The cross-leaved polygala, has a very sweet but intermittent fragrance, as of checkerberry and mayflowers combined

 




August 27. 

I see the volumes of smoke-not quite the blaze — from burning brush, as I suppose, far in the western horizon.  I believe it is at this season of the year chiefly that you see this sight.  It is always a question with some whether it is not a fire in the woods, or some building. It is an interesting feature in the scenery at this season.

The farmer's simple enterprises.

The vervain which I examined by the railroad the other day has still a quarter of an inch to the top of its spikes.

Hawkweed groundsel (Senecio hieracifolius) (fireweed).

Rubus sempervirens, evergreen raspberry, the small low blackberry, is now in fruit.

The Medeola Virginica, cucumber-root, the whorl-leaved plant, is now in green fruit.

Polygala cruciata, cross-leaved polygala, in the meadow between Trillium Woods and railroad. This is rare and new to me. It has a very sweet, but as it were intermittent, fragrance, as of checkerberry and mayflowers combined. The handsome calyx-leaves.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 27, 1851

The vervain which I examined by the railroad the other day has still a quarter of an inch to the top of its spikes. See August 20, 1851 ("The flowers of the blue vervain have now nearly reached the summit of their spikes");  August 21, 1851 ("they are all within about half an inch of the top of the spikes");  August 23, 1851 ("The Verbena hastata at the pond has reached the top of its spike,. . . only one or two flowers are adhering."); August 22, 1859 ("T he circles of the blue vervain flowers, now risen near to the top, show how far advanced the season") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  the Blue Vervain

Rubus sempervirens, evergreen raspberry, the small low blackberry, is now in fruit.  See August 24, 1859 ("  The small sempervirens blackberry in prime in one place.");  September 7, 1858 ("J. Farmer calls those Rubus sempervirens berries, now abundant, “snake blackberries.”")  See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Blackberries

Polygala cruciata, cross-leaved polygala, has  a very sweet but intermittent  fragrance, as of checkerberry and mayflowers combined.  See  July 10, 1854 ("Polygala cruciata, Hubbard's Close, two or three days "); July 13, 1852 ("The Polygala sanguinea and P. cruciata in Blister's meadow, both numerous and well out. The last has a fugacious (?) spicy scent, in which, methinks, I detect the scent of nutmegs. Afterward I find that it is the lower part of the stem and root which is most highly scented, like checkerberry, and not fugacious"); September 13, 1851("The cross-leaved polygala emits its fragrance as if at will. You are quite sure you smelled it and are ravished with its sweet fragrance, but now it has no smell. You must not hold it too near, but hold it on all sides and at all distances, and there will perchance be wafted to you sooner or later a very sweet and penetrating fragrance. What it is like you cannot surely tell, for you do not enjoy it long enough nor in volume enough to compare it. It is very likely that you will not discover any fragrance while you are rudely smelling at it; you can only remember that you once perceived it. Both this and the caducous polygala are now some what faded.") See also August 13, 1856 ("The root of the Polygala verticillata also has the checkerberry odor.") and   A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,The Polygala

A record of a sunset. At midnight by moonlight.

June 28.

OEnothera biennis, evening-primrose, with its conspicuous flowers but rather unsightly stem and leaves. 

The Rubus odorata, purple flowering raspberry, in gardens. 

Potatoes for some time. 

Evening. 7 p.m. — Moon more than half. 

There are meteorologists, but who keeps a record of the fairer sunsets? 

While men are recording the direction of the wind, they neglect to record the beauty of the sunset or the rainbow. 

The sun not yet set. 

The bobolink sings descending to the meadow as I go along the railroad to the pond. 

The seringo-bird and the common song sparrow, — and the swallows twitter. 

The plaintive strain of the lark, coming up from the meadow, is perfectly adapted to the hour. 

When I get nearer the wood, the veery is heard, and the oven-bird, or whet-saw, sounds hollowly from within the recesses of the wood. 

The clouds in the west are edged with fiery red. A few robins faintly sing. 

The huckleberry-bird in more open fields in the woods. The thrasher?

The sun is down. 

The night-hawks are squeaking in the somewhat dusky air and occasionally making the ripping sound; the chewinks sound; the bullfrogs begin, and the toads; also tree-toads more numerously. 

Walden imparts to the body of the bather a remark ably chalky-white appearance, whiter than natural, tinged with blue, which, combined with its magnifying and distorting influence, produces a monstrous and ogre like effect, proving, nevertheless, the purity of the water. 

The river water, on the other hand, imparts to the bather a yellowish tinge.

There is a very low mist on the water close to the shore, a few inches high. 

The moon is brassy or golden now, and the air more dusky; yet I hear the pea-wai and the wood thrush, and now a whip-poor-will before I have seen a star. 

