A sudden and conspicuous fall aspect to the scenery of the river.

September 24

September 24, 2014

6 A. M. — To Hill. Low fog-like veil on meadows. On the large sassafras trees on the hill I see many of the handsome red club-shaped pedicels left, with their empty cups which have held fruit; and I see one or two elliptical but still green berries. Apparently the rest have ripened and fallen or been gathered by birds already, unless they fell prematurely.

Hear the flicker note. See a song-sparrow-like bird singing a confused low jingle. Afterward hear from a willow by river a clear strain from a song sparrow! 

The Viburnum Lentago berries now turn blue-black in pocket, as the nudum did, which last are now all gone, while the Lentago is now just in season.

P. M. —- By boat to Grape Cliff.

These are the stages in the river fall: first, the two varieties of yellow lily pads begin to decay and blacken (long ago); second, the first fall rains come after dog days and raise and cool the river, and winds wash the decaying sparganium, etc., etc., to the shores and clear the channel more or less; third, when the first harder frosts come (as this year the 21st and 22d inst), the button-bushes, which before had attained only a dull mixed yellow, are suddenly bitten, wither, and turn brown, all but the protected parts.

The first fall is so gradual as not to make much impression, but the last suddenly and conspicuously gives a fall aspect to the scenery of the river. The button-bushes thus withered suddenly paint with a rich brown the river’s brim. There, where the land appears to lap over the water by a mere edging, these thinner portions are first done brown. 

I float over the still liquid middle. I have not seen any such conspicuous effect of frost as this sudden withering of the button-bushes.

The water begins to be clear of weeds, and the fishes are exposed. It is now too cold to bathe with comfort. 

I scare up a duck which circles round four times high in the air a diameter of a. hundred rods, and finally alights with a long, slanting flight near where it rose. The muskrats make haste now to rear their cabins and conceal themselves. I see still what I, take to be small flocks of grackles feeding beneath the covert of the button-bushes and flitting from bush to bush. They seldom expose them-selves long. 

See a warbler which inquisitively approaches me creeper-wise along some dead brush twigs. It may be the pine-creeping warbler, though I see no white bars on wings. I should say all yellow olivaceous above; clear lemon-yellow throat and breast; narrow white ring around eye; black bill, straight; clay-colored legs; edge of wings white.

Young hickories, pretty generally, and some black oaks are frost-bitten, but no young white oaks. On the shrub oak plain under Cliffs, the young white oaks are generally now tending to a dull inward red. The ilicifolia generally green still, with a few yellowish or else scarlet leaves. The young black oaks with many red, scarlet, or yellowish leaves. The chinquapin pretty generally a clear brilliant dark red. The same with a few twigs of the scarlet oak, but not brilliant, i. e. glossy. The tupelo green, reddish, and brilliant scarlet, all together. The brightest hazel dim vermilion. Some red maple sprouts clear scarlet deepening to purplish. The panicled cornel green with a tinge of reddish purple. Only these young trees and bushes are yet conspicuously changed. 

The tupelo and the chinquapin the most brilliant of the above. The scarlet oak the clearest red. 

But little bright Solidago nemorosa is left. It is generally withered or dim. 

September 24, 2024

What name of a natural object is most poetic? That which he has given for convenience, whose life is most nearly related to it, who has known it longest and best.

The perception of truth, as of the duration of time, etc., produces a pleasurable sensation.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 24, 1854

On the large sassafras trees on the hill I see many of the handsome red club-shaped pedicels left, with their empty cups. See September 3, 1856 ("I find one sassafras berry, dark-blue in its crimson cup, club-shaped. . . methinks, far from palatable.") See also September 28, 1854 ("The sassafras trees on the hill are now wholly a bright orange scarlet as seen from my window, and the small ones elsewhere are also changed.") September 30, 1854 ("I detect the sassafras by its peculiar orange scarlet half a mile distant.")

