July 29.
Most fields are so completely shorn now that the walls and fence-sides, where plants are protected, appear unusually rich.
I know not what aspect the flowers would present if our fields and meadows were untouched for a year, if the mower were not permitted to swing his scythe there. No doubt some plants contended long in vain with these vandals, and at last withdrew from the contest.
About these times some hundreds of men with freshly sharpened scythes make an irruption into my garden when in its rankest condition, and clip my herbs all as close as they can, and I am restricted to the rough hedges and worn-out fields which had little to attract them, to the most barren and worthless pastures.
I know how some fields of johnswort and goldenrod look, left in the natural state, but not much about our richest fields and meadows.
The sight of the small rough sunflower about a dry ditch bank and hedge advances me at once further toward autumn. At the same time I hear a dry, ripe, autumnal chirp of a cricket. It is the next step to the first goldenrod.
It grows where it escapes the mower, but no doubt, in our localities of plants, we do not know where they would prefer to grow if unmolested by man, but rather where they best escape his vandalism. How large a proportion of flowers, for instance, are referred to and found by hedges, walls, and fences.
Beck Stow's is much frequented by cows, which burst through the thickest bushes.
Butterflies of various colors are now more abundant than I have seen them before, especially the small reddish or coppery ones.
I counted ten yesterday on a single Sericocarpus conyzoides. They were in singular harmony with the plant, as if they made a part of it.
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.
Being constantly in motion and, as they moved, opening and closing their wings to preserve their balance, they presented a very lifesome scene.
To-day I see them on the early goldenrod (Solidago stricta).
American pine-sap, just pushing up, — false beech- drops. Gray says from June to August. It is cream-colored or yellowish under the pines in Hubbard's Wood Path. Some near the fence east of the Close. A plant related to the tobacco-pipe.
Remarkable this doubleness in nature, — not only that nature should be composed of just these individuals, but that there should be so rarely or never an individual without its kindred, — its cousin. It is allied to something else. There is not only the tobacco-pipe, but pine- sap.
Brister's Hill. There are some beautiful glossy, firm ferns there, – Polytichum acrostichoides (?), shield fern. Nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that line.
I also see some small, umbrella-shaped (with sharp cones), shining and glossy yellow fungi, like an election cake atop, also some dead yellow and orange.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 29, 1853
Butterflies of various colors are now more abundant. See July 15, 1854 (“There are many butterflies, yellow and red, about the Asclepias incarnata now.”)
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. See March 18, 1860 (“There is but one flower in bloom in the town, and this insect knows where to find it. . . .No doubt this flower, too, has learned to expect its winged visitor knocking at its door in the spring.”)
Polytichum acrostichoides (?), shield fern. [Christmas fern] Nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that line. See
September 30, 1859 ("Of the twenty-three ferns which I seem to know here, seven may be called evergreens.")
The insect that comes
for the pollen of a plant
becomes part of it.
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality."
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2022
We walk to the watering hole at sunset, then down the streambed scoured out by rains earlier this summer. Orange glow in the west fades to dusk; magically, the woods fill with fireflies and the flute of the thrush.
Magically at dusk
the woods fill with fireflies and
the flute of the thrush.
zphx July 29, 2013
