For the first time I perceive this spring
that the year is a circle.
I would make a chart of our life,
know why just this circle of creatures completes the world.
Henry Thoreau, April 18, 1852
On the Cliff I find
after long and careful search
one sedge flowering.
April 7, 1854
March 2. Two or three tufts of carex have shot up in Hosmer’s cold spring ditch and been frost-bitten. March 2, 1860
March 3. Also, pretty near [John Hosmer's second] spring, I see a tuft of carex (?) whose stiff glaucous points have risen several inches above the surface. March 3, 1859
March 19. A common sedge which already begins to yellow the top of some tussocks. March 19, 1860
March 22. The phenomena of an average March . . . a Vegetation fairly begins, – conferva and mosses, grass and carex, etc . . . The skunk-cabbage begins to bloom (23d) . . . lake grass; and perchance the gooseberry and lilac begin to show a little green. That is, one indigenous native flower blooms. (Vide if the early sedge does.) March 22, 1860
March 25. Much of this peculiar yellowish color on the surface of the Clamshell plain is due to a little curled sedge or grass growing at short intervals, loosely covering the ground (with green mosses intermixed) in little tufts like curled hair. March 25, 1859
April 2. Some of the earliest plants are now not started because covered with snow, as the stellaria and shepherd's-purse. Others, like the Carex Pennsylvanica, the crowfoot, saxifrage, callitriche, are either covered or recently uncovered. I think it must be partly owing to the want of rain, and not wholly to the snow, that the first three are so backward. April 2, 1856
April 7. On the Cliff I find, after long and careful search, one sedge above the rocks, low amid the withered blades of last year, out, its little yellow beard amid the dry blades and few green ones, — the first herbaceous flowering I have detected. April 7, 1854
April 7. Round the two-mile square. I see where the common great tufted sedge (Carex stricta) has started under the water on the meadows, now fast falling. April 7, 1861
April 10. At Lee’s the early sedge; one only sheds pollen . . . As for the early sedge, who would think of looking for a flower of any kind in those dry tufts whose withered blades almost entirely conceal the springing green ones? I patiently examined one tuft after another, higher and higher up the rocky hill, till at last I found one little yellow spike low in the grass which shed its pollen on my finger. April 10, 1855
April 11. My early sedge, which has been out at Cliffs apparently a few days (not yet quite generally), the highest only two inches, is probably Carex umbellata. April 11, 1860
April 17. The sedge is shooting up in the meadows, erect, rigid, and sharp, a glaucous green unlike that of the grass on banks. April 17, 1858
April 18. Common saxifrage and also early sedge I am surprised to find abundantly out—both—considering their backwardness April 2d. Both must have been out some, i. e. four or five, days half-way down the face of the ledge. April 18, 1856
grass. April 22, 1852
April 22. Within a few days I pricked my fingers smartly against the sharp, stiff points of some sedge coming up. At Heywood's meadow, by the railroad, this sedge, rising green and dense with yellow tips above the withered clumps, is very striking, suggesting heat, even a blaze, there. April 22, 1859
[See June 19, 1859 ("The prevailing sedge of Heywood Meadow by Bartlett Hill-side, that which showed yellow tops in the spring, is the Carex stricta.)]
April 24. Sitting on Lightning Hillside and looking over Heywood's meadow, am struck by the vivid greenness of the tips of the sedge just pushing up out of its dry tussocks in the water. I observed it here on the 22d. It is some six inches high or more. All the lower, or the greater, part of the tussock is brown and sere and prostrate withered blades of last year, while from the top spring up ranks of green life like a fire, from amid the withered blades. This new grass is green beneath, but yellow-tipped, perhaps on account of the recent snow or higher water. It is the renewal of life. The contrast of life with death, spring with winter, is nowhere more striking. April 24, 1859
April 26. The forward-rank sedge of Well Meadow which is so generally eaten (by rabbits, or possibly woodchucks), cropped close, is allied to that at Lee's Cliff, which is also extensively browsed now. I have found it difficult to get whole specimens. Certain tender early greens are thus extensively browsed now, in warm swamp-edges and under cliffs, — the bitter cress, the Carex varia (?) at Lee's, even skunk-cabbage. April 26, 1860
May 2. The sedge apparently Carex Pennsylvanica has now been out on low ground a day or two. May 2, 1860
May 10. That early glaucous, sharp-pointed, erect sedge, grass like, by the riverside is now apparently in prime. Is it the Carex aquatilis? May 10, 1858
May 10. As I stand on Hunt’s Bridge, I notice . . . the glaucous green of Carex stricta tufts, and the light yellowish green of the very coarse sedges of the meadow. May 10, 1860
May 14. The early sedges, even in the meadows, have blossomed before you are aware of it, while their tufts and bases are still mainly brown. May 14, 1860
***
See also:
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Earliest Flower.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring, Greening grasses and sedges
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Sedges in Early Spring
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 © 2009-2025