The walker in the woods at this hour takes note of the different veins of air through which he passes, — the fresher and cooler in the hollows, laden with the condensed fragrance of plants, as it were distilled in dews; and yet the warmer veins in a cool evening like this do not fail to be agreeable, though in them the air is comparatively lifeless or exhausted of its vitality. It circulates about from pillar to post, from wood-side to side-hill, like a dog that has lost its master, now the sun is gone. 

Now it is starlight; perhaps that dark cloud in the west has concealed the evening star before.

Yet I hear a chewink, veery, and wood thrush. 

Nighthawks and whip-poor-wills, of course. 

A whip-poor-will whose nest, perchance, I am near, on the side of the Cliff, hovers in the dusky air about ten feet from me, now on this side, then on that, on quivering wings, inspecting me, showing the white on its wings. It holds itself stationary for a minute. 

It is the first warm night for a week, and I hear the toads by the river very numerous. 

First there was sundown, then starlight. 

Starlight! That would be a good way to mark the hour, if we were precise. 

That is an epoch, when the last traces of daylight have disappeared and the night (nox) has fairly set in. 

Is not the moon a mediator? 

She is a light-giver that does not dazzle me. 

I have camped out all night on the tops of four mountains, — Wachusett, Saddle-back, Ktaadn, and Monadnock, — and I usually took a ramble over the summit at midnight by moonlight. 

I remember the moaning of the wind on the rocks, and that you seemed much nearer to the moon than on the plains. The light is then in harmony with the scenery. Of what use the sunlight to the mountain-summits? From the cliffs you looked off into vast depths of illumined air.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 28, 1852

When I get nearer the wood, the veery is heard, and the oven-bird, or whet-saw, sounds hollowly from within the recesses of the wood. ...  Now it is starlight [y]et I hear a chewink, veery, and wood thrush. Compare July 28, 1854 ("Veery and wood thrush not very lately, nor oven-bird"); See also May 13, 1856 (“At the swamp, hear the yorrick of Wilson’s thrush; the tweezer-bird or Sylvia Americana. Also the oven-bird sings.”); May 19, 1860 (“By the path-side near there, what I should call a veery's nest with four light-blue eggs, but I have not heard the veery note this year, only the yorrick.“); June 11, 1852 ("The oven-bird and the thrasher sing. "); June 15, 1854 ("Thrasher and catbird sing still; summer yellowbird and Maryland yellow-throat sing still; and oven-bird and veery"); June 16, 1856 (“Heard . . . not only Wilson’s thrush, but evergreen forest note and tanager.”); June 21, 1852 (“I hear the veery and the huckleberry-bird and the catbird.”); July 10, 1854 ("The singing birds at present are . . . Red-eye, tanager, wood thrush, chewink, veery, oven-bird, — all even at midday.") July 27, 1852 (" Have I heard the veery lately?"): July 30, 1852 ("How long since I heard a veery? Do they go, or become silent, when the goldfinches herald the autumn? ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Veery

Now it is starlight; perhaps that dark cloud in the west has concealed the evening star before. . . .Starlight! That would be a good way to mark the hour, if we were precise. See  August 8, 1851 ("Starlight! that would be a good way to mark the hour, if we were precise.”); May 8, 1852 (“Starlight marks conveniently a stage in the evening, i. e. when the first star can be seen. ”); June 30, 1852 (“It is starlight about half an hour after sunset to-night; i. e. the first stars appear”); July 20, 1852 ("It is starlight. You see the first star in the southwest, and know not how much earlier you might have seen it had you looked.")

I have camped out all night on the tops of four mountains . . . and I usually took a ramble over the summit at midnight by moonlight. See March 31, 1853 ("It is affecting to sec a distant mountain-top . . . whereon you camped for a night in your youth, which you have never revisited, still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Mountains in the Horizon and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June Moonlight

The sunny south side of this swamp.

November 25. 


P. M. —To Ministerial Swamp. 

I go through the Dennis Swamp by railroad. See a few high blueberry buds which have fairly started, expanded into small red leaves, apparently within a few weeks. 

The Rubus hispidus is now very common and conspicuous amid the withered grass and leaves of the swamp, with its green or reddened leaves; also the gold-thread.

The prinos berries on their light-brown twigs are quite abundant and handsome. 

While most keep close to their parlor fires this cold and blustering Thanksgiving afternoon, and think with compassion of those who are abroad, I find the sunny south side of this swamp as warm as their parlors, and warmer to my spirit. Aye, there is a serenity and warmth here which the parlor does not suggest, enhanced by the sound of the wind roaring on the northwest side of the swamp a dozen or so rods off. What a wholesome and inspiring warmth is this! 