Hear the flicker note.  See October 5, 1857 ("The pigeon woodpecker utters his whimsical ah-week ah-week, etc., as in spring. "); December 9, 1858 ("At New Bedford. See a song sparrow and a pigeon woodpecker. ) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Pigeon Woodpecker (flicker)

Hear from a willow by river a clear strain from a song sparrow! September 25, 1854 (" I hear some clear song sparrow strains, as from a fence-post amid snows in early spring. "); September 30, 1854 ("The song sparrow is still about, and the blackbird.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  the Song Sparrow (Fringilla melodia)

The button-bushes, which before had attained only a dull mixed yellow, are suddenly bitten, wither, and turn brown. See September 24, 1855 ("The button bushes pretty well browned with frost . . . their pale yellowish season past."); See also September 18, 1860 ("This is a beautiful day . . . the first unquestionable and conspicuous autumnal day, when the willows and button-bushes are a yellowed bower in parallel lines along the swollen and shining stream."); September 20, 1859 ("I suspect that the button-bushes and black willows have been as ripe as ever they get to be"); September 20, 1855 ("First decisive frost, killing melons and beans, browning button-bushes and grape leaves.")

The water begins to be clear of weeds, and the fishes are exposed. It is now too cold to bathe with comfort. See September 5, 1854 ("This is a fall phenomenon. The river weeds, becoming rotten, though many are still green, fall or are loosened, the water rises, the winds come, and they are drifted to the shore, and the water is cleared."); August 9, 1855 ("River is risen and fuller, and the weeds at bathing-place washed away somewhat. Fall to them.")

The ilicifolia generally green still, with a few yellowish or else scarlet leaves. See October 1, 1859 ("The shrub oaks on this hill are now at their height, both with respect to their tints and their fruit."); October 2, 1851 ("The shrub oaks on the terraced plain are now almost uniformly of a deep red"); October 7, 1857 ("Some shrub oaks are yellow, others reddish.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Shrub Oak

But little bright Solidago nemorosa is left. It is generally withered or dim. See September 24, 1856 ("S. nemoralis, about done")

What name of a natural object is most poetic? See January 29, 1852 ("The names of plants are for the most part traced to Celtic and Arabian roots.");  August 7, 1853 ("Is it not as language that all natural objects affect the poet? "); March 5, 1858 ("Our scientific names convey a very partial information only; they suggest certain thoughts only. It does not occur to me that there are other names for most of these objects, given by a people who stood between me and them, who had better senses than our race."); October 4, 1859 ("I do not get nearer by a hair's breadth to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man. To conceive of it with a total apprehension . . . you must approach the object totally unprejudiced You must be aware that no thing is what you have taken it to be."); February 12, 1860 ("Natural objects and phenomena are in this sense forever wild and unnamed by us."); February 18, 1860 ("A name is at most a mere convenience and carries no information with it . . . the sooner we forget their names the better, so far as any true appreciation of them is concerned. I think, therefore, that the best and most harmless names are those which are an imitation of the voice or note of an animal, or the most poetic ones.")

The perception of truth . . . produces a pleasurable sensation.See February 27, 1851 ("a novel and grand surprise, or a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we had called knowledge before; an indefinite sense of the grandeur and glory of the universe.”); September 1851 (“There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth. All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.”);  April 19 1852 ("How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact! suggesting what worlds remain to be unveiled.");  August 8, 1852 ("No man ever makes a discovery, even an observation of the least importance, but he is advertised of the fact by a joy that surprises him.”)

September 24. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, September 24

Suddenly withered

rich brown button-bushes now

paint the river’s brim.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Suddenly withered

rich brown button-bushes

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

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-540924

This is the season of small fruits

August 9.

The Hieracium Canadense is out and is abundant at Peter's well. I also find one or two heads of the liatris. Perhaps I should have seen it a few days earlier, if it had not been for the mower. It has the aspect of a Canada thistle at a little distance. 

How fatally the season is advanced toward the fall! I am not surprised now to see the small rough sunflower. There is much yellow beside now in the fields. 

