The warmth of the sun is just beginning to be appreciated again on the advent of cooler days.

September 21. 

Monday. P. M. – To Corallorhiza Rock. and Tobacco-pipe Wood, northeast of Spruce Swamp. 

Peaches are now in their prime. 

Came through that thick white pine wood on the east of the spruce swamp. This is a very dense white pine grove, consisting of tall and slender trees which have been thinned, yet they are on an average only from three to six feet asunder. Perhaps half have been cut. It is a characteristic white pine grove, and I have seen many such. The trees are some ten inches in diameter, larger or smaller, and about fifty feet high. They are bare for thirty-five or forty feet up, — which is equal to at least twenty-five years of their growth, or with only a few dead twigs high up. Their green crowded tops are mere oval spear-heads in shape and almost in proportionate size, four to eight feet wide, – not enough, you would think, to keep the tree alive, still less to draw it upward. In a dark day the wood is not only thick but dark with the boles of the trees. 

Under this dense shade, the red-carpeted ground is almost bare of vegetation and is dark at noon. There grow Goodyera pubescens and repens, Corallorhiza multiflora (going to seed), white cohosh berries, Pyrola secunda, and, on the low west side and also the east side, an abundance of tobacco-pipe, which has begun to turn black at the tip of the petals and leaves. 

The Solidago casia is very common and fresh in copses, perhaps the prevailing solidago now in woods. 

Rudbeckia laciniata done, probably some time. 

The warmth of the sun is just beginning to be appreciated again on the advent of cooler days. 

Measured the large white willow north the road near Hildreth's. At a foot and a half from the ground it is fourteen feet in circumference; at five feet, the smallest place, it is twelve feet in circumference. It was once still larger, for it has lost large branches.[Cut down in '59.]

H. D. Thoereau, Journal, September 21, 1857


Corallorhiza Rock. See August 29, 1857 ("Nearby, north [of Indian Rock, west of the swamp], is a rocky ridge, on the east slope of which the Corallorhiza multiflora is very abundant.")

Corallorhiza multiflora [spotted coral root] (going to seed)... See note to August 13, 1857

Under this dense shade, the red-carpeted ground is almost bare of vegetation and is dark at noon. There grow Goodyera pubescens and repens See August 20, 1857 ("The Goodyera repens grows behind the spring where I used to sit, amid the dead pine leaves") and note to August 27, 1856 (“Goodyera pubescens, rattlesnake-plantain, is apparently a little past its prime. It is very abundant on Clintonia Swamp hillside. . .”)

An abundance of tobacco-pipe, which has begun to turn black . . . See July 24, 1856 ("Tobacco-pipe much blackened, out a long time.")

The Solidago casia is very common and fresh in copses, perhaps the prevailing solidago now in woods. See October 8, 1856 ("S. casia, much the worse for the wear, but freshest of any [goldenrod] seen.")

The warmth of the sun is just beginning to be appreciated again on the advent of cooler days. See  September 18, 1860 ("This is a beautiful day, warm but not too warm, a harvest day . . ."If you are not happy to-day you will hardly be so to-morrow.”); August 29, 1854 ("I enjoy the warmth of the sun now that the air is cool, and Nature seems really more genial. ")

I hear a peculiar sound which I mistake for a woodpecker's tapping.

August 20. 

Thursday. 

P. M. – To Hubbard's Close. 

July 31, 2019

The hillside at Clintonia Swamp is in some parts quite shingled with the rattlesnake-plantain (Goodyera pubescens) leaves overlapping one another. The flower is now apparently in its prime. 

As I stand there, I hear a peculiar sound which I mistake for a woodpecker's tapping, but I soon see a cuckoo hopping near suspiciously or inquisitively, at length within twelve feet, from time to time uttering a hard, dry note, very much like a woodpecker tapping a dead dry tree rapidly, its full clear white throat and breast toward me, and slowly lifting its tail from time to time. Though somewhat allied to that throttled note it makes by night, it was quite different from that. 