Bigtooth aspen, November 25, 2018

I see aspen (tremuliformis) leaves, which have long since fallen, turned black, which also shows the relation of this tree to the willow, many species of which also turn black. 

Pass Tarbell’s behind. The farmer, now on the downhill of life, at length gets his new barn and barn cellar built, far away in some unfrequented vale. This for twoscore years he has struggled for. This is his poem done at last, — to get the means to dig that cavity and rear those timbers aloft. How many millions have done just like him!—or failed to do it! There is so little originality, and just so little, and just as much, fate, so to call it, in literature. With steady struggle, with alternate failure and success, he at length gets a barn cellar completed, and then a tomb. You would say that there was a tariff on thinking and originality.

I pass through the Ministerial Swamp and ascend the steep hill on the south cut off last winter. In the barren poplar hollow just north of the old mountain cranberry is another, the largest, patch of it (i. e. bear-berry) that I remember in Concord. 

How often I see these aspens standing dead in barren, perhaps frosty, valleys in the woods! Most shrub oaks there have lost their leaves (Quercus ilicifolia), which, very fair and perfect, cover the ground. 

You are surprised, late these afternoons, a half an hour perhaps before sunset, after walking in the shade or on looking round from a height, to see the singularly bright yellow light of the sun reflected from pines, especially pitch pines, or the withered oak leaves, through the clear, cold air, the wind, it may be, blowing strong from the northwest. Sunlight in summer falling on green woods is not, methinks, such a noticeable phenomenon. I stand on that high hill south of the swamp cut off by C. (?) Wheeler last winter, and when I look round northeast I am greatly surprised by the very brilliant sunlight of which I speak, surpassing the glare of any noontide, it seems to me.

November 25, 2018

H.. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 25, 1858

See a few high blueberry buds which have fairly started, expanded into small red leaves. See November 6, 1853 (“The remarkable roundish, plump red buds of the high blueberry.”); November 23, 1857 (“You distinguish it by its gray spreading mass; its light-gray bark, rather roughened; its thickish shoots, often crimson; and its plump, roundish red buds.”)


The Rubus hispidus is now very common and conspicuous amid the withered grass and leaves of the swamp, with its green or reddened leaves. See February 18, 1858 (“The Rubus hispidus (sempervirens of Bigelow) is truly evergreen.”);  August 4, 1854 (“The swamp blackberry on high land, ripe a day or two.”); August 6, 1856 (“Rubus hispidus ripe.”); August 15, 1852 ("The swamp blackberry begins.”); August 23, 1856 (“ At the Lincoln bound hollow, Walden, there is a dense bed of the Rubus hispidus, matting the ground seven or eight inches deep, and full of the small black fruit, now in its prime. It is especially abundant where the vines lie over a stump. Has a peculiar, hardly agreeable acid.”); November 16, 1858 (“Rubus hispidus leaves last through the winter, turning reddish”); November 20, 1858 (“the Rubus hispidus leaves last all winter like an evergreen”)

 Rubus hispidus is a small, herb-like shrub up to 8 inches tall. with the common names swamp dewberry, bristly dewberry, bristly groundberry, groundberry, hispid swamp blackberry or running swamp blackberry. It is a species of dewberry in the rose family, closely related to the blackberries.The twigs are red and have bristles. Flowers in small clumps, each with five white rounded petals. The berries, dark purple, almost black, are rather bitter for culinary use, and so this plant is generally not cultivated. ~wkipedia

I find the sunny south side of this swamp as warm as their parlors, and warmer to my spirit. See November 25, 1850 ("Tthere was a finer and purer warmth than in summer; a wholesome, intellectual warmth, in which the body was warmed by the mind's contentment. The warmth was hardly sensuous, but rather the satisfaction of existence."); see also January 7, 1857 (“I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplified. ”)

A cold and blustering afternoon. They want me to agree not to breathe castles.

November 16.

November 16, 2018

P. M. -— To Hubbard’s Close. 

A cold and blustering afternoon; sky for the most part overcast. 

The Cornus Canadensis is called by Loudon “a deciduous herbaceous plant,” the pyrolas “ever-green herbaceous plants.” The bunchberry leaves are now little if any withered, but generally drooping, the four hanging together as is the habit of the sericea and florida, the lambkill, etc. The plant dies down to its perennial spring. You can see its pink bud already strongly formed. But this year’s plant is very slow to die, and I suspect many of the leaves remain green all winter under the snow. They are now generally purplish-tinged. Let me observe in what respect the pyrolas are more evergreen. The new bud is formed between the present two leaves, the old leaves, lower on the stem or vine, being mostly decayed. 

There are many large limbs strewn about the woods, which were broken off by that strong southeast wind in peach time. These are now thickly leaved, the dead wood not being able to cast off the withered leaves; but the leaves having died thus prematurely are of a different color from that their companions changed to, — a peculiar yellow-brown (i. e. chestnuts and oaks) with more or less green in it.

