Saturday. P. M. – To Lupine Hill via Depot Field Brook.
For some time I have noticed the grass whitish
and killed at top by worms (?).
The meadows are yellow with golden senecio.
Marsh speedwell (Veronica scutellata), lilac -
tinted, rather pretty.
The mouse-ear forget me-not (Myosotis laxa) has now extended its racemes (?) very much, and hangs over the edge of the brook. It is one of the most interesting minute flowers. It is the more beautiful for being small and unpretending, for even flowers must be modest.
The blue flag (Iris versicolor). Its buds are a dark indigo-blue tip beyond the green calyx. It is rich but hardly delicate and simple enough; a very handsome sword-shaped leaf.
The blue-eyed grass is one of the most beautiful of flowers. It might have been famous from Proserpine down. It will bear to be praised by poets.
The blue flag, notwithstanding its rich
furniture, its fringed recurved parasols over its anthers, and its variously
streaked and colored petals, is loose and coarse in its habit.
How completely all character is expressed by flowers !
This is a little too showy and gaudy, like some women's bonnets. Yet it belongs to the meadow and ornaments it much.
The critchicrotches are going to seed.
I love the sweet-flag as well as the muskrat (?). Its tender inmost leaf is very palatable below.
Enothera pumila, dwarf tree-primrose. Ever it will be some obscure small and modest flower that will most please us.
Some of the ferns have branches wholly covered
with fruit.
How difficult, if not impossible, to do the things we have done! as fishing and camping out. They seem to me a little fabulous now.
Boys are bathing at Hubbard's Bend, playing
with a boat (I at the willows).
The color of their bodies in the sun at a distance is pleasing, the not often seen flesh-color. I hear the sound of their sport borne over the water.
As yet we have not man in nature.
What a singular fact for an angel visitant to
this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose
their bodies under the severest penalties ! A pale pink, which the sun would
soon tan.
White men ! There are no white men to contrast with the red and the black; they are of such colors as the weaver gives them. I wonder that the dog knows his master when he goes in to bathe and does not stay by his clothes.
Small white-bellied (?) swallows in a row ( a dozen ) on the telegraph - wire over the water by the bridge. This perch is little enough departure from unobstructed air to suit them. Pluming themselves.
If you could furnish a perch aerial enough,
even birds of paradise would alight.
Swallows have forked tails, and wings and tails are about the same length. They do not alight on trees, methinks, unless on dead and bare boughs, but stretch a wire over water and they perch on it.
This is among the phenomena that cluster about
the telegraph.
Hedge-mustard.
(Turned into the lane beyond Dennis's.)
Some fields are almost wholly covered with sheep's-sorrel, now turned red, — its valves (?). It helps thus agreeably to paint the earth, contrasting even at a distance with the greener fields, blue sky, and dark or downy clouds. It is red, marbled, watered, mottled, or waved with greenish, like waving grain, — three or four acres of it.
To the farmer or grazier it is a troublesome weed, but to the landscape-viewer an agreeable red tinge laid on by the painter. I feel well into summer when I see this redness.
It appears to be avoided by the cows.
The petals of the sidesaddle-flower, fully expanded, hang down. How complex it is, what with flowers and leaves! It is a wholesome and interesting plant to me, the leaf especially.
Rye that has sown itself and come up
scatteringly in bunches is now nearly ripe.
They are beginning to cut rank grass on the
village street.
I should say the summer began with the leafiness, umbrageous summer!
The glory of Dennis's lupines is departed, and
the white now shows in abundance beneath them.
So I cannot walk longer in those fields of
Enna in which Proserpine amused herself gathering flowers.
The steam whistle at a distance sounds even
like the hum of a bee in a flower.
So man's works fall into nature.
The flies hum at mid-afternoon, as if
peevish and weary of the length of the days.
The river is shrunk to summer width; on the
sides smooth whitish water, or rather it is the light from the pads; - in the
middle, dark blue or slate, rippled.
The color of the earth at a distance where a
wood has been cut off is a reddish brown.
Nature has put no large object on the face of
New England so glaringly white as a white house.
The Ranunculus filiformis on the muddy shore
of the river.
The locusts' blossoms in the graveyard fill
the street with their sweet fragrance.
It is day, and we have more of that same light that the moon sent us, but not reflected now, but shining directly. The sun is a fuller moon.
Who knows how much lighter day there may be?
