.
In the summer you might not have noticed them. Now they are conspicuous amid the withered leaves.
You are inclined to approach and raise each frond in succession, moist, trembling, fragile greenness. They linger thus in all moist clammy swamps under the bare maples and grape-vines and witch-hazels, and about each trickling spring which is half choked with fallen leaves.
What means this persistent vitality, invulnerable to frost and wet? Why were these spared when the brakes and osmundas were stricken down? They stay as if to keep up the spirits of the cold-blooded frogs which have not yet gone into the mud; that the summer may die with decent and graceful moderation, gradually,
Is not the water of
the spring improved by their presence ? They fall back and droop here and there,
like the plumes of departing summer, — of the departing year,
Even in them I feel an argument for immortality. Death is so far from being universal. The same destroyer does not destroy all,
How valuable they are (with the lycopodiums) for cheerfulness. Greenness at the end of the year, after the fall of the leaf, as in a hale old age.
To my eyes they are tall and noble as palm groves, and always some forest noble-ness seems to have its haunt under their umbrage. Each such green tuft of ferns is a grove where some nobility dwells and walks.
All that was immortal in the swamp's herbage seems here crowded into smaller compass, the concentrated greenness of the swamp.
How dear they must be to the chickadee and the rabbit! The cool, slowly retreating rear-guard of the swamp army.
What virtue is theirs that enables them to resist the frost?
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 31, 1857
Some scarlet oaks are pretty bright yet. See October 31, 1858 ("The woods in Lincoln south and east of me are lit up by its more level rays, and there is brought out a more brilliant redness in the scarlet oaks, scattered so equally over the forest, than you would have believed was in them. Every tree of this species which is visible in these directions, even to the horizon, now stands out distinctly red") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Scarlet Oak
