Where mosses and lichens abound.

November 14. 

Saw to-day, while surveying in the Second Division woods, a singular round mound in a valley, made perhaps sixty or seventy years ago.

Cyrus Stow thought it was a pigeon-bed, but I soon discovered the coal and that it was an old coal-pit. I once mistook one in the Maine woods for an Indian mound.

The indestructible charcoal told the tale.

I had noticed singular holes and trenches in the former wood, as if a fox had been dug out. The sun has probably been let in here many times, and this has been a cultivated field; and now it is clothed in a savage dress again.

The wild, rank, luxuriant place is where mosses and lichens abound.

We find no heroes' cairns except those of heroic colliers, who once sweated here begrimed and dingy, who lodged here, tending their fires, who lay on a beetle here, perchance, to keep awake.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 14, 1850

Colliers tending their fires who lay on a beetle here, perchance, to keep awake See March 15, 1857 ("Who was it, what satyr, that invented this rustic beetle? It was shaped:     

An indispensable piece of woodcraft.")

What ages between me and the tree whose shade I enjoy!

 June 5. 

P. M. — To Gowing's Swamp and Poplar Hill. 

The shad-flies were very abundant probably last evening about the house, for this morning they are seen filling and making black every cobweb on the side of the house, blinds, etc. All freshly painted surfaces are covered with them. The surface of pools and ditches also is remarkably thick with them. The living ones are on the bushes which I pluck, far from any water. 

I find one Vaccinium Oxycoccus open. The petals are not white like the common, but pink like the bud. 

That low reedy sedge about the edge of the central pool in the swamp is just out of bloom and shows the seeds.

I see a great many tortoises in that pool, showing their heads and backs above water and pursuing each other about the pool. It is evidently their copulating- season. Their shells are yellow-spotted, and their throats are of a reddish yellow (?). Are they the Emys guttata?  It is a wonder how they made their way to this water through so many twiggy bushes and over so many tussocks. How should they know of such a wild water? To this wild water, then, the tortoises which inhabit the swamps resort in their breeding-season, and are there undisturbed. You would think it almost the labor of a lifetime for a tortoise to make its way from the surrounding shrubbery to this water, and how do they know that there is water here? 

The larch cones are still very beautiful against the light, but some cones, I perceive, are merely green.

Some apparent beach plum (?) almost completely out of bloom, ten to twelve feet high, along the wall behind Adolphus Clark's. This is the largest I know of.

Lamb kill. 

The mocker-nuts on Mrs. Ripley's hill apparently a day or more. 

Some red maples are much more fertile than others. Their keys are now very conspicuous. But such trees have comparatively few leaves and have grown but little as yet. 

At evening, paddle up Assabet. There are many ephemerae in the air; but it is cool, and their great flight is not yet. 

Pincushion gall on oak. 

I am interested in each contemporary plant in my vicinity, and have attained to a certain acquaintance with the larger ones. They are cohabitants with me of this part of the planet, and they bear familiar names. Yet how essentially wild they are! as wild, really, as those strange fossil plants whose impressions I see on my coal. Yet I can imagine that some race gathered those too with as much admiration, and knew them as intimately as I do these, that even they served for a language of the sentiments. Stigmariae stood for a human sentiment in that race's flower language. Chickweed, or a pine tree, is but little less wild. I assume to be acquainted with these, but what ages between me and the tree whose shade I enjoy! It is as if it stood substantially in a remote geological period.

June 5,  2017

H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  June 5, 1857



Some red maples are much more fertile than others. Their keys are now very conspicuous. See June 3, 1860 ("The roads now strewn with red maple seed. "); June 2, 1859 ("Red maple seed is partly blown off. Some of it is conspicuously whitish or light-colored on the trees.")

Botanizing with Russell; Bathing in Walden

July 23

July 23, 2016

9 a. m. — Up river for Nuphar Kalmiana with Russell.

Pasture thistle, not long. 

Hypericum Sarothra, not long, or perhaps some days. 

Antennaria margaritacea. Scutellaria lateriflora, apparently some days. 

R. says that my five-finger fungus is the Lycoperdon stellatum and can be found now. I find it in some places. (It is different from the white rough-coated puffball now found.) It was exhibited lately in Boston as the "resurrection plant " (! !) to compete with the one imported from Palestine. 

That what I have called fresh-water sponge is such, Spongea fluviatilis, and, like the marine, is uncertain whether vegetable or animal. When burned it leaves a mass of white spicula which have been mistaken for infusoria! 

Thinks the dry brown last-year’s plant I brought from Haskell's Island, Lakeville, the Epiphegus. 

That the Rubus Canadensis, low blackberry, is not found far west of us. 