I see a gray squirrel, eight or ten rods off in Hubbard’s large wood, scamper over the leaves and run up an oak. From the oak it crosses ascending into a tall white pine top, and there lies concealed, and I can see no more of him. 

The earth half covered with this slight snow, merely grayed with [it], is the more like the bare gray limbs of oak woods now, and such woods and the earth make the more uniform impression. 

Methinks the wintergreen, pipsissewa, is our handsomest evergreen, so liquid glossy green and dispersed almost all over the woods. The mountain laurel, the lycopodium dendroideum, complanatum, and lucidulum, and the terminal shield fern are also very interesting.

Preaching? Lecturing? Who are ye that ask for these things? What do ye want to hear, ye puling infants? A trumpet-sound that would train you up to mankind, or a nurse’s lullaby? The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state. It would be a relief to breathe one’s self occasionally among men. If there, were any magnanimity in us, any grandeur of soul, anything but sects and parties undertaking to patronize God and keep the mind within bounds, how often we might encourage and provoke one another by a free expression! I will not consent to walk with my mouth muzzled, not till I am rabid, until there is danger, that I shall bite the unoffending and that my bite will produce hydrophobia. 

Freedom of speech! It hath not entered into your hearts to conceive what those words mean. It is not leave given me by your sect to say this or that; it is when leave is given to your sect to withdraw. The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard. I ask only that one fourth part of my honest thoughts be spoken aloud. 'What is it you tolerate, you church to-day? Not truth, but a lifelong hypocrisy. Let us have institutions framed not out of our rottenness, but out of our soundness. This factitious piety is like stale gingerbread. I would like to suggest what a pack of fools and cowards we mankind are. They want me to agree not to breathe castles. If I should draw a long breath in the neighborhood of these institutions, their weak and flabby sides would fall out, for my own inspiration would exhaust the air about them. The church! it is eminently the timid institution, and the heads and pillars of it are constitutionally and by principle the greatest cowards in the community. The voice that goes up from the monthly concerts is not so brave and so cheering as that which rises from the frogponds of the land. The best “preachers,” so called, are an effeminate class; their bravest thoughts wear petticoats. If they have any manhood they are sure to forsake the ministry, though they were to turn their attention to baseball. Look at your editors of popular magazines. I have dealt with two or three the most liberal of them. They are afraid to print a whole sentence, a round sentence, a free-spoken sentence. They want to get thirty thousand subscribers, and they will do anything to get them. They consult the D.D.’s and all the letters of the alphabet before printing a 'sentence.‘ I have been into many of these cowardly New England towns where they profess Christianity, — invited to speak, perchance, —where they were trembling in their shoes at the thought of the things you might say, as if they knew their weak side, — that they were weak on all sides. The devil they have covenanted with is a timid devil. If they would let their sores alone they might heal, and they could to the wars again like men; but in stead of that they get together in meeting-house cellars, rip off the bandages and poultice them with sermons.

One of our New England towns is scaled up hermetically like a molasses-hogshead,— such is its sweet Christianity, — only a little of the sweet trickling out at the cracks enough to daub you. The few more liberal-minded or indifferent inhabitants are the flies that buzz about it. It is Christianity bunged up. I see awful eyes looking out through a bull’s-eye at the bung-hole. It is doubtful if they can fellowship with me. 

The further you go up country, I think the worse it is, the more benighted they are. On the one side you will find a barroom which holds the “Scoffers,” so called, on the other a vestry where is a monthly concert of prayer. There is just as little to cheer you in one of these companies as the other. It may be often the truth and righteousness of the barroom that saves the town. There is nothing to redeem the bigotry and moral cowardice of New-Englanders in my eyes. You may find a cape which runs six miles into the sea that has not a man of moral courage upon it. What is called faith is an immense prejudice. Like the Hindoos and Russians and Sandwich-Islanders (that were), they are the creatures of an institution. They do not think; they adhere like oysters to what their fathers and grandfathers adhered to. How often is it that the shoemaker, by thinking over his last, can think as valuable a thought as he makes a valuable shoe? 

I have been into the town, being invited to speak to the inhabitants, not valuing, not having read even, the Assembly’s Catechism, and I try to stimulate them by reporting the best of my experience. I see the craven priest looking round for a hole to escape at, alarmed  because it was he that invited me thither, and an awful silence pervades the audience. They think they will never get me there again. But the seed has not all fallen in stony and shallow ground. 