How beautiful now the early goldenrods (Solidago stricta), rising above the wiry grass of the Great Fields in front of Peter's where I sit ( which is not worth cutting), not solid yellow like the sunflower, but little pyramidal or sheaf like golden clouds or mists, supported by almost invisible leafy columns, which wave in the wind, like those elms which run up very tall and slender without a branch and fall over like a sheaf on every side! They give a very indefinite but rich, mellow, and golden aspect to the field.

I spend the forenoon in my chamber, writing or arranging my papers, and in the afternoon I walk forth into the fields and woods. I turn aside, perchance, into some withdrawn, untrodden swamp, and find these blueberries, large and fair, awaiting me in inexhaustible abundance, for I have no tame garden. They embody for me the essence and flavor of the swamp, — cool and refreshing, of various colors and flavors. Here they hang for many weeks unchanged, in dense clusters, half a dozen touching each other, — black, blue, and intermediate colors. I prefer the large blue, with a bloom on them, and slightly acid ones. 

I taste and am strengthened. This is the season of small fruits. I trust, too, that I am maturing some small fruit as palatable in these months, which will communicate my flavor to my kind.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 9, 1853

This is the season of small fruits. I trust, too, that I am maturing some small fruit as palatable in these months, which will communicate my flavor to my kind.  See August 9, 1854 ("Walden" published.”) Compare August 17, 1851 (“Ah! if I could so live that . . . when small fruits are ripe, my fruits might be ripe also! that I could match nature always with my moods ! that in each season when some part of nature especially flourishes, then a corresponding part of me may not fail to flourish!”); August 6, 1852 ("Methinks there are few new flowers of late. An abundance of small fruits takes their place. Summer gets to be an old story. Birds leave off singing, as flowers blossoming.");  August 18, 1853 (“The season of flowers or of promise may be said to be over, and now is the season of fruits; but where is our fruit ? The night of the year is approaching. What have we done with our talent?”); June 17, 1854 (“The season of hope and promise is past; already the season of small fruits has arrived. We are a little saddened, because we begin to see the interval between our hopes and their fulfillment. The prospect of the heavens is taken away, and we are presented only with a few small berries.”);

The royal month of August

August 18.

Rudbeckia laciniata, sunflower-like tall cone-flower, behind Joe Clark's. 

As I go over the hill behind Hunt's, the North River has a glassy stillness and smoothness, seen through the smoky haze that fills the air and has the effect of a film on the water, so that it looks stagnant. No mountains can be seen.

The locust is heard.  Fruits are ripening. Ripe apples here and there scent the air.  I see those minute yellow cocoons on the grass.

There is indeed something royal about the month of August. Its is a perhaps more tropical heat than that of July. Though hot it is not so suffocating a blaze, and the evenings generally are cooler..

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 18, 1852


There is indeed something royal about the month of August. See August 10, 1853("August, royal and rich"); August 4, 1851("It is now the royal month of August.").

The thistle and the Kosmos.

August 6

Blue vervain is now very attractive to me, and then there is that interesting progressive history in its rising ring of blossoms. It has a story.

Methinks there are few new flowers of late. An abundance of small fruits takes their place. Summer gets to be an old story. Birds leave off singing, as flowers blossoming. With the goldenrod comes the goldfinch. About the time his cool twitter is heard, does not the bobolink, thrasher, catbird, oven-bird, veery, etc ., cease?

All men beholding a rainbow begin to understand the significance of the Greek name for the world, - Kosmos, or beauty. It was designed to impress man. We live, as it were, within the calyx of a flower.

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. What a sweet couch!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 6, 1852

We live, as it were, within the calyx of a flower. See  August 3, 1852 ("A splendid entire rainbow after a slight shower, with two reflections of it, outermost broad red, passing through yellow to green, then narrow red, then blue or indigo (not plain what), then faint red again. It is too remarkable to be remarked on.");  June 5, 1853 (“The heavens and the earth are one flower. The earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla.”); May 16, 1854 ("The earth is all fragrant as one flower.”); May 16, 1852 ("The whole earth is fragrant as a bouquet held to your nose.”)

