I see where the crickets are eating the wild strawberries.

June 20. 

 Tuesday. 

June 20, 2014

Motherwort to-morrow. 

Elder. 

A cloud of minute black pollywogs in a muddy pool. I see where the crickets are eating the wild strawberries. 

P. M. - To Shadbush Meadow. 

Heard a new bird –– chut-cheeter-varrer-chutter-wit ––on the low bushes, about the size of Wilson's thrush apparently. Apparently olivaceous (?) above, most so on head, yellow front, dark bill, dark wings with two white bars, all yellow or yellowish breast and beneath. Perhaps never heard it before. 

Cow-wheat, apparently two or three days.

A three-leaved Lysimachia stricta apparently, with reddish flower-buds, not open. 

Shad-berries almost, but scarce. 

There seems to be much variety in the Rosa lucida, some to have stouter hooked prickles than the R. Carolina.  

Upland haying begun, or beginning. 

Common nettle.

H. D Thoreau, Journal, June 20, 1854


Motherwort to-morrow. See June 29, 1852 ("Leonurus Cardiaca, motherwort, a nettle-like plant by the street-side.")

Elder. See June 21, 1852 ("Elder is blossoming; flowers opening now where black berries will be by and by.")

A cloud of minute black pollywogs in a muddy pool..See June 15, 1852 ("This half-stagnant pond-hole, drying up and leaving bare mud, with the pollywogs and turtles making off in it, is agreeable and encouraging to behold, as if it contained the seeds of life, the liquor rather, boiled down. The foulest water will bubble purely.");  See also June 15, 1851 ("The pollywogs in the pond are now fulltailed"); June 15, 1855 ("Many pollywogs an inch long.") and note to May 19, 1857 ("See myriads of minute pollywogs, recently hatched, in the water of Moore's Swamp.")

I see where the crickets are eating the wild strawberries. See June 22, 1851 ("Only in the quiet of evening do I so far recover my senses as to hear the cricket, which in fact has been chirping all day.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Cricket in Spring and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau: Strawberries

Cow-wheat, apparently two or three days. See June 14, 1859 ("Cow-wheat, how long ?"); June 16, 1856 ("Cow-wheat numerously out."); June 19, 1853 ("Cow-wheat out"); August 6, 1851("After how few steps, how little exertion, the student stands in pine woods above the Solomon's-seal and the cow-wheat, in a place still unaccountably strange and wild to him, and to all civilization!") [Cow-wheat is a native annual hemiparasite (partially parasitic), using specialized root structures to invade the roots of its host and steal nutrients, while also performing photosynthesis. Its hosts may be several species of pine (Pinus) and poplar (Populus) ~ GoBotany].

Shad-berries almost, but scarce. See June 25, 1853. ("An unusual quantity of amelanchier berries, – I think of the two common kinds . . . Both these are now in their prime. These are the first berries after strawberries. . .I  never saw nearly so many before. It is a very agreeable surprise."); June 25, 1854 ("Shad-berry ripe.") 

The Rosa lucida . . . have stouter hooked prickles than the R. Carolina. See June 21, 1852 (" I observe a rose (called by some moss rose), with a bristly reddish stem; another, with a smooth red stem and but a few prickles; another, with many prickles and bristles."); July 24, 1853 ("The late rose, -- R. Carolina, swamp rose,-- I think has larger and longer leaves; at any rate they are duller above (light beneath). and the bushes higher.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Rose
Upland haying begun. See June 21, 1853 ("The farmers have commenced haying. With this the summer culminates.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Haymaking

July 20. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 20

Rosa lucida –

stouter hooked prickles than the

R. Carolina.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Crickets are eating the Wild Strawberries

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 © 2009-2024

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-540620

These are the wildest and richest gardens that we have

August 5. 

I can tell the extent to which a man has heard music by the faith he retains in the trivial and mean, even by the importance he attaches to what is called the actual world. Any memorable strains will have unsettled so low a faith and substituted a higher. Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted. 