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 12, 1852
The meadows are yellow with golden senecio. See June 9, 1853 ("The meadows are now yellow with the golden senecio, a more orange yellow, mingled with the light glossy yellow of the buttercup."); June 10, 1854 ("The meadows now begin to be yellow with senecio.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Golden Senecio
It is one of the most interesting minute flowers. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Mouse-ear forget-me-not (Myosotis laxa small-flowered forget- me- not)
The blue-eyed grass is one of the most beautiful of flowers . . .It will bear to be praised by poets. See June 15, 1851 ("The blue-eyed grass, wellnamed, looks up to heaven."); A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Blue-Eyed Grass
The critchicrotches are going to seed. I love the sweet-flag as well as the muskrat (?). Its tender inmost leaf is very palatable below. See May 23, 1860 ("Critchicrotches some two or three days; now tender to eat . How agreeable and surprising the peculiar fragrance of the sweet flag when bruised! That this plant alone should have extracted this odor surely for so many ages each summer from the moist earth!"); May 27, 1852 ("The fruit of the sweet flag is now just fit to eat, and reminds me of childhood, — the critchicrotches. They would help sustain a famished traveller. The inmost tender leaf, also, near the base, is quite palatable, as children know. I love it as well as muskrats (?)."); July 20, 1852. "Dug open a muskrat's gallery ... there was half a critchicrotch in it." May 29 1854 (Critchicrotches have been edible some time in some places. It must be a kind of water milfoil, whose leaves I now see variously divided under water, and some nearly two feet long. ") See also Critchicrotches · iNaturalist ("It turns out Thoreau is referring to the fruit of Acorus calamus. This wetland plant goes by dozens of common names . . . sweet flag, calamus, beewort, bitter pepper root, gladdon, myrtle grass, myrtle sedge, pine root, rat root, sea sedge, sweet cane, sweet cinnamon, sweet grass, sweet myrtle, sweet root, sweet rush, and sweet sedge. . . . I continue to be amazed at how often I can observe the same plant or animal on the exact same date as Thoreau observes it.") and Journal IV 74, 92, 240, V 155, VI 307, VII 387.
Sheep's-sorrel, now turned red, helps thus agreeably to paint the earth, contrasting even at a distance with the greener fields, blue sky, and dark or downy clouds. See June 12, 1859 ("I am struck with the beauty of the sorrel now. . . . What a wholesome red! . . . There is hardly a more agreeable sight at this season."); June 12, 1854 ("Clover now reddens the fields."); See also June 11, 1853 ("In the sorrel-fields, also, what lately was the ruddy, rosy cheek of health, now that the sorrel is ripening and dying, has become the tanned and imbrowned cheek of manhood."); May 22, 1854 ("The sorrel beginning to redden the fields with ruddy health, — all these things make earth now a paradise. How many times I have been surprised thus, on turning about on this very spot, at the fairness of the earth!"); June 5, 1853 ("The distant fields are seen, reddened with sorrel, and the meadows wet green, full of fresh grass, and the trees in their first beautiful, bright, untarnished and unspotted green."); June 6, 1857(“A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind.”)
The petals of the sidesaddle-flower, fully expanded, hang down. See note to June 12, 1856 ("Sidesaddle flower numerously out now.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Purple Pitcher Plant
I should say the summer began with the leafiness, umbrageous summer! See May 27, 1853 ("A new season has commenced - summer - leafy June.”); June 1, 1853 ("Summer begins now about a week past, with the expanded leaves, the shade and warm weather");June 4, 1860 (''The leafy season has fairly commenced."); June 6, 1855 ("The dark eye and shade of June”); June 9, 1852 (The general leafiness, shadiness, and waving of grass and boughs in the breeze characterize the season")
Nature has put no large object on the face of New England so glaringly white as a white house. See June 24, 1852 ("I have not heard that white clouds, like white houses, made any one's eyes ache."); November 25, 1853 ("The white houses of the village, also, are remarkably distinct and bare and brought very near."); November 29, 1858 ("[After a snowfall ] White houses no longer stand out and stare in the landscape.")
The locusts' blossoms in the graveyard fill the street with their sweet fragrance. See June 7, 1854 ("The locusts so full of pendulous white racemes five inches long, filling the air with their sweetness and resounding with the hum of humble and honey bees"); June 9, 1852 ("The locust in bloom"); June 10, 1853 ("The locust bloom is now perfect, filling the street with its sweetness."); June 11, 1856 ("The locust in graveyard shows but few blossoms yet.")