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. See August 4, 1852 (“The little bees have gone to sleep amid the clethra blossoms in the rain and are not yet aroused.”)

Blue vervain is now very attractive to me, and then there is that interesting progressive history in its rising ring of blossoms. It has a story. See August 20, 1851 ("The flowers of the blue vervain have now nearly reached the summit of their spikes."); August 22, 1859 ("The circles of the blue vervain flowers, now risen near to the top, show how far advanced the season is.")

August 6. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August 6

Rainbows remind us.

Kosmos – or beauty – is the

Greek name for the world.

We live as it were

like a bee asleep in a

thistle blossom.

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

August  6.

5 a. m. — I do not hear this morning the breathing of chip-birds nor the song of robins. Are the mornings now thus ushered in? Are they as spring like? Has not the year grown old? Methinks we do ourselves, at any rate, somewhat tire of the season and observe less attentively and with less interest the opening of new flowers and the song of the birds. It is the signs of the fall that affect us most. It is hard to live in the summer content with it. To Cliffs. How different the feeble twittering of the birds here at sunrise from the full quire of the spring! Only the wood thrush, a huckleberry-bird or two, or chickadee, the scream of a flicker or a jay, or the caw of a crow, and commonly only an alarmed note of a robin. A solitary peawai may be heard, perchance, or a red-eye, but no thrashers, or catbirds, or oven-birds, or the jingle of the chewink. I hear the ominous twittering of the goldfinch over all.

The village is seen through a thin veil of fog. I just distinguish the tree-tops beneath me in the southwest, and the light-colored river through the mist, which is gathering and preparing to retreat before the sun. From a tree-top I see the surface of Walden, whose shores are laid bare, the sun being directly opposite, and there fore the surface of the lake is a bright sheen seen through some stately pines near the railroad. This bright, silvery sheen comes through the dispersing mists to me, its shores being still concealed by fog, and a low white scudding mist is seen against the more distant dark clouds, drifting westward over all the forests before the sun. Gathered some of those large, sometimes pear-shaped, sweet blue huckleberries which grow amid the rubbish where woods have just been cut. A farmer told me that he lost a good many doves by their being trodden upon by oxen.

P. M. — To Saw Mill Brook and hill beyond.

 I still remember how much bluer those early blueberries were that grew in the shade.

Have just finished Gilpin's "Lakes of Cumberland." An elegant writer of English prose. I wish he would look at scenery sometimes not with the eye of an artist. It is all side screens and fore screens and near distances and broken grounds with him. I remark that in his tour through Wales, and afterward through Cumberland and Westmoreland, he never ascends to the top of a mountain, and if he gets up higher than usual, he merely says that the view is grand and amusing, as if because it was not easy to paint, or picturesque, it was not worth beholding, or deserving of serious attention. However, his elegant moderation, his discrimination, and real interest in nature excuse many things.

Milkweeds and trumpet-flowers are important now, to contrast with the cool, dark, shaded sides and recesses of moist copses. I see their red under the willows and alders everywhere against a dark ground. Methinks that blue, next to red, attracts us in a flower.

Blue vervain is now very attractive to me, and then there is that interesting progressive history in its rising ring of blossoms. It has a story.

Next to our blood is our prospect of heaven. Does not the blood in fact show blue in the covered veins and arteries, when distance lends enchantment to the view? The sight of it is more affecting than I can describe or account for.

The rainbow, after all, does not attract an attention proportionate to its singularity and beauty. Moses (?) was the last to comment on it. It is a phenomenon more aside from the common course of nature. Too distinctly a sign or symbol of something to be disregarded. What form of beauty could be imagined more striking and conspicuous? An arch of the most brilliant and glorious colors completely spanning [the] heavens before the eyes of men! Children look at it. It is wonderful that all men do not take pains to behold it. At some waterfalls it is permanent, as long as the sun shines. Plainly thus the Maker of the universe sets the seal to his covenant with men. Many articles are thus clinched. Designed to impress man. All men beholding it begin to understand the significance of the Greek epithet applied to the world, — name for the world, — - Kosmos, or beauty. It was designed to impress man. We live, as it were, within the calyx of a flower.