That there is described — he thinks in Hooker's English Flora — a certain massing up of a conferva similar to that of my eriocaulon balls. Has seen a Mexican species, allied to the potato, cultivated hereabouts, which became a weed, — would not become larger than a walnut. 

Speaks of the young pouts with their bladders attached, accompanied by the old. 

That the berries of the celtis are pleasant to taste, those of the sassafras abominable. 

Showed me the Dulichium spathaceum, leaves in three ranks, so common along river, now in bloom; also the Carex lupulina (?) or retrorsa (?), hop sedge, with the inflated perigynia. 

Said that those reddish clusters of buds on a rush or carex were enlarged by disease. 

That the two white cotton-grasses (Eriophorum) were probably but one species, taller and shorter; also the two wool-grasses Scirpus — Trichophorum [sic] were probably but one species, the tall and short. 

That there was an account of the lecheas by Tuckerman in Silliman's Journal. 

P. M. — To Walden for hydropeltis. 

A young sternothserus which R. picked up recently dead, on the shore of the pond, was one and one sixteenth inches long, — the upper shell, — probably therefore a last year's one, or not yet one year old. Very high and sharp back, but broader than old. No hook to upper bill. 

That fern leaf on my coal (?) is probably the Newropteris as figured in Richardson's Botany. 

Saw at Hydropeltis Meadow a small bullfrog in the act of swallowing a young but pretty sizable apparently Rana palustris, such as now hop about, an inch and a half long. He took it down head foremost, and as the legs were slowly taken in, — stuffing himself, — for the legs were often straightened out, — I wondered what satisfaction it could be to the larger to have that cold slimy fellow, entire, lying head to tail within him! I sprang to make him disgorge, but it was too late to save him. Though I tossed the bullfrog out of the water, the palustris was entombed. So little while had he been in the light when he fell into that recess! 

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. The heat passes through the water with[out] being absorbed by it much. 

The hydropeltis leaves so crowded they cannot lie flat, but their edges show (a good part the under side) as if blown up by wind. 

The water adder killed on the 15th and left hanging on a twig has decayed wonderfully. I perceive no odor, and it is already falling to pieces. I can see most of its ribs and through and through in many directions ! ! It is already mere skin and skeleton, as empty as [a] flute. I can count the bare ribs, and it [is] inoffensive to the smell. 

See apparently young goldfinches about, very freshly bright golden and black. 

The small potamogeton, heterophyllus (?) or hybridus (?), out some time. Ludwigia alternifolia, five or six days.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 23, 1856

Bathing in Walden, I find the water considerably colder at the bottom while I stand up to my chin. See June 25, 1858 ("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"); July 3, 1854 ("What a luxury to bathe now! It is gloriously hot, — the first of this weather. I cannot get wet enough. I must let the water soak into me. I begin to inhabit the planet, and see how I may be naturalized at last.”); July 9, 1852 ("Bathing is an undescribed luxury. To feel the wind blow on your body, the water flow on you and lave you, is a rare physical enjoyment this hot day. . . .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 10, 1852 (" I make quite an excursion up and down the river in the water, a fluvial, a water walk. . . .Walking up and down a river in torrid weather with only a hat to shade the head.”);  July 17, 1860 ("The soft sand on the bottom of Walden, as deep as I can wade, feels very warm to my feet, while the water feels cold.");July 22, 1851("I bathe, and in a few hours I bathe again, not remembering that I was wetted before. When I come to the river, I take off my clothes and carry them over, then bathe and wash off the mud and continue my walk. I would fain take rivers in my walks endwise.”).  See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Luxury of Bathing


The water adder killed on the 15th. See July 15, 1856 ("It was about three feet long, but large round in proportion, with about one hundred and forty abdominal plates and a long, slender tail. . . .")

Young goldfinches about, very freshly bright golden and black. See May 6, 1860 ("A goldfinch apparently not quite in summer dress; with a dark-brown, not black, front.") See also July 10, 1854 (" Goldfinch oftener twitters over."); July 17, 1852 ("Again methinks I hear the goldfinch."); July 31, 1859 ("The goldfinch's note, the cool watery twitter, is more prominent now."); July 31, 1855 ("Have observed the twittering over of goldfinches for a week."); and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Goldfinch

Saturday afternoon we are putting together a sturdy garden cart at the edge of the garage when a sudden wind rises the trees begin to crack and the top of the large near-dead maple at the top of the driveway comes down with a crash blocking the way out. Then a heavy rain comes and thunder and rain and dark I decide to take a nap. I get up a couple of hours later when the power goes on and begin to clear the driveway starting with the small stuff. Jane comes out with her Japanese saw and I spend a lot of time first with the electric chainsaw which derails after each cut and eventually get my gas chainsaw going and cut the larger stuff. We end up loading my truck with all the tops of the tree and drive it up the driveway where we dump it near the entrance to the trail. 20160723

July 23. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 23

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