The following are our shrubby evergreen plants (not including Coniferas): — 

• Mitchella repens 
• Linnaea 
• Andromeda Polifolia 
• Cassandra calyculata 
• Mayflower 
• Checkerberry 
• Mountain laurel 
• Lambkill 
• Kalmia glauca 
• Labrador tea 
• Common cranberry 
• European cranberry 

To which I will add the herbaceous:— 

• Chimaphila umbellata 
•                  maculata 

N. B. — Rubus hispidus leaves last through the winter, turning reddish.

It is no compliment to be invited to lecture before the rich Institutes and Lyceums. The settled lecturers are as tame as the settled ministers. The audiences do not want to hear any prophets; they do not wish to be stimulated and instructed, but entertained. They, their wives and daughters, go to the Lyceum to suck a sugarplum. The little of medicine they get is disguised with sugar. It is never the reformer they hear there, but a faint and timid echo of him only. They seek a pass time merely. Their greatest guns and sons of thunder are only wooden guns and great-grandsons of thunder, who give them smooth words well pronounced from manuscripts well punctuated, — they who have stolen the little fire they have from prophets whom the audience would quake to hear. They ask for orators that will entertain them and leave them where they found them. The most successful lecturing on Washington, or what-not, is an awful scratching of backs to the tune, it may be, of fifty thousand dollars. Sluggards that want to have a lullaby sung to them! Such manikins as I have described are they, alas, who have made the greatest stir (and what a shallow stir) in the church and Lyceum, and in Congress. They want a medicine that will not interfere with their daily meals. 

There is the Lowell Institute with its restrictions, requiring a certain faith in the lecturers. How can any free thinking man accept its terms? It is as if you were to resolve that you would not eat oysters that were not of a particular faith, — that, for instance, did not believe the Thirty-Nine Articles,— for the faith that is in an oyster is just as valuable as the faith referred to in Mr. Lowell’s will. These popular lecturers, our preachers, and magazines are for women and children in the bad sense. 

The curators have on their lists the names of the men who came before the Philomathean Institute in the next large town and did no harm; left things in statu quo, so that all slept the better for it; only confirmed the audience in their previous badness; spoke a good word for youngsters to be good boys. A man may have a good deal to say who has not any desk to thump on, who does not thunder in bad air. 

They want all of a man but his truth and independence and manhood. 

One who spoke to their condition would of course make them wince, and they would retaliate, i. e. kick him out, or stop their ears. 

The cold weather which began on the 12th, with the snow of the 13th and since, suddenly killed the few remaining living leaves, without any exceptions to speak of. Most foreign plants at once dropped their leaves, though pretty thick before, but there are many still on the privet. The sweet-fern in some places has still many green, more than any indigenous shrub or tree, though far the greater part of them (the sweet-ferns) are bare or withered. Probably the larch about fallen.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 16, 1858

A cold and blustering afternoon; sky for the most part overcast. See November 13, 1851 (“A cold and dark afternoon, the sun being behind clouds in the west. The landscape is barren of objects, the trees being leafless, and so little light in the sky for variety.”)

It is an early September afternoon.

September 7. 

P. M. — To Assabet Bath. 

September 7, 2018

I turn Anthony’s corner. It is an early September afternoon, melting warm and sunny; the thousands of grasshoppers leaping before you reflect gleams of light; a little distance off the field is yellowed with a Xerxean army of Solidago nemoralis between me and the sun; the earth-song of the cricket comes up through all; and ever and anon the hot z-ing of the locust is heard. (Poultry is now fattening on grasshoppers.) The dry deserted fields are one mass of yellow, like a color shoved to one side on Nature’s palette. You literally wade in yellow flowers knee-deep, and now the moist banks and low hollows are beginning to be abundantly sugared with Aster Tradescantia.

J. Farmer calls those Rubus sempervirens berries, now abundant, “snake blackberries.” 

Looking for my Maryland yellow-throat’s nest, I find that apparently a snake has made it the portico to his dwelling, there being a hole descending into the earth through it! 

In Shad-bush Meadow the prevailing grasses (not sedges) now are the slender Panicum clandestinum, whose seeds are generally dropped now, Panicum virgatum, in large tufts, and blue-joint, the last, of course, long since done. These are all the grasses that I notice there. 

What a contrast to sink your head so as to cover your ears with water, and hear only the confused noise of the rushing river, and then to raise your ears above water and hear the steady creaking of crickets in the aerial universe! 

While dressing, I see two small hawks, probably partridge hawks, soaring and circling about one hundred feet above the river. Suddenly one drops down from that height almost perfectly perpendicularly after some prey, till it is lost behind the bushes. 

Near the little bridge at the foot of Turtle Bank, Eragrostis capillaris in small but dense patches, apparently in prime (the Poa capillaris of Bigelow). What I have thus called in press is E. pectinacea (P. hirsuta of Bigelow). 

On the flat hill south of Abel Hosmer, Agrostis scabra, hair grass, flyaway grass, tickle grass, out of bloom; branches purplish. That of September 5th was the A. perennans, in lower ground. 

