A Book of the Seasons: The Common Barberry

I would make a chart of our life, 

know why just this circle of creatures completes the world.

Henry Thoreau, April 18, 1852

THE COMMON BARBERRY

February 4. I have often wondered how red cedars could have sprung up in some pastures which I knew to be miles distant from the nearest fruit-bearing cedar, but it now occurs to me that these and barberries, etc., may be planted by the crows, and probably other birds. February 4, 1856.

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

To relieve and ventilate the tree and, as well, to destroy its enemies.

December 2. 

The woodpeckers' holes in the apple trees are about a fifth of an inch deep or just through the bark and half an inch apart. 

They must be the decaying trees that are most frequented by them, and probably their work serves to relieve and ventilate the tree and, as well, to destroy its enemies.

The barberries are shrivelled and dried. I find yet cranberries hard and not touched by the frost.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 2, 1850


The woodpeckers' holes in the apple trees. See December 5, 1853 ("See and hear a downy woodpecker on an apple tree. Have not many winter birds, like this and the chickadee, a sharp note like tinkling glass or icicles?"); December 14, 1855 ("I heard the sound of a downy woodpecker tapping . . . Frequently, when I pause to listen, I hear this sound in the orchards or streets."); January 5, 1860 ("I see where the downy woodpecker has worked lately by the chips of bark and rotten wood scattered over the snow, though I rarely see him in the winter. Once to-day, however, I hear his sharp voice.") see also  Walter Harding, Walden’s Man of Science, VQR (Winter 1981) ("He mistook the distinctive hole-drilling of the yellow-bellied sapsucker for the work of the downy woodpecker,") 

I find yet cranberries hard and not touched by the frost. See August 23, 1859 ("The cranberries (not vines) are extensively frost-bitten and spoiled.");  August 29, 1858 ("We saw where many cranberries had been frost-bitten, F. thinks the night of the 23d. They are much injured."); September 20, 1851 ("The cranberries, too, are touched."); September 24, 1855 ("Some still raking, others picking, cranberries. "); December 7 , 1853 ("I sent two and a half bushels of my cranberries to Boston and got four dollars for them.")

Woodpeckers' holes in 

the apple trees are about  

half an inch apart.

A farmer in his field.

September 23

P. M. — Round by Clematis Brook.

The forget-me-not still.

I observe the rounded tops of the dogwood bushes, scarlet in the distance, on the edge of the meadow (Hubbard's), more full and bright than any flower.

The maples are mostly darker, the very few boughs that are turned, and the tupelo, which is reddening.

The ash is just beginning to turn.

The scarlet dogwood is the striking bush to-day.

I find huckleberries on Conantum still sound and blackening the bushes.

How much longer a mile appears between two blue mountain peaks thirty or more miles off in the horizon than one would expect!

Some acorns and hickory nuts on the ground, but they have not begun to shell.

Is it the nut of the Carya amara, with raised seams, but not bitter, that I perceive?

I suppose that is the Carya tomentosa, or mockernut hickory, with large rounded nuts on Lee's land.

The bitternuts (?), rubbed together, smell like varnish.

The sarothra in bloom.

The wind from the north has turned the white lily pads wrong side up, so that they look red, and their stems are slanted up-stream.

Almost all the yellow ones have disappeared.

September 23, 2018

A blue-stemmed goldenrod, its stem and leaves red.

The woodbine high on trees in the shade a delicate pink.

I gathered some haws very good to eat to-day. I think they must be the senelles of the Canadians.

Hamamelis Virginiana out, before its leaves fall.

A woodchuck out.

The waxwork not opened.

The "feathery tails" of the clematis fruit conspicuous and interesting now.

Yellow lily out (again?) in the pond-holes.

Passing a corn-field the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm. Any of his acquaintances would. He was only a trifle more weather-[beaten] than when I saw him last. His back being toward me, I missed nothing, and I thought to myself if I were a crow I should not fear the balance of him, at any rate.

In northern latitudes, where other edible fruits are scarce, they make an account of haws and bunch-berries.

The barberry bushes in Clematis Hollow are very beautiful now, with their wreaths of red or scarlet fruit drooping over a rock.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 23, 1852

The scarlet dogwood is the striking bush to-day. See note to September 25, 1852 ("The scarlet of the dogwood is the most conspicuous and interesting of the autumnal colors at present.")