Hearing that one with whom I was acquainted had committed suicide, I said I did not know when I had planted the seed of that fact that I should hear of it. 

P. M. —To C. Miles's blueberry swamp. 

There is a pond-hole there perfectly covered with the leaves of the floating-heart and whiter than ever with its small white flowers, as if a slight large-flaked snow had fallen on it. The ground rises gently on every side, and first by the edge grow a few gratiolas, then the Lysimachia stricta, with a few blossoms left, then, a rod or two distant, in the higher rows of this natural coliseum, the red-panicled racemes of the hardhack rise. 

That is a glorious swamp of Miles's, — the more open parts, where the dwarf andromeda prevails. Now, perhaps, an olivaceous green is the tint, not at all reddish, the lambkill and the bluish or glaucous rhodora and the pyrus intermixed making an extensive rich moss like bed, in which you sink three feet to a dry bottom of moss or dead twigs, or, if peaty ground, it is covered with cup lichens; surrounded all by wild-looking woods, with the wild white spruce advancing into it and the pitch pine here and there, and high blueberry and tall pyrus and holly and other bushes under their countenance and protection. 

These are the wildest and richest gardens that we have. Such a depth of verdure into which you sink. They were never cultivated by any. 

Descending wooded hills, you come suddenly to this beautifully level pasture, comparatively open, with a close border of high blueberry bushes. You cannot believe that this can possibly abut on any cultivated field. Some wood or pasture, at least, must intervene. Here is a place, at last, which no woodchopper nor farmer frequents and to which no cows stray, perfectly wild, where the bittern and the hawk are undisturbed. 

The men, women, and children who perchance come hither blueberrying in their season get more than the value of the berries in the influences of the scene. 

How wildly rich and beautiful hang on high there the blueberries which might so easily be poisonous, the cool blue clusters high in air. Choke-berries, fair to the eye but scarcely palatable, hang far above your head, weighing down the bushes. The wild holly berry, perhaps the most beautiful of berries, hanging by slender threads from its more light and open bushes and more delicate leaves. The bushes, eight feet high, are black with choke-berries, and there are no wild animals to eat them. 

I cannot sufficiently admire the rhexia, one of the highest-colored purple flowers, but difficult to bring home in its perfection, with its fugacious petals. 

The Hieracium scabrum is just opening. 

Large spotted polygonum by the river, with white flowers on a slender spike. 

Lechea racemulosa (?) of Bigelow, — not in Gray, — a fine, almost leafless, bushy, sometimes reddish, low plant in dry fields.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 5, 1852

The men, women, and children who perchance come hither blueberrying in their season get more than the value of the berries in the influences of the scene. See June 26, 1853 ("Many of my fellow-citizens might go fishing a thousand times, perchance, before the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure, -- before they began to angle for the pond itself.”); August 30, 1856 (“It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels”);  December 28, 1856 (“getting what they went for, though they may not be aware of it, i. e. a wilder experience than the town affords.”); July 30, 1860 (“Am glad to press my way through Miles's Swamp.”)

Choke-berries, fair to the eye but scarcely palatable. See August 5, 1856 (“”Choke-cherries . . .begin to be ripe, though still red. They are scarcely edible, but their beauty atones for it. See those handsome racemes of ten or twelve cherries each, dark glossy red, semi- transparent. You love them not the less because they are not quite palatable”)

I cannot sufficiently admire the rhexia, one of the highest-colored purple flowers. See August 1, 1856 (“They make a splendid show, these brilliant rose-colored patches, especially in the neighborhood of Copan. It is about the richest color to be seen now. Yet few ever see them in this perfection”); August 27, 1856 (“The rhexia greets me in bright patches on meadow banks.”); August 28, 1859 ("The rhexia in Ebby Hubbard's field is considerably past prime, and it is its reddish chalices which show most at a distance now. I should have looked ten days ago. Still it is handsome with its large yellow anthers against clear purple petals. It grows there in large patches with hardhack."):  October 2, 1856 (“The scarlet leaves and stem of the rhexia, some time out of flower, makes almost as bright a patch in the meadow now as the flowers did,”)

August 5. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August 5

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

To have the leisure to see the parallax of cows in a pasture.