Methinks there are few new flowers of late. An abundance of small fruits takes their place. Summer gets to be an old story. Birds leave off singing, as flowers blossoming, i. e. perhaps in the same propor tion. With the goldenrod comes the goldfinch. About the time his cool twitter was heard, did not the bobo link, thrasher, catbird, oven-bird, veery, etc., cease? 

I see some delicate ferns, in the low damp woods by the brook, which have turned whitish at the extremity. Cohush berries have just begun to be white, as if they contained a pearly venom, — wax white with a black spot (or very dark brown), imp-eyed. The leaves of one of the cornels (alternate-leaved or else round-leaved) are, some of them, turned lake-color. The weeds are now very high and rank in moist wood-paths and along such streams as this. I love to follow up the course of the brook and see the cardinal- flowers which stand in its midst above the rocks, their brilliant scarlet the more interesting in this open, but dark, cellar-like wood; the small purple fringed orchises with long dense spikes, all flower, — for that is often all that is seen above the leaves of other plants (is not this the last flower of this peculiar flower kind, — i. e. all flower and color, the leaves subordinated ?) ; and the Mimulus ringens, abundant and handsome in these low and rather shady places. Many flowers, of course, like the last, are prominent, if you visit such scenes as this, though one who confines himself to the road may never see them. From Smith's Hill beyond, there is as good a view of the mountains as from any place in our neighbor hood, because you look across the broad valley in which Concord lies first of all. The foreground is on a larger scale and more proportionate. The Peterboro Hills are to us as good as mountains. Hence, too, I see that fair river-reach, in the north. 

I find a bumblebee asleep in a thistle blossom (a pasture thistle), the loiterer; having crowded himself in deep amid the dense florets, out of the reach of birds, while the sky was overcast. What a sweet couch!

As I always notice the tone of the bell when I go into a new town, so surely, methinks, I notice some pe culiarity in the accent and manners of the inhabitants. The bristly aralia berries are ripe; like the sarsapa- rilla, a blue black. The shorn fields are acquiring a late green or refresh [sic]. They are greener, much, than a month ago, before the grass was cut. For ten days the weather has been cool and the air full of moisture. Is it not because of the increase of vegeta tion, the leaves being multiplied, the weeds more rank, the shadows heavier ? This is what is called dog-day weather. The water in the river and pond is quite cool, and it is more bracing and invigorating to bathe, though less luxurious. Methinks the water cannot again be as warm as it has been. Erechthites hieracifolia, apparently a day or two. Lespedeza capitata. Aralia racemosa, how long ? — petty morel, spikenard, like a large sarsaparilla. Hieracium paniculatum. Lycopus Virginicus (with five calyx -teeth). Solidagos, lanceolata ( ?) and puberula ( ?). Stellaria media at R. W. E.'s. Is it the same, then, which I saw in Cheney's garden so early ? That clammy, hairy-leaved cerastium (?) I still see, with a starry white flower. Was it the Urtica gracilis I examined, or the common nettle ? What is that plant at the brook with hairy under sides now budded ?

Ripening fruit

September 1

The fruit of the trilliums is very handsome. I found some a month ago, a singular red, angular-cased pulp, drooping, with the old anthers surrounding it three quarters of an inch in diameter; and now there is another kind, a dense crowded cluster of many ovoid berries turning from green to scarlet or bright brick color. 

Then there is the mottled fruit of the clustered Solomon's-seal, and also the greenish (with blue meat) fruit of the Convallaria multiflora dangling from the axils of the leaves.


H.D. Thoreau, Journal, September 1, 1851

The fruit of the trilliums is very handsome.. . .a dense crowded cluster of many ovoid berries turning from green to scarlet or bright brick color. 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.")

A crowded cluster 

of ovoid berries turning 

from green to scarlet.