A blue-stemmed goldenrod, its stem and leaves red. See September 23, 1860 ("I see everywhere in the shady yew wood those pretty round-eyed fungus-spots on the upper leaves of the blue-stemmed goldenrod, contrasting with the few bright-yellow flowers above them, -- yellowish-white rings (with a slate-colored centre), surrounded by green and then dark."); See also November 10, 1858 ("In the path below the Cliff, I see some blue-stemmed goldenrod turned yellow as well as purple.") and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Blue-stemmed Goldenrod (solidago caesia)

How much longer a mile appears between two blue mountain peaks thirty or more miles off in the horizon. See March 31, 1853 ("It is affecting to see a distant mountain-top,. . . still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it.'); May 17, 1858 ("I doubt if in the landscape there can be anything finer than a distant mountain-range. They are a constant elevating influence."); August 14, 1854 (“I have come forth to this hill at sunset to see the forms of the mountains in the horizon.— to behold and commune with something grander than man. “); August 30, 1854 ("The clearness of the air makes it delicious to gaze in any direction. . . ., and I see with new pleasure to distant hillsides and farmhouses . . and to the mountains in the horizon."); October 20, 1852 ("This is an advantage of mountains in the horizon: they show you fair weather from the midst of foul."); October 22, 1857 ("But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it? "); November 4, 1857 ("But those grand and glorious mountains, how impossible to remember daily that they are there, and to live accordingly! They are meant to be a perpetual reminder to us, pointing out the way."): November 22, 1860 ("Simply to see to a distant horizon through a clear air, - the fine outline of a distant hill or a blue mountaintop through some new vista, - this is wealth enough for one afternoon.")  

The wind from the north has turned the white lily pads wrong side up, so that they look red. See June 29, 1852 ("The wind exposes the red undersides of the white lily pads. This is one of the aspects of the river now."); August 24,1854 ("The bright crimson-red under sides of the great white lily pads, turned up by the wind in broad fields on the sides of the stream, are a great ornament to the stream. It is not till August, methinks, that they are turned up conspicuously.”)

Carya amara, bitternut -- Carya tomentosa, mockernut hickory,( North American hickories include:

·        Carya glabra – pignut hickory

·       Carya laciniosa - shagbark hickory

·     Carya ovata – shagbark hickory

·      Carya texana  black hickory

·      Carya tomentosa  – mockernut hickory

·      Carya cordiformis (amara)  – bitternut hickory)

 

 

The second spring commences.

September 28. 

P. M. — To the Boulder Field. 

September 28, 2019

I find the hood-leaved violet quite abundant in a meadow, and the pedata in the Boulder Field. I have now seen all but the blanda, palmata, and pubescens blooming again, and bluebirds and robins, etc., are heard again in the air. 

This is the commencement, then, of the second spring. Violets, Potentilla Canadensis, lambkill, wild rose, yellow lily, etc., etc., begin again. 

Children are now gathering barberries, — just the right time. 

Speaking of the great fall flower which the valleys are at present, its brightest petal is still the scarlet one of dogwood, and in some places the redder red maple one is equally bright; then there is the yellow walnut one, and the broad dull red one of the huckleberry, and the hazel, high blueberry, and Viburnum nudum of various similar tints. 

It has been too cold for the thinnest coat since the middle of September. 

Grapes are still abundant. I have only to shake the birches to bring down a shower of plums. But the flavor of none is quite equal to their fragrance. 

Some soils, like this rocky one on the old Carlisle road, are so suited to the apple that they spring up wild and bear well in the midst of pines, birches, maples, and oaks, their red and yellow fruit harmonizing with the autumnal tints of the forest in which they grow. I am surprised to see rising amid the maples and birches in a swamp the rounded tops of apple trees rosy with fair fruit. 

A windy day. What have these high and roaring winds to do with the fall? No doubt they speak plainly enough to the sap that is in these trees, and perchance they check its upward flow.

A very handsome gray dotted thorn near the black birch grove, six inches in diameter, with a top large in proportion, as large as a small apple tree, bristling with many thorns from suckers about its trunk. This is a very handsome object, and the largest thorn I have seen in Concord, almost bare of leaves and one mass of red fruit, five eighths of an inch in diameter, causing its slender branches to spread and droop gracefully. It reminds me of a wisp of straws tied together, or a dust-brush upright on its handle. 