On the railroad between tracks above Red House, hardly yet out; forked aristida, or poverty grass. 

Storrow Higginson brings from Deerfield this evening some eggs to show me, — among others apparently that of the Virginian rail. It agrees in color, size, etc., according to Wilson, and is like (except, perhaps, in form) to one which E. Bartlett brought me a week or ten days ago, which dropped from a load of hay carried to Stow’s barn! So perhaps it breeds here. [Yes. Vide Sept. 9th. Vide Sept. 21st and Dec. 7th, and June 1st, 1859]

Also a smaller egg of same form, but dull white with very pale dusky spots, which may be that of the Carolina rail. 

He had also what I think the egg of the Falco fuscatus, it agreeing with MacGillivray’s sparrow hawk’s egg.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 7, 1858

Looking for my Maryland yellow-throat’s nest. See June 10, 1858 (“To Assebet Bath. . .A Maryland yellow-throat's nest near apple tree by the low path beyond the pear tree. Perfectly concealed under the loose withered grass at the base of a clump of birches, with no apparent entrance. ”)

In Shad-bush Meadow the prevailing grasses now are the slender Panicum clandestine, Panicum virgatum,  and blue-joint, the last, of course, long since done. These are all the grasses that I notice there. See August 2, 1858 (“Landed at the Bath-Place and walked the length of Shad-bush Meadow. . . .What I have called the Panicum latifoliumhas now its broad leaves, striped with red, abundant under Turtle Bank, above Bath-Place.”)

Storrow Higginson brings from Deerfield this evening some eggs to show me, — among others apparently that of the Virginian rail. See September 9, 1858 (“My egg (named Sept. 7th) was undoubtedly a meadow-hen’s Rallus Virginiana.”)

A great pea-green emperor moth.

July 1.

I am surveying the Bedford road these days, and have no time for my Journal. 

July 1, 2013

Saw one of those great pea-green emperor moths, like a bird, fluttering over the top of the woods this forenoon, 10 a. m., near Beck Stow's. 

Gathered the early red blackberry in the swamp or meadow this side of Pedrick's, where I ran a pole down nine feet. It is quite distinct from the evergreen one and is without prickles. Fruit red, middle-sized, with a few, perhaps ten or twelve, large globules.

May be the Rubus triflorus, but not growing on hills.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 1, 1853


One of those great pea-green emperor moths. See June 27, 1858 (“See an Attacus luna in the shady path”)  See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Luna Moth (Attacus luna)

May be the Rubus triflorus. See June 30, 1854 ("Rubus triflorus berries, some time, — the earliest fruit of a rubus. The berries are very scarce, light red, semitransparent, showing the seed . . ."); July 2, 1851("Some of the raspberries are ripe, the most innocent and simple of fruits")

The ground under the white pines is now strewn with the effete male flowers.

June 25

The ground under the

white pines is now strewn with the

effete male flowers.

June 25, 1858

P. M. — To Conantum. Hotter than yesterday and, like it, muggy or close.

June 25, 2018

So hazy can see no mountains. In many spots in the road and by edge of rye-fields the reflected heat is almost suffocating. 

93° at 1 P. M. 

At my perch pool I hear the pebbly sound of frogs, and some, perhaps below the middle size, hop in before I see them. I suspect that this sound is not made by the bullfrog, but by the fontinalis or palustris. 

In the meadow or partly included in the west end of Hubbard’s Grove, a smooth, rather flaccid rush with roundish spikes, say twenty inches high, apparently fresh, somewhat flava-like.

Sitting on the Conantum house sill (still left), I see two and perhaps three young striped squirrels, two thirds grown, within fifteen or twenty feet, one or more on the wall and another on the ground. Their tails are rather imperfect, as their bodies. They are running about, yet rather feebly, nibbling the grass, etc., or sitting upright, looking very cunning. The broad white line above and below the eye make it look very long as well as large, and the black and white stripes on its sides, curved as it sits, are very conspicuous and pretty. Who striped the squirrel's side? 

Several times I saw two approach each other and playfully and, as it were, affectionately put their paws and noses to each other's faces. Yet this was done very deliberately and affectionately. There was no rudeness nor excessive activity in their sport. At length the old one appears, larger and much more bluish, and shy, and, with a sharp cluck or chip, calls the others gradually to her and draws them off along the wall, they from time to time frisking ahead of her, then she ahead of them. 

The hawks must get many of these inexperienced creatures. 

The Rubus frondosus is hardly past prime, while the villosus is almost wholly done here.

Just south the wall at Bittern Cliff, the Panicum latifolium, hardly yet, with some leaves almost an inch and a half wide. 

