May I love and revere myself above all the gods that men have ever invented.

August 15. 

Friday. 

Hypericum Canadense, Canadian St. John's-wort, distinguished by its red capsules. The petals shine under the microscope, as if they had a golden dew on them. 

Cnicus pumilus, pasture thistle. How many insects a single one attracts ! While you sit by it, bee after bee will visit it, and busy himself probing for honey and loading himself with pollen, regardless of your over shadowing presence. He sees its purple flower from afar, and that use there is in its color. 

Oxalis stricta, upright wood-sorrel, the little yellow ternate-leaved flower in pastures and corn-fields. 

Sagittaria sagittifolia, or arrowhead. It has very little root that I can find to eat. 

Campanula crinoides, var. 2nd, slender bellflower, vine-like like a galium, by brook-side in Depot Field. 

Impatiens, noli-me-tangere, or touch-me-not, with its dangling yellow pitchers or horns of plenty, which I have seen for a month by damp causeway thickets, but the whole plant was so tender and drooped so soon I could not get it home. 

May I love and revere myself above all the gods that men have ever invented. May I never let the vestal fire go out in my recesses.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal August 15, 1851

Hypericum Canadense, Canadian St. John's-wort, distinguished by its red capsules. See July 19, 1856 ("It is the Hypericum ellipticum and Canadense (linear- leaved) whose red pods are noticed now.");August 17, 1856 ("Hypericum Canadense well out at 2 p. m.")   See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, St. Johns-wort (Hypericum)


He sees its purple flower from afar, and that use there is in its color. See August 6, 1852 ("I find a bumblebee asleep in a thistle blossom, having crowded himself in deep amid the dense florets, out of the reach of birds, while the sky was overcast"); ; September 30, 1852 ("If there are any sweet flowers still lingering on the hillside, it is known to the bees both of the forest and the village."); October 11, 1856 ("A pasture thistle with many fresh flowers and bees on it."); March 18, 1860 ("No doubt this flower, too, has learned to expect its winged visitor knocking at its door in the spring."); July 29, 1853 (“The insect that comes after the honey or pollen of a plant is necessary to it and in one sense makes a part of it”)

May I love and revere myself above all the gods See July 16, 1851 ("May I treat myself tenderly as I would treat the most innocent child whom I love; may I treat children and my friends as my newly discovered self. Let me forever go in search of myself; never for a moment think that I have found myself; be as a stranger to myself, never a familiar, seeking acquaintance still. May I be to myself as one is to me whom I love, a dear and cherished object. ...[May] I love and worship myself with a love which absorbs my love for the world.");  January 9, 1853 ("May I lead my life the following year as innocently! May it be as fair and smell as sweet!. . .. It will go forth in April, this vestal now cherishing her fire, to be married to the sun."); October 18, 1855 (“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”); 

A strong west wind, saving us from intolerable heat, accompanied by a blue haze, making the mountains invisible.

July 22. 

This morning, though perfectly fair except a haziness in the east, which prevented any splendor, the birds do not sing as yesterday. They appear to make distinctions which we cannot appreciate, and perhaps sing with most animation on the finest mornings. 

1 p. m. — Lee's Bridge, via Conantum; return by Clematis Brook. 

There men in the fields are at work thus indefatigably, more or less honestly getting bread for men. The writer should be employed with at least equal industry to an analogous though higher end.

Flocks of yellow-breasted, russet-backed female bobolinks are seen flitting stragglingly across the meadows. The bobolink loses his song as he loses his colors. 

Tansy is now conspicuous by the roadsides, covered with small red butterflies. It is not an uninteresting plant. I probably put it down a little too early. 

Is that a slender bellflower with entire leaves by the Corner road? 

The green berries of the arum are seen, and the now reddish fruit of the trillium, and the round green-pea-sized green berries of the axil-flowering Solomon's-seal. 

Farmers have commenced their meadow-haying. 

The Aster macrophyllus, large-leafed, in Miles's Swamp. 

Is not that the Lysimachia ciliata, or hairy-stalked loosestrife, by the Corner road, not the lanceolata? Eupatorium sessilifolium now whitish. 

A strong west wind, saving us from intolerable heat, accompanied by a blue haze, making the mountains invisible. We have more of the furnace-like heat to-day, after all. 

The Rhus glabra flowers are covered with bees, large yellowish wasps, and butterflies; they are all alive with them. How much account insects make of some flowers! There are other botanists than I. 

The Asclepias syriaca is going to seed. Here is a kingfisher frequenting the Corner Brook Pond. They find out such places. 

Huckleberrying and blackberrying have commenced. 

The round-leafed sundew. Monotropa uniflora, Indian- pipe. 

Solidago Canadensis (?) almost out.

Either a smooth Polygonum hydropiperoides or a white P. amphibium var. terrestre. 