It must be the same I have seen in Canada. The same with that on Nawshawtuct. Probably most beautiful in fruit, not only on account of its color, but because this causes the branches to spread and curve outward gracefully. 

Ah, if I could put into words that music that I hear; that music which can bring tears to the eyes of marble statues! — to which the very muscles of men are obedient!

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

I find the hood-leaved violet quite abundant in a meadow, and the pedata in the Boulder Field. See August 12, 1858 (“Saw a Viola pedata blooming again.”);  August 31, 1853 ("Viola pedata out again."); September 4, 1856 ("Viola pedata again."); September 9, 1858 ("Many Viola cucullata have opened again"); September 12, 1851 ("Found a violet, apparently Viola cucullata, or hood-leaved violet, in bloom in Baker's Meadow beyond Pine Hill."); October 22, 1859 (" In the wood-path below the Cliffs I see perfectly fresh and fair Viola pedata flowers, as in the spring, though but few together. No flower by its second blooming more perfectly brings back the spring to us.”).

Children are now gathering barberries, — just the right time. See September 16. 1857  ("Barberries very handsome now. See boys gathering them in good season."); September 29, 1853 ("Barberry ripe."); September 29, 1854 ("Now is the time to gather barberries") See also  September 18, 1856 ("I get a full peck from about three bushes.”); September 19, 1856 (“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.”) September 25, 1855 (We get about three pecks of barberries from four or five bushes”); October 1, 1853 (" Got three pecks of barberries.").

It has been too cold for the thinnest coat since the middle of September. Compare September 29, 1854 ("Yesterday was quite warm, requiring the thinnest coat.")

September 28.  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, September 28

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Scarlet berry season.

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

   

Nature's Moods

September 24. 

P. M. — To Melvin's Preserve.

Was that a flock of grackles on the meadow? I have not seen half a dozen blackbirds, methinks, for a month. 

I have many affairs to attend to, and feel hurried these days. Great works of art have endless leisure for a background, as the universe has space. Time stands still while they are created. The artist cannot be in [a] hurry. The earth moves round the sun with inconceivable rapidity, and yet the surface of the lake is not ruffled by it. 

September 24, 2013

It is not by a compromise, it is not by a timid and feeble repentance, that a man will save his soul and live, at last. He has got to conquer a clear field, letting Repentance & Co. go. That 's a well-meaning but weak firm that has assumed the debts of an old and worthless one. You are to fight in a field where no allowances will be made, no courteous bowing to one-handed knights. You are expected to do your duty, not in spite of every thing but one, but in spite of everything. 

See a green snake. 

Stedman Buttrick's handsome maple and pine swamp is full of cinnamon ferns. I stand on the elevated road, looking down into it. The trees are very tall and slender, without branches for a long distance. All the ground, which is perfectly level, is covered and concealed, as are the bases of the trees, with the tufts of cinnamon fern, now a pale brown. It is a very pretty sight, these northern trees springing out of a ground work of ferns. It is like pictures of the tropics, except that here the palms are the undergrowth. You could not have arranged a nosegay more tastefully. It is a rich groundwork, out of which the maples and pines spring. 

But outside the wood and by the roadside, where they are exposed, these ferns are withered, shrivelled, and brown, for they are tenderer than the dicksonia. The fern, especially if large, is so foreign and tropical that these remind me of artificial groundworks set in sand, to set off other plants. These ferns (like brakes) begin to decay, i. e. to turn yellow or brown and ripen, as here, before they are necessarily frost-bitten. Theirs is another change and decay, like that of the brake and sarsaparilla in the woods and swamps, only later, while the exposed ones are killed before they have passed through all their changes. The exposed ones attained to a brighter yellow early and were then killed; the shaded ones pass through various stages of rich, commonly pale brown, as here, and last much longer. The brown ones are the most interesting. 

