Spring leaf-out begins.

April 24. 

April  24, 2016

The river is only half an inch above summer level.

The meadow-sweet and hardhack have begun to leaf.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 24, 1860


The river is only half an inch above summer level. See April 24, 1852 ("The water is still over the causeway on both sides of Carlisle Bridge for a long distance. It is a straight flood now for about four miles.");  April 24, 1857 ("The water is at its height, higher than before this year.") See aksi April 1, 1858 ("The river is at summer level; has not been up this spring, and has fallen to this.")

 The meadow-sweet and hardhack have begun to leaf. See  April 24, 1852 ("The leaves of the hardhack, curled up, show their white under sides");April 24, 1855 ("The Salix alba begins to leaf. "); April 24, 1856 ("The earliest gooseberry leaf has spread a third of an inch or more.") See also April 25, 1859 ("I see the meadow-sweet, thimble-berry (even in a swamp), high blackberry, and (on a dry rock in the woods in a sunny place) some Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum leafing (even the last) apparently two or three days "); May 4, 1852 ("The meadow-sweet begins to leave out") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Spring leaf-out.

What a change there will be in a few years, this little forest of goldenrod giving place to a forest of pines!

December 17.

P. M. — To Walden.

The snow being some three or four inches deep, I see rising above it, generally, at my old bean-field, only my little white pines set last spring in the midst of an immense field of Solidago nemoralis, with a little sweet-fern (i.e. a large patch of it on the north side).

What a change there will be in a few years, this little forest of goldenrod giving place to a forest of pines!

By the side of the Pout's Nest, I see on the pure white snow what looks like dust for half a dozen inches under a twig. Looking closely, I find that the twig is hardhack and the dust its slender, light-brown, chaffy looking seed, which falls still in copious showers, dusting the snow, when I jar it; and here are the tracks of a sparrow which has jarred the twig and picked the minute seeds a long time, making quite a hole in the snow. The seeds are so fine that it must have got more snow than seed at each peck. But they probably look large to its microscopic eyes.

I see, when I jar it, that a meadow-sweet close by has quite similar, but larger, seeds.

This the reason, then, that these plants rise so high above the snow and retain their seed, dispersing it on the least jar over each successive layer of snow beneath them; or it is carried to a distance by the wind.

What abundance and what variety in the diet of these small granivorous birds, while I find only a few nuts still!

These stiff weeds which no snow can break down hold their provender. What the cereals are to men, these are to the sparrows. The only threshing they require is that the birds fly against their spikes or stalks.

A little further I see the seed-box (?) (Ludwigia) full of still smaller, yellowish seeds.

And on the ridge north is the track of a partridge amid the shrubs. It has hopped up to the low clusters of smooth sumach berries, sprinkled the snow with them, and eaten all but a few. Also, here only, or where it has evidently jarred them down — whether intentionally or not, I am not sure — are the large oval seeds of the stiff-stalked lespedeza, which I suspect it ate, with the sumach berries. There is much solid food in them. When the snow is deep the birds could easily pick the latter out of the heads as they stand on the snow.

I observe, then, eaten by birds to-day, the seed of hardhack and meadow-sweet, sumach, and probably lespedeza, and even seed-box.

Under the hill, on the southeast side of R. W. E.'s lot, where the hemlock stands, I see many tracks of squirrels. The dark, thick green of the hemlock (amid the pines) seems to attract them as a covert. The snow under the hemlock is strewn with the scales of its cones, which they (and perhaps birds?) have stripped off, and some of its little winged seeds. It is pleasant to see the tracks of these squirrels (I am not sure whether they are red or gray or both, for I see none) leading straight from the base of one tree to that of another, thus leaving untrodden triangles, squares, and polygons of every form, bounded by much trodden highways.

One, two, three, and the track is lost on the upright bole of a pine, — as if they had played at base-running from goal to goal, while pine cones were thrown at them on the way. The tracks of two or three suggest a multitude. You come thus on the tracks of these frisky and volatile (semivolitant) creatures in the midst of perfect stillness and solitude, as you might stand in a hall half an hour after the dancers had departed.

I see no nests in the trees, but numerous holes through the snow into the earth, whence they have emerged. They have loitered but little on the snow, spending their time chiefly on the trees, their castles, when abroad.

The snow is strewn not only with hemlock scales, but, under other trees, with the large white pine scales for rods together where there is no track, the wind having scattered them as they fell, and also the shells of hickory-nuts. It reminds me of the platform before a grocery where nuts are sold.

You see many places where they have probed the snow for these white pine cones, evidently those which they cut off green and which accordingly have not opened so as to drop the seeds. This was perhaps the design in cut ting them off so early, — thus to preserve them under the snow (not dispersed). Do they find them by the scent?

At any rate they will dig down through the snow and come right upon a pine cone or a hickory-nut or an acorn, which you and I cannot do.

Two or three acres of Walden, off the bar, not yet frozen.

Saw in [it] a good-sized black duck, which did not dive while I looked. I suspect it must have been a Fuligula, though I saw no white.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 17, 1859

What abundance and what variety in the diet of these small granivorous birds. These stiff weeds which no snow can break down hold their provender.  See January 16, 1860 ("Though you may have never noticed this shrub, the tree sparrow comes from the north in the winter straight to it, and confidently shakes its panicle, and then feasts on the fine shower of seed that falls from it. The bird understands how to get its dinner perfectly.")

Two or three acres of Walden, off the bar, not yet frozen. Saw in it a good-sized black duck. See December 27, 1852 ("Not a particle of ice in Walden to-day. . . . A black and white duck on it, Flint's and Fair Haven being frozen up.")

The flowers I see at present are autumn flowers..

August 28. 

P. M. — To Walden.

A cool day; wind northwest. Need a half -thick coat. Thus gradually we withdraw into winter quarters. It is a clear, flashing air, and the shorn fields now look bright and yellowish and cool, tinkled and twittered over by bobolinks, goldfinches, sparrows, etc. 

You feel the less inclined to bathing this weather, and bathe from principle, when boys, who bathe for fun, omit it. 

Thick fogs these mornings. We have had little or no dog-days this year, it has been so dry.

Pumpkins begin to be yellow. 

White cornel berries mostly fallen. 

The arrowhead is still a common flower and an important one. I see some very handsome ones in Cardinal Ditch, whose corollas are an inch and a half in diameter. The greater part, however, have gone to seed. 

The flowers I see at present are autumn flowers, such as have risen above the stubble in shorn fields since it was cut, whose tops have commonly been clipped by the scythe or the cow; or the late flowers, as asters and goldenrods, which grow in neglected fields and along ditches and hedgerows. 

The rhexia in Ebby Hubbard's field is considerably past prime, and it is its reddish chalices which show most at a distance now. I should have looked ten days ago. Still it is handsome with its large yellow anthers against clear purple petals. It grows there in large patches with