We bathe at Bittern Cliff. The water is exceedingly warm near the surface, but refreshingly cold four or five feet beneath. There must be twenty degrees difference at least. 

The ground under the white pines is now strewn with the effete flowers, like an excrement.  

I notice an apparent female bullfrog, with a lustrous greenish (not yellow) throat.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 25, 1858

The ground under the white pines is now strewn with the effete flowers. See June 25, 1852 (" I am too late for the white pine flowers. The cones are half an inch long and greenish, and the male flowers effete."); June 25, 1857 ("White pine effete."); July 1, 1852 ("The path by the wood-side is red with the effete staminiferous flowers of the white pine.")

We bathe at Bittern Cliff. The water is exceedingly warm near the surface, but refreshingly cold four or five feet beneath. See July 9, 1852 ("The pond water being so warm made the water of the brook feel very cold;. . .and when I thrust my arm down where it was only two feet deep, my arm was in the warm water of the pond, but my hand in the cold water of the brook.”); July 23, 1856 ("Bathing in Walden, I find the water considerably colder at the bottom while I stand up to my chin, but the sandy bottom much warmer to my feet than the water.")

An apparent female bullfrog, with a lustrous greenish (not yellow) throat. See June 7, 1858 ("'Are not the females oftenest white-throated?")

July 25. See A Book of the Seasons,, by Henry Thoreau, June 25

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

So the cows eat barberries, and help disperse or disseminate them exactly as they do the apple!

May 29. 

May 29, 2018

P. M. – To Bateman's Pond via Pratt's. 

Buttonwood, one tree, not for two or three days. 

Rubus triflorus, well out, at Calla Swamp, how long?

Calla apparently in two or three, or three or four days, the very earliest. 

Arethusa bulbosa, well out. 

Cornus Canadensis blooms apparently with C. florida; not quite yet. 

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. 

See the genista, winter-killed at top, some seven or eight rods north of the southernmost large boulder in the Boulder Field. 

Cannot find any large corydalis plants where it has been very plenty. 

A few of the Cornus florida buds by the pond have escaped after all. 

Farmer describes an animal which he saw lately near Bateman's Pond, which he thought would weigh fifty or sixty pounds, color of a she fox at this season, low but very long, and ran somewhat like a woodchuck. I think it must have been an otter, though they are described as dark glossy-brown.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 29, 1858

Calla apparently in two or three, or three or four days, the very earliest. See June 7, 1857 (“Pratt has got the Calla palustris, in prime. . .from the bog near Bateman's Pond”) and note to July 2, 1857 ("Calla palustris . . . at the south end of Gowing's Swamp. Having found this in one place, I now find it in another.")

Arethusa bulbosa, well out. See note to May 29, 1856 ("Two Arethusa bulbosa at Hubbard’s Close apparently a day or two.")

See the genista, winter-killed at top, some seven or eight rods north of the southernmost large boulder in the Boulder Field. See May 21, 1858 ("Pratt shows me what I take to be Genista tinctoria (not budded) from the Boulder Field");  June 28, 1858  ("The Genista tinctoria has been open apparently a week. It has a pretty and lively effect, reminding me for some reason of the poverty-grass."). See also April 21, 1852 ("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, . . .I look down on some of them as on the backs of oxen. A certain personality, or at least brute life, they seem to have."); November 3, 1857 ("It is singular that several of those rocks should be thus split into twins. Even very low ones, just appearing above the surface, are divided and parallel, having a path between them. It would be something to own that pasture with the great rocks in it")

The Cornus florida by the pond. See May 18, 1857 (“There is a large tree [Cornus florida] on the further side the ravine near Bateman's Pond and another by some beeches on the rocky hillside a quarter of a mile northeast.”)

Walden ice.

February 18. 

I find Walden ice to be nine and a half plus inches thick, having gained three and a half inches since the 8th. 

The Rubus hispidus (sempervirens of Bigelow) is truly evergreen. 

There has been so little snow this winter that I have noticed it the more, — red, glossy, and, as it were, plaited. 

I see the ice, three inches thick, heaved up tentwise eighteen inches or more in height, near the shore, yet where the water is too deep for the bottom to have been heaved, as if some steam had heaved it. 

At Brister's further spring, the water which trickles off in various directions between and around little mounds of green grass half frozen, when it reaches the more mossy ground runs often between two perpendicular walls of ice, as at the bottom of a cañon, the top of these perfectly square-edged banks being covered with the moss that originally covered the ground (otherwise undisturbed) and extending several feet on each side at the same level. These icy cliffs are of a loose crystalline composition, with many parallel horizontal seams, as if built up. I suppose that the water flows just under the moss, and, freezing, heaves it one stage; then the next night, perchance, new water, flowing underneath, heaves the whole another stage; and so on, steadily lifting it up. 