Going along this old Carlisle road, — road for walkers, for berry-pickers, and no more worldly travellers; road for Melvin and Clark, not for the sheriff nor butcher nor the baker's jingling cart; road where all wild things and fruits abound, where there are countless rocks to jar those who venture there in wagons; which no jockey, no wheelwright in his right mind, drives over, no little spidery gigs and Flying Childers; road which leads to and through a great but not famous garden, zoological and botanical garden, at whose gate you never arrive, — as I was going along there, I perceived the grateful scent of the dicksonia fern, now partly decayed, and it reminds me of all up-country with its springy mountainsides and unexhausted vigor. Is there any essence of dicksonia fern, I wonder? Surely that giant who, my neighbor expects, is to bound up the Alleghanies will have his handkerchief scented with that. In the lowest part of the road the dicksonia by the wall-sides is more than half frost-bitten and withered, — a sober Quaker-color, brown crape! — though not so tender or early [?] as the cinnamon fern; but soon I rise to where they are more yellow and green, and so my route is varied. On the higher places there are very handsome tufts of it, all yellowish out side and green within. The sweet fragrance of decay! 

When I wade through by narrow cow-paths, it is as if I had strayed into an ancient and decayed herb-garden. Proper for old ladies to scent their handkerchiefs with. Nature perfumes her garments with this essence now especially. She gives it to those who go a-barberrying and on dank autumnal walks. The essence of this as well as of new-mown hay, surely! The very scent of it, if you have a decayed frond in your chamber, will take you far up country in a twinkling. You would think you had gone after the cows there, or were lost on the mountains. It will make you as cool and well as a frog, — a wood frog, Rana sylvatica. It is the scent the earth yielded in the saurian period, before man was created and fell, before milk and water were invented, and the mints. Far wilder than they.

Rana sylvatica passed judgment on it, or rather that peculiar-scented Rana palustris. It was in his reign it was introduced. That is the scent of the Silurian Period precisely, and a modern beau may scent his handkerchief with it. Before man had come and the plants that chiefly serve him. There were no Rosacea nor mints then. So the earth smelled in the Silurian (?) Period, before man was created and any soil had been debauched with manure. The saurians had their handkerchiefs scented with it. For all the ages are represented still and you can smell them out. 

A man must attend to Nature closely for many years to know when, as well as where, to look for his objects, since he must always anticipate her a little. Young men have not learned the phases of Nature; they do not know what constitutes a year, or that one year is like another. I would know when in the year to expect certain thoughts and moods, as the sports man knows when to look for plover. 

Though you may have sauntered near to heaven's gate, when at length you return toward the village you give up the enterprise a little, and you begin to fall into the old ruts of thought, like a regular roadster. Your thoughts very properly fail to report themselves to headquarters. Your thoughts turn toward night and the evening mail and become begrimed with dust, as if you were just going to put up at (with ?) the tavern, or even come to make an exchange with a brother clergyman here on the morrow. 

Some eyes cannot see, even through a spy-glass. I showed my spy-glass to a man whom I met this afternoon, who said that he wanted to see if he could look through it. I tried it carefully on him, but he failed. He said that he tried a lot lately on the muster-field but he never could see through them, somehow or other everything was all a blur. I asked him if he considered his eyes good. He answered that they were good to see far. They looked like two old-fashioned china saucers. He kept steadily chewing his quid all the while he talked and looked. This is the case with a great many, I suspect. Everything is in a blur to them. He enjoys the distinction of being the only man in the town who raises his own tobacco. Seeing is not in them. No focus will suit them. You wonder how the world looks to them, — if those are eyes which they have got, or bits of old china, familiar with soap suds. 

As I stood looking over a wall this afternoon at some splendid red sumach bushes, now in their prime, I saw Melvin the other side of the wall and hailed him.

 "What are you after there?" asked he. 

"After the same thing that you are, perhaps," answered I.

But I mistook, this time, for he said that he was looking amid the huckleberry bushes for some spectacles which a woman lost there in the summer. It was his mother, no doubt. 

Road — that old Carlisle one — that leaves towns behind; where you put off worldly thoughts; where you do not carry a watch, nor remember the proprietor; where the proprietor is the only trespasser, — looking after his apples ! — the only one who mistakes his calling there, whose title is not good; 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. The world-surrounding hoop! faery rings! Oh, the jolly cooper's trade it is the best of any! Carried to the furthest isles where civilized man penetrates. This the girdle they've put round the world! Saturn or Satan set the example. Large and small hogsheads, barrels, kegs, worn by the misses that go to that lone schoolhouse in the Pinkham notch. 

The lonely horse in its pasture is glad to see company, comes forward to be noticed and takes an apple from your hand. 

Others are called great roads, but this is greater than they all. The road is only laid out, offered to walkers, not accepted by the town and the travelling world. To be represented by a dotted line on charts, or drawn in lime-juice, undiscoverable to the uninitiated, to be held to a warm imagination. No guide-boards indicate it. No odometer would indicate the miles a wagon had run there. Rocks which the druids might have raised — if they could. 