October 5

Sunday. P. M. — To Hill and over the pastures westward. 

Sally Cummings and Mike Murray are out on the Hill collecting apples and nuts. Do they not rather belong to such children of nature than to those who have merely bought them with their money? There are few apples for them this year, however, and it is too early for walnuts (too late for hazelnuts). The grapes are generally gone, and their vines partly bare and yellowed, though without frost. 

I amuse myself on the hilltop with pulling to pieces and letting fly the now withered and dry pasture thistle tops. They have a much coarser pappus than the milkweeds. I am surprised, amid these perfectly withered and bleached thistles, to see one just freshly in flower. 

The autumnal dandelion is now comparatively scarce there. 

In the huckleberry pasture, by the fence of old barn boards, I notice many little pale-brown dome-shaped (puckered to a centre beneath) puff-balls, which emit their dust. When you pinch them, a smoke-like brown dust (snuff-colored) issues from the orifice at their top, just like smoke from a chimney. It is so fine and light that it rises into the air and is wafted away like smoke. They are low Oriental domes or mosques. Sometimes crowded together in nests, like a collection of humble cottages on the moor, in the coal pit or Numidian style; for there is suggested some humble hearth beneath, from which this smoke comes up, as it were the homes of slugs and crickets. 

They please me not a little by their resemblance to rude dome-shaped, turf-built cottages on the plain, wherein some humble but everlasting life is lived. Amid the low and withering grass or the stubble there they are gathered, and their smoke ascends between the legs of the herds and the traveller. I imagine a hearth and pot, and some snug but humble family passing its Sunday evening beneath each one. Some, when you press them harder, emit clear water — the relics of rain or dew — along with the dust, which last, how ever, has no affinity for it, but is quite dry and smoke like. 

I locate there at once all that is simple and admirable in human life. There is no virtue which their roofs exclude. I imagine with what contentment and faith I could come home to them at evening. I see some not yet ripe, still entire and rounded at top. When I break them open, they are found to be quite soggy, of a stringy white consistency, almost cream-like, riper and yellowish at top, where they will burst by and by. Many have holes eaten into them. On one I find a slug feeding, with a little hole beneath him, and a cricket has eaten out the whole inside of another in which he is housed. This before they are turned to dust. Large chocolate-colored ones have long since burst and are spread out wide like a shallow dish. 

Crickets are seen now moving slowly about in the paths, often with their heads only concealed in a burrow, as if looking out for winter quarters. I saw, on my return, a dozen crickets of various sizes gathered on an apple paring which I had dropped in the path when I came along. 

The sweet-briar rose hips are very handsome now, but these hips do not deserve to be coupled with haws as articles of food, even in extremities. They are very dry, hard, seedy, and unpalatable. I see some fresh-grown callitriche in some clear well-filled leafy pools which are commonly dry at this season.

The singular long pointed reddish bulbs in the axils of the Lysimachia stricta are one of the signs of the season, cool and late. 

It is well to find your employment and amusement in simple and homely things. These wear best and yield most. I think I would rather watch the motions of these cows in their pasture for a day, which I now see all headed one way and slowly advancing, — watch them and project their course carefully on a chart, and report all their behavior faithfully, — than wander to Europe or Asia and watch other motions there; for it is only ourselves that we report in either case, and perchance we shall report a more restless and worthless self in the latter case than in the first.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 5, 1856

Sally Cummings and Mike Murray are out on the Hill collecting apples and nuts. See October 23, 1857 ("Sal Cummings, a thorough countrywoman, conversant with nuts and berries, calls the soapwort gentian “blue vengeance,” mistaking the word. A masculine wild eyed woman of the fields. Somebody has her daguerreotype..")

