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. ”)

Columbine already eaten by bees.

April 18.

To Lee’s Cliff by boat. 

A strong northwest wind. The waves were highest off Hubbard’s second grove, where they had acquired their greatest impetus and felt the full force of the wind. Their accumulated volume was less beyond on account of the turn in the river. The greatest undulation is at the leeward end of the longest broad reach in the direction of the wind. I was steering there diagonally across the black billows, my boat inclined so as almost to drink water. 

Scare up the same two black ducks (and twice again). The under sides of their wings show quite light and silvery as they rise in the light. 

Red maple stamens in some places project considerably, and it will probably blossom to-morrow if it is pleasant. 

The farmer neglects his team to watch my sail. 

The slippery elm, with its round rusty woolly buds and pale-brown ashy twigs. 

That pretty, now brown-stemmed moss with green oval fruit. 

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. 

Crowfoot, apparently two or three days. Antennaria at end of Cliff as you descend, say yesterday. Turritis stricta. 

Columbine, and already eaten by bees. Some with a hole in the side. 

It is worth the while to go there to smell the catnep. I always bring some home for the cat at this season. 

See those great chocolate puffballs burst and diffusing their dust on the side of the hill. 

At the sandy place where I moored my boat, just this side this Cliff, the Selaginella apus is abundant, and on Conantum shore near elms thirty or forty rods below.

Left boat opposite Bittern Cliff. 

Bear-berry grows by path from river, seven rods beyond last pine, south side, now strongly flower budded. 

Observed a large mass of white lily root with the mud washed up, the woolly steel-blue root, with  singular knobs for offshoots and long, large, succulent white roots from all sides, the leaf-buds yellow and lightly rolled up on each side. 

Small sallow next above tristis, three feet high, in path to Walden. 

Walden is open entirely to-day for the first time, owing to the rain of yesterday and evening. I have observed its breaking up of different years commencing in ’45, and the average date has been April 4th. 

This evening I hear the snipes generally and peeping of hylas from the door. 

A small brown wasps’ (?) nest (last year’s, of course) hung to a barberry bush on edge of Lee’s Cliff.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 18, 1856


Steering there diagonally across the black billows, my boat inclined so as almost to drink water. See . April 14, 1856 ("The boat, tossed up by the rolling billows, keeps falling again on the waves with a chucking sound which is inspiriting"); April 29, 1856 (" Sailing is much like flying, and from the birth of our race men have been charmed by it")

Scare up the same two black ducks See April 17, 1856 ("Now I hear ducks rise, and know by their hoarse quacking that they are black ones, and see two going off as if with one mind, along the edge of the wood. .") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the American Black Duck

Red maple stamens in some places project considerably. See April 23, 1856 ("The red maple did not shed pollen on the 19th and could not on the 20th, 21st, or 22d, on account of rain; so this must be the first day, — the 23d.") See also note to April 11, 1860 ("Acer rubrum west side Deep Cut, some well out.") Also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Red Maple

The farmer neglects his team to watch my sail. March 26, 1855 ("Sail down to the Great Meadows. A strong wind with snow driving from the west and thickening the air. The farmers pause to see me scud before it.")

This evening I hear the snipes generally and peeping of hylas from the door. See April 18, 1854 ("One[snipe] booms now at 3 p. m."); April 18, 1855 ("The rush sparrows tinkle now at 3 P. M. far over the bushes, and hylodes are peeping in a distant pool."); April 18, 1860 ("Melvin says he has heard snipe some days, but thinks them scarce.") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Snipe

Walden is open entirely to-day for the first time, ... the average date has been April 4th. See note to March 14, 1860  ("No sooner has the ice of Walden melted than the wind begins to play in dark ripples over the surface of the virgin water.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Ice-out