There I go searching for malic acid of the right quality, with my tests. The process is simple. Place the fruit between your jaws and then endeavor to make your teeth meet. The very earth contains it. The Easterbrooks Country contains malic acid. 

To my senses the dicksonia fern has the most wild and primitive fragrance, quite unalloyed and untamable, such as no human institutions give out, — the early morning fragrance of the world, antediluvian, strength and hope imparting. They who scent it can never faint. It is ever a new and untried field where it grows, and only when we think original thoughts can we perceive it. If we keep that on [sic] our boudoir we shall be healthy and evergreen as hemlocks. Older than, but related to, strawberries. Before strawberries were, it was, and it will outlast them. Good for the trilobite and saurian in us; death to dandies. It yields its scent most morning and evening. Growing without manure; older than man; refreshing him; preserving his original strength and innocence. 

When the New Hampshire farmer, far from travelled roads, has cleared a space for his mountain home and conducted the springs of the mountain to his yard, already it grows about the sources of that spring, before any mint is planted in his garden. There his sheep and oxen and he too scent it, and he realizes that the world is new to him. There the pastures are rich, the cattle do not die of disease, and the men are strong and free. The wild original of strawberries and the rest. Nature, the earth herself, is the only panacea. They bury poisoned sheep up to the necks in earth to take the poison out of them. 

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. 

The sumach berries are probably past their beauty. 

Fever-bush berries are scarlet now, and also green.  They have a more spicy taste than any of our berries, carrying us in thought to the spice islands. Taste like lemon-peel. 

The panicled andromeda berries (?) begin to brown. 

The bayberry berries are apparently ripe, though not so gray as they will be, — more lead-colored. They bear sparingly here. Leaves not fallen nor changed, and I the more easily find the bushes amid the changed huckleberries, brakes, etc., by their greenness. 

The poke on Eb. Hubbard's hillside has been considerably frost-bitten before the berries are one-third ripe. It is in flower still. Great drooping cylindrical racemes of blackish-purple berries, six inches or more in length, tapering a little toward the end; great flat blackish and ripe berries at base, with green ones and flowers at the other end; all on brilliant purple or crimson-purple peduncle and pedicels. 

Those thorns by Shattuck's barn, now nearly leafless, have hard green fruit as usual. 

The shrub oak is apparently the most fertile of our oaks. I count two hundred and sixty-six acorns on a branch just two feet long. Many of the cups are freshly empty now, showing a pretty circular pink scar at the bottom, where the acorn adhered. They are of various forms and sizes on different shrubs; are now turning dark-brown and showing their converging meridional light-brown lines. 

Never fear for striped squirrels in our shrub oak land.

Am surprised to find, by Botrychium Swamp, a Rhus radicans which is quite a tree by itself. It is about nine feet high by nine in width, growing in the midst of a clump of barberry bushes, which it overhangs. It is now at the height of its change, very handsome, scarlet and yellow, and I did not at first know what it was. I found it to consist of three or four branches, each nearly two inches thick and covered with those shaggy fibres, and these are twined round some long-since rotted barberry stems, and around one another, and now make a sizable-looking trunk, which rises to the height of four feet before it branches, and then spreads widely every way like an oak. It was, no doubt, indebted to the barberry for support at first, but now its very branches are much larger than that, and it far overtops and over spreads all the barberry stems.

H. D Thoreau, Journal, September 24, 1859

Great works of art have endless leisure for a background . . . Time stands still while they are created. The artist cannot be in [a] hurry. The earth moves round the sun with inconceivable rapidity, and yet the surface of the lake is not ruffled by it. See September 17, 1839 ("If the setting sun seems to hurry him to improve the day while it lasts, the chant of the crickets fails not to reassure him, even-measured as of old, teaching him to take his own time henceforth forever. The wise man is restful, never restless or impatient. He each moment abides there where he is, as some walkers actually rest the whole body at each step. As the wise is not anxious that time wait for him, neither does he wait for it.") July 19, 1851 ("This rapid revolution of nature, even of nature in me, why should it hurry me?"); January 11, 1852 ("We cannot live too leisurely. Let me not live as if time was short"); May 9, 1852 ("Our moods vary from week to week, with the winds and the temperature and the revolution of the seasons. It is impossible to remember a week ago."); December 28, 1852 ("A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?"); Walden, An artist in the city of Kouroo ("In an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter. ")