Far from here, I see the surface of weeds and mud lifted up in like manner where there is no cañon or rill, but a puddle. 

George Minott tells me that he, when young, used often to go to a store by the side of where Bigelow's tavern was and kept by Ephraim Jones, – the Goodnow store. That was probably the one kept by my old trader. 

Told me how Casey, who was a slave to a man — Whitney — who lived where Hawthorne owns, —the same house, — before the Revolution, ran off one Sunday, was pursued by the neighbors, and hid him self in the river up to his neck till nightfall, just across the Great Meadows. He ran through Gowing's Swamp and came back that night to a Mrs. Cogswell, who lived where Charles Davis does, and got something to eat; then cleared far away, enlisted, and was freed as a soldier after the war. 

Whitney's boy threw snow balls at him the day before, and finally C., who was chopping in the yard, threw his axe at him, and W. said he was an ugly nigger and he must put him in jail. 

He may have been twenty years old when stolen from Africa; left a wife and one child there. Used to say that he went home to Africa in the night and came back again in the morning; i. e., he dreamed of home. Lived to be old. Called Thanksgiving “Tom Kiver.”

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 18, 1858

And now the lark must look out for the mowers.

July 11. 

July11,  2016

P. M. — To Corner Spring and Cliffs. 

Haying is fairly begun, and for some days I have heard the sound of the mowing-machine, and now the lark must look out for the mowers. 

The flowering fern, which is so much larger in the copses, though much is brown and effete, is still perhaps in prime. 

Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum ripe. Their dark blue with a bloom is a color that surprises me. 

The cymbidium is really a splendid flower, with its spike two or three inches long,  of commonly three or five large, irregular, concave, star-shaped purple flowers, amid the cool green meadow-grass. It has an agreeable fragrance withal. 

I see more berries than usual of the Rubus triflorus in the open meadow near the southeast corner of the Hubbard meadow blueberry swamp. Call it, perhaps, Cymbidium Meadow. They are dark shining red and, when ripe, of a very agreeable flavor and somewhat of the raspberry's spirit. 

Petty morel not yet, by the bars this side Corner Spring; nor is the helianthus there budded yet.

Apocynum cannabinum, with its small white flowers and narrow sepals half as long as whole corolla, apparently two or three days. 

The trumpet-weed is already as high as my head, with a rich glaucous bloom on its stem. 

Indeed, looking off into the vales from Fair Haven Hill, where a thin blue haze now rests almost universally, I see that the earth itself is invested with a glaucous bloom at this season like some fruits and rapidly growing stems. 

Thermometer at 93° + this afternoon. 

Am surprised to find the water of Corner Spring spoiled for the present, however much I clear it out, by the numbers of dead and dying frogs in it (Rana palustris). There is a mortality among which has made them hop to this spring to die. 

There is an abundance of corydalis on the top of the Cliffs, but most of it is generally out of bloom, i. e. excepting a twig or two, and it is partly withered, not so fresh as that in our garden; but some in the shade is quite green and fresh and abundantly blooming still.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 11, 1857

And now the lark must look out for the mowers. See July 11, 1854 ("I hear Conant's cradle cronching the rye behind the fringe of bushes in the Indian field. Reaping begun."); July 29, 1853 ("About these times some hundreds of men with freshly sharpened scythes make an irruption into my garden when in its rankest condition, and clip my herbs all as close as they can,") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Haymaking and June 30,1851 ("The lark sings a note which belongs to a New England summer evening. "); July 16, 1851 ("The lark sings in the meadow; the very essence of the afternoon is in his strain. This is a New England sound"); July 18, 1852 ("The larks and blackbirds and kingbirds are heard in the meadows."); July 26, 1853 ("Lark, too seen now, four or five together, sing as of yore"); July 26, 1856 ("I see young larks fly pretty well before me.")

Rubus triflorus in the open meadow near the southeast corner of the Hubbard meadow blueberry swamp. See note to July 6, 1857 ("Rubus triflorus well ripe.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Raspberry

Apocynum cannabinum, with its small white flowers and narrow sepals. See note to September 2, 1856 ("Some years ago I sought for Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) hereabouts in vain, and concluded that it did not grow here. A month or two ago I read again, as many times before, that its blossoms were very small, scarcely a third as large as those of the common species, and for some unaccountable reason this distinction kept recurring to me, and I regarded the size of the flowers I saw, though I did not believe that it grew here; and in a day or two my eyes fell on it, aye, in three different places, and different varieties of it.")

Thermometer at 93° + this afternoon. See July 2, 1855 ("At 2 P. M. — Thermometer north side of house ... 93°") 

Dead and dying frogs in Corner Spring (Rana palustris). See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  The   Pickerel frog  (Rana palustris or Lithobates palustris)

July 11. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 11

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