The spear thistle. [Cirsium lanceolatum.]

Galium circcezans, wild liquorice, in Baker Farm Swamp. 

What is that minute whitish flower with an upright thread-like stem and thread-like linear leaves, with a kind of interrupted spike or raceme of small, whitish, erect, bell-like flowers, the corolla divided by a stout partition, from which projects the style, with three distinct segments in the edge of the bell each side of the partition? [Canada snapdragon.] 

Also found a very small narrow-leaved whitish aster (?).[Erigeron Canadensis.]

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 22, 1852

Flocks of yellow-breasted, russet-backed female bobolinks are seen flitting stragglingly across the meadows See August 15, 1852 (" I see a dense, compact flock of bobolinks going off in the air over a field. They cover the rails and alders, and go rustling off with a brassy, tinkling note as I approach, revealing their yellow breasts and bellies. This is an autumnal sight, that small flock of grown birds in the afternoon sky. ") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Bobolink

The green berries of the arum are seen. See September 28, 1856 ("The arum berries are still fresh and abundant, perhaps in their prime. A large cluster is two and a half inches long by two wide ")

The now reddish fruit of the trillium. See August 19, 1852 ("The trillium berries, six-sided, one inch in diameter, like varnished and stained cherry wood, glossy red, crystalline and ingrained, concealed under its green leaves in shady swamps. ")

The Aster macrophyllus, large-leafed, in Miles's Swamp. See August 9, 1856 ("The flowers of A. macrophyllus are white with a very slight bluish tinge, in a coarse flat-topped corymb. Flowers nine to ten eighths of an inch in diameter."); August 26, 1856 ("Aster macrophyllus, now in its prime. It grows large and rank, two feet high. On one I count seventeen central flowers withered, one hundred and thirty in bloom, and half as many buds.")

July 22. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 22

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

Botonizing the meadows

August 6, 2015

August 6

Down river to Tarbell Hill with C. 

Saw a Sternotherus odoratus, caught by the neck and hung in the fork between a twig and main trunk of a black willow, about two feet above water, — apparently a month or two, being nearly dry. Probably in its haste to get down had fallen and was caught. I have noticed the same thing once or twice before. 

Hear the autumnal crickets. 

At Ball’s Hill see five summer ducks, a brood now grown, feeding amid the pads on the opposite side of the river, with a whitish ring, perhaps nearly around neck. A rather shrill squeaking quack when they go off. 

It is remarkable how much more game you will see if you are in the habit of sitting in the fields and woods. As you pass along with a noise it hides itself, but presently comes forth again. 

The Ludwigia spharocarpa out maybe a week. I was obliged to wade to it all the way from the shore, the meadow-grass cutting my feet above and making them smart. You must wear boots here.

The lespedeza with short heads, how long? These great meadows through which I wade have a great abundance of hedge-hyssop now in bloom in the water. Small St. John’s-worts and elodeas, lanceolate loosestrife, arrow heads, small climbing bellflower, also horse-mint on the drier clods. These all over the meadow. 

I see seven or eight nighthawks together; dull-buff breasts, with tails short and black beneath. 

The mole cricket creaks along the shore. 

Meadow-haying on all hands.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 6, 1855

Hear the autumnal crickets . . . The mole cricket creaks along the shore. See  August 6, 1854 (“.This anticipation of the fall, — coolness and cloud, and the crickets steadily chirping in mid-afternoon.”);  see also August 4, 1851 ("I hear the note of a cricket, and am penetrated with the sense of autumn."); August 18, 1856 “I hear the steady (not intermittent) shrilling of apparently the alder cricket, clear, loud, and autumnal, a season sound.”) and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Cricket in August

The Ludwigia spharocarpa out maybe a week.  See August 1, 1856 ("Ludwigia sphaerocarpa apparently a week out, a foot and a half to two feet high.") See also Gobotany — round-pod water-primrose

 

Small St. John’s-worts and elodeas, lanceolate loosestrife, arrow heads, small climbing bellflower, also horse-mint . . . all over the meadow. See August 13, 1856 (“Is there not now a prevalence of aromatic herbs in prime? — The polygala roots, blue-curls, wormwood, pennyroyal, Solidago odora, rough sunflowers, horse-mint, etc., etc. Does not the season require this tonic? ”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, St. Johns-wort (Hypericum)

I see seven or eight nighthawks together See . August 2, 1854 ("The nighthawk flies low , skimming over the ground now "): see also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,, the Nighthawk

Meadow-haying on all hands. See August 6, 1858 ("We pass haymakers in every meadow,");   August 7, 1854 ("A great part of the farmers of Concord are now in the meadows, and toward night great loads of hay are seen rolling slowly along the river’s bank,"); See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Haymaking

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 © 2009-2025