The tufts of cinnamon fern, now a pale brown. See September 6, 1854 ("The cinnamon ferns along the edge of woods next the meadow are many yellow or cinnamon, or quite brown and withered."); September 12, 1858 ("The cinnamon fern has begun to yellow and wither."); September 25, 1859 ("The cinnamon ferns are all a decaying brown. . . in harmony with the twilight of the swamp"); September 27, 1857 ("The large common ferns (either cinnamon or interrupted) are yellowish, and also many as rich a deep brown now as ever."); October 1, 1858 ("The cinnamon ferns are crisp and sour in open grounds"); October 2, 1857 ("They are now generally imbrowned or crisp. In the more open swamp beyond, these ferns, recently killed by the frost and exposed to the sun, fill the air with a very strong sour scent"); October 2, 1859 ("I perceive in various places, in low ground, this afternoon, the sour scent of cinnamon ferns decaying. It is an agreeable phenomenon, reminding me of the season and of past years.");  October 6, 1858 ("Cinnamon ferns are generally crisped, but in the swamp I saw some handsomely spotted green and yellowish, and one clump, the handsomest I ever saw, ");October 17, 1857 ("The cinnamon ferns . . .have acquired their November aspect")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Cinnamon Fern

He enjoys the distinction of being the only man in the town who raises his own tobacco. See September 22, 1859 ("Temple, . . .thinks he is the only one who has cultivated any in C[oncord]. of late years.")

There I see Melvin and the robins, and many a nut-brown maid sashe-ing to the barberry bushes. See October 20, 1857 ("What a wild and rich domain that Easterbrooks Country! . . . 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")

I meet Melvin loaded down with barberries, in bags and baskets. See September 18, 1856 ("I get a full peck from about three bushes.”); September 25, 1855 (We get about three pecks of barberries from four or five bushes”). October 1, 1853 (" Got three pecks of barberries.")

This is the case with 

a great many, I suspect – 

Everything a blur. 

tinyurl.com/HDThaste

The barberry flower is now in prime.

June 1. 

Farmer has heard the quail a fortnight. Channing yesterday. 

The barberry flower is now in prime, and it is very handsome with its wreaths of flowers. 

Many low blackberry flowers at Lee's Cliff. 

June-grass there well out. 

Krigia, how long? 

Breams' nests begun at Hubbard's Grove shore. They have carefully cleaned the bottom, removing the conferva, small weeds, etc., leaving the naked stems of some coarse ones, as the bayonet rush, bare and red. 

Young Stewart tells me that when he visited again that gray squirrel's nest which I described about one month ago up the Assabet, the squirrels were gone, and he thought that the old ones had moved them, for he saw the old about another nest. He found another, similar nest with three dead blind gray squirrels in it, the old one probably having been killed. 

This makes three gray squirrels' nests that I have seen and heard of (seen two of them) this year, made thus of leaves and sticks open in the trees, and I hear of some more similar ones found in former years, so that I think this mode of nesting their young may be the rule with them here. 

Add to this one red squirrel's nest of the same kind.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 1, 1860


The barberry flower is now in prime, and it is very handsome with its wreaths of flowers. See May 29,  1852 ("Barberry in bloom. “); May 29, 1857 ("I perceive the buttery-like scent of barberry bloom from over the rock,”)

Many low blackberry flowers at Lee's Cliff.  See May 25, 1857 (“Also low blackberry on the rocks a day or two.”); May 28, 1859 (“Low blackberry in bloom on railroad bank.”); June 2, 1852 (“ Low blackberry in bloom. ”); June 5, 1855 (“Low blackberry out in low ground”); June 16, 1858 (“How agreeable and wholesome the fragrance of the low blackberry blossom,”)

Breams' nests begun. See June 6, 1855 (“I notice . . . two or three cleared or light-colored places, apparently bream-nests commenced.”); June 8, 1858 ("I see many breams’ nests”); June 11, 1856 (“See a bream’s nest two and a quarter feet diameter, laboriously scooped out, and the surrounding bottom for a diameter of eight feet (! !) comparatively white and clean”); June 26, 1857 (“Stand over a bream's nest close to the shore ”); July 1, 1852 (“From the bridge I see a bream's nest in soft sand on the edge of deeper water”); July 10, 1853 ("The bream poised over its sandy nest on waving fin”)