I amuse myself on the hilltop with pulling to pieces and letting fly the now withered and dry pasture thistle tops . . . I am surprised . . . to see one just freshly in flower. See September 29, 1858 ("Let off some pasture thistle-down. One steadily rose from my hand, freighted with its seed, till it was several hundred feet high, and then passed out of sight . . .It may still be travelling when I am sleeping."); See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Thistle and Thistle-down

Long pointed reddish bulbs in the axils of the Lysimachia stricta are one of the signs of the season . . . October 16, 1853 ("The Lysimachia stricta, with its long bulb-lets in the axils, how green and fresh by the shore of the pond!")

I would rather watch the motions of these cows in their pasture for a day. See note to  July 5, 1853 ("Such a habit have cows in a pasture of moving forward while feeding . . .   I had to watch my opportunity to look between them.")

Surprised amid these

withered thistles to see one

freshly in flower.

 

The anxious peet of a peetweet, hovering over its young.

July 6

P. M. — To Assabet Bath. 

Campanula aparinoides, roadside opposite centaurea, several days. Early low blueberries ripe. 

Cross the river at bath place. On the sandy bank opposite, see a wood tortoise voraciously eating sorrel leaves, under my face. 

In A. Hosmer’s ice-bared meadow south of Turnpike, hear the distressed or anxious peet of a peetweet, and see it hovering over its young, half grown, which runs beneath and suddenly hides securely in the grass when but few feet from me. 

White avens, evidently Bigelow’s Geum album (which Gray makes only a variety of G. Virginianum), a good while, very rough and so much earlier than the G. Virginianum that only one flower remains. The heads have attained their full size, with twisted tails to the awns, while the other will not open for some days. I think Bigelow must be right. 

Lysimachia lanceolata, a day or two. 

Rhus typhina in our yard; how long? Did not see it out in New Bedford ten days ago. 

There is a young red mulberry in the lower hedge beneath the celtis. 

G. Emerson says the sweet-briar was doubtless introduced, yet, according to Bancroft, Gosnold found it on the Elizabeth Isles.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 6, 1856

On the sandy bank opposite, see a wood tortoise voraciously eating sorrel leaves, under my face. See June 28, 1860 ("Meet to-day with a wood tortoise . . . in Hosmer's sandy bank field north of Assabet Bridge, deliberately eating sorrel.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Wood Sorrel; A Book of the Seasons, the Wood Turtle (Emys insculpta)

The distressed or anxious peet of a peetwee  . . ,  hovering over its young. See July 2, 1860 ("the alarm note of the peetweets, concerned about their young."); June 21, 1855 ("Peetweets make quite a noise calling to their young with alarm.")

Half-grown young peetweets

suddenly hide in the grass

but few feet from me.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  The anxious peet of a peetweet

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 ©  2009-2026

https://tinyurl.com/HDT-560706

Hunter's Moon. Walk to White Pond.

October 16. 

October 16.

The third pleasant day. Hunter's Moon. Walk to White Pond. 

The Polygonum dumetorum in Tarbell's Swamp lies thick and twisted, rolled together, over the loose raised twigs on the ground, as if woven over basketwork, though it is now all sere. 

The Marchantia polymorpha is still erect there. Viola ovata out. 

The Lysimachia stricta, with its long bulb-lets in the axils, how green and fresh by the shore of the pond! 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 16, 1853

The Lysimachia strida, with its long bulb-lets in the axils, how green and fresh by the shore of the pond! See October 5, 1856 ("Long pointed reddish bulbs in the axils of the Lysimachia stricta are one of the signs of the season .")

Signs of Fall

July 31. There is more shadow under the edges of woods and copses now. The foliage appears to have increased so that the shadows are heavier, and perhaps it is this that makes it cooler, especially morning and evening, though it may be as warm as ever at noon. 

The green cranberries are half formed. 

Saw but one Lysimachia stricta left in the meadows, the meadow-sweet meadows.

The absence of flowers, the shadows, the wind, the green cranberries, etc., are autumnal. 

The river has risen a foot or so since its lowest early in the month. The water is quite cool. Methinks it cannot be so warm again this year. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 31, 1852

The water is cool. 

Methinks it cannot be so 

warm again this year.