I go along by the hillside footpath in the woods about Hubbard's Close. The Goodyera repens grows behind the spring where I used to sit, amid the dead pine leaves. Its leaves partly concealed in the grass. It is just done commonly. 

Helianthus, strumosus-like, at the south end of Stow's cold pool; how long?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 20, 1857

The hillside at Clintonia Swamp is in some parts quite shingled with the rattlesnake-plantain . . . See August 27, 1856 (“Goodyera pubescens, rattlesnake-plantain, is apparently a little past its prime. It is very abundant on Clintonia Swamp hillside. . .”)

A hard, dry note, very much like a woodpecker tapping. . .See May 29, 1856 (“A cuckoo’s note, loud and hollow, from a wood-side.”)

Helianthus, strumosus-like, at the south end of Stow's cold pool. . . See note to August 12, 1856 ("Am surprised to see still a third species or variety of helianthus . . . At edge of the last clearing south of spring. I cannot identify it. . . .In some respects it is most like H. strumosus, but not downy beneath.”)

How ever unexpected are these later flowers!

September 14. 

cheered by the sight of
an Aster Novae-Angliae

P. M. — To Hubbard's Close and Cardinal Ditch. 

Now for the Aster Tradescanti along low roads, like the Turnpike, swarming with butterflies and bees. Some of them are pink. 

How ever unexpected are these later flowers! 

You thought that Nature had about wound up her affairs. You had seen what she could do this year, and had not noticed a few weeds by the roadside, or mistook them for the remains of summer flowers now hastening to their fall; you thought you knew every twig and leaf by the roadside, and no thing more was to be looked for there; and now, to your surprise, these ditches are crowded with millions of little stars. They suddenly spring up and face you, with their legions on each side the way, as if they had lain in ambuscade there. The flowering of the ditches. 

Call them travellers' thoughts, numerous though small, worth a penny at least, which, sown in spring and summer, in the fall spring up unobserved at first, successively dusted and washed, mingled with nettles and beggar-ticks as a highway harvest. A starry meteoric shower, a milky way, in the flowery kingdom in whose aisles we travel. 

Let the traveller bethink himself, elevate and expand his thoughts somewhat, that his successors may oftener hereafter be cheered by the sight of an Aster Novae-Angliae or spectabilis here and there, to remind him that a poet or philosopher has passed this way. 

The gardener with all his assiduity does not raise such a variety, nor so many successive crops on the same space, as Nature in the very roadside ditches. There they have stood, begrimed with dust and the wash of the road so long, and made acquaintance with passing sheep and cattle and swine, gathering a trivial experience, and now at last the fall rains have come to wash off some of that dust, and even they exhibit these dense flowery panicles as the result of all that experience, as pure for an hour as if they grew by some wild brook-side. Successor to Mayweed & Co. 

Is not mayweed, by the way, the flower furthest advanced into the road rut or mid-channel, like the kalmiana lily in the river? The mid- channel, where the stream of travel flows deep and strong, unless it is far up the stream toward its fountainhead, no flower invades. Mayweed! what a misnomer! Call it rut-weed rather. 

Goodyera pubescens apparently just done. 

Fringed gentian well out (and some withered or frost-bitten?), say a week, though there was none to be seen here August 27th. 

I see the fruit and flowers of Polygonum Careyi affected with smut like corn.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 14, 1856

Let the traveller bethink himself, elevate and expand his thoughts somewhat, that his successors may oftener hereafter be cheered by the sight of an Aster . . . to remind him that a poet or philosopher has passed this way. See August 30, 1856 "The more thrilling, wonderful, divine objects I behold in a day, the more expanded and immortal I become. If a stone appeals to me and elevates me, tells me how many miles I have come, how many remain to travel, — and the more, the better, — reveals the future to me in some measure, it is a matter of private rejoicing.")

Fringed gentian well out . . . See September 14, 1855 ("To Hubbard's Close. . . .  I see no fringed gentian yet.. ")