Three gray squirrels' nests that I have seen and heard of (seen two of them) this year, made thus of leaves and sticks open in the trees. See April 25, 1860 (“Mr. Stewart tells me that he has found a gray squirrel's nest up the Assabet, in a maple tree. I resolve that I too will find it.”);  May 29, 1860 (“In another white pine near by, some thirty feet up it, I found a gray squirrel's nest, with young”); . See also  January 24, 1856 (“That Wheeler swamp is a great place for squirrels. I observe many of their tracks along the riverside there. The nests are of leaves, and apparently of the gray species.”); March 6, 1856 (“ [A](probably) gray squirrel’s nest high in a pitch pine, and acorn shells about on it. ”); October 23, 1857 (“I see a squirrel's nest in a white pine, recently made, on the hillside near the witch-hazels.”); November 13, 1857 (“ I see, on a white oak on Egg Rock, where the squirrels have lately made a nest for the winter of the dry oak leaves . . . I suspect it is a gray squirrel's nest.”); May 31, 1858 (“go to see a gray squirrel's nest in the oak at the Island point. It is about fifteen feet from the ground,”); November 5, 1860 ([T]here are the nests of several gray squirrels in the trees.”)

Add to this one red squirrel's nest of the same kind. See May 29, 1860 ("Some eighteen feet high in a white pine in a swamp in the oak meadow lot, I climbed to a red squirrel’s nest. . . . This was a mass of rubbish covered with sticks, such as I commonly see (against the main stem), but not so large as a gray squirrel’s . . . I have thus found three squirrels’ nests this year, two gray and one red, in these masses of twigs and leaves and bark exposed in the tree-tops and not in a hollow tree, and methinks this is the rule and not the exception.")

I hear the quails nowadays while surveying.

May 29. 

May 29, 2019

Fogs this and yesterday morning. 

I hear the quails nowadays while surveying. 

Barberry in bloom, wild pinks, and blue-eyed grass.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal , May 29, 1852

Fogs this and yesterday morning. See May 24, 1854 ("A considerable fog, but already rising and retreating to the river. As I go along the causeway the sun rises red, with a great red halo, through the fog"); July 22, 1851 ("These are our fairest days, which are born in a fog.")

I hear the quails nowadays. See May 20, 1858 ("Hear a quail whistle.");  May 25, 1855 ("Hear a quail and the summer spray frog, amid the ring of toads."); June 1, 1856 (" Heard a quail whistle May 30th."); June 1, 1860 ("Farmer has heard the quail a fortnight. Channing yesterday."); June 3, 1859 ("Quail heard.")

Barberry in bloom. See May 28, 1855 ("Barberry open (probably two or more days at Lee’s)."); May 29, 1857 ("I perceive the buttery-like scent of barberry bloom from over the rock,"); May 29, 1858 ("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."); June 14, 1856 ("Miss Pratt brings me the fertile barberry from northeast the great yellow birch. The staminate is apparently effete.")

Wild pinks. See June 2, 1855 ("Silene, or wild pink, how long?"); May 31, 1856 ("Pink, common wild, maybe two or three days"); May 26, 1859 ("Geranium (how long?), behind Bittern Cliff, and wild pink.")

Blue-eyed grass. See note to May 27, 1859 ("Blue-eyed grass out.")

The note of the wood pewee is now more prominent, while birds generally are silent.

August 6. 

P. M. —— Walk to Boulder Field. 

The broom is quite out of bloom; probably a week or ten days. It is almost ripe, indeed. I should like to see how rapidly it spreads. The dense roundish masses, side by side, are three or four feet over and fifteen inches high. They have grown from near the ground this year. The whole clump is now about eighteen feet from north to south by twelve wide. 

Within a foot or two of its edge, I detect many slender little plants springing up in the grass, only three inches high, but, on digging, am surprised to find that they are two years old. They have large roots, running down straight as well as branching, much stouter than the part above ground. Thus it appears to spread slowly by the seed falling from its edge, for I detected no runners. 

It is associated there with indigo, which is still abundantly in bloom. 

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. 

Cut a couple of those low scrub apple bushes, and found that those a foot high and as wide as high, being clipped by the cows, as a hedge with shears, were about twelve years old, but quite sound and thrifty.

If our sluggish river, choked with potamogeton, might seem to have the slow-flying bittern for its peculiar genius, it has also the sprightly and aerial kingbird to twitter over and lift our thoughts to clouds as white as its own breast. 

Emerson is gone to the Adirondack country with a hunting party. Eddy says he has carried a double-barrelled gun, one side for shot, the other for ball, for Lowell killed a bear there last year. But the story on the Mill-Dam is that he has taken a gun which throws shot from one end and ball from the other! 

I think that I speak impartially when I say that I have never met with a stream so suitable for boating and botanizing as the Concord, and fortunately nobody knows it. I know of reaches which a single country seat would spoil beyond remedy, but there has not been any important change here since I can remember. The willows slumber along its shore, piled in light but low masses, even like the cumuli clouds above. 

We pass haymakers in every meadow, who may think that we are idlers. But Nature takes care that every nook and crevice is explored by some one. While they look after the open meadows, we farm the tract between the river’s brinks and behold the shores from that side. We, too, are harvesting an annual crop with our eyes, and think you Nature is not glad to display her beauty to us? 

Early in the day we see the dewdrops thickly sprinkled over the broad leaves of the potamogeton. These cover the stream so densely in some places that a web footed bird can almost walk across on them. 

Nowadays we hear the squealing notes of young hawks. 

The kingfisher is seen hovering steadily over one spot, or hurrying away with a small fish in his mouth, sounding his alarum nevertheless. 

The note of the wood pewee is now more prominent, while birds generally are silent. 

This is pure summer; no signs of fall in this, though I have seen some maples, as above the Assabet Spring, already prematurely reddening, owing to the water, and for some time the Cornus sericea has looked brownish red. 

Every board and chip cast into the river is soon occupied by one or more turtles of various sizes. The sternothaerus oftenest climbs up the black willows, even three or more feet.

I hear of pickers ordered out of the huckleberry-fields, and I see stakes set up with written notices forbidding any to pick there. Some let their fields, or allow so much for,the picking. Sic transit gloria ruris.

We are not grateful enough that we have lived part of our lives before these evil days came. What becomes of the true value of country life? What if you must go to market for it? Shall things come to such a pass that the butcher commonly brings round huckleberries in his cart? It is as if the hangman were to perform the marriage ceremony, or were to preside at the communion table. 

Such is the inevitable tendency of our civilization, — to reduce huckleberries to a level with beef-steak. The butcher’s item on the door is now “calf’s head and huckleberries.” 

I suspect that the inhabitants of England and of the Continent of Europe have thus lost their natural rights with the increase of population and of monopolies. The wild fruits of the earth disappear before civilization, or are only to be found in large markets. The whole country becomes, as it were, a town or beaten common, and the fruits left are a few hips and haws.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 6, 1858

If our sluggish river, choked with potamogeton, might seem to have the slow-flying bittern for its peculiar genius,... See August 2, 1856  ("This antediluvian bird, creature of the night, is a fit emblem of a dead stream like this Musketicook. This especially is the bird of the river. There is a sympathy between its sluggish flight and the sluggish flow of the stream, — its slowly lapsing flight, even like the rills of Musketicook and my own pulse sometimes.")

We pass haymakers in every meadow. We, too, are harvesting an annual crop with our eyes, and think you Nature is not glad to display her beauty to us? See July 30, 1856 ("I saw haymakers at work dressed simply in a straw hat, boots, shirt, and pantaloons, the shirt worn like a frock over their pants. The laborer cannot endure the contact with his clothes."); August 3, 1859 ("The haymakers are quite busy on the Great Meadows, it being drier than usual. It being remote from public view, some of them work in their shirts or half naked. "); August 5, 1854 ("I find that we are now in the midst of the meadow-haying season, and almost every meadow or section of a meadow has its band of half a dozen mowers and rakers, either bending to their manly work with regular and graceful motion.")

They appear to have generally died, perhaps dried up. See June 28, 1858 ("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."); May 29, 1858 ("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.")

The note of the wood pewee is now more prominent, while birds generally are silent. See August 9, 1856 ("The notes of the wood pewee and warbling vireo are more prominent of late, and of the goldfinch twittering over"); August 18, 1860 ("The note of the wood pewee sounds prominent of late.”)

August 6. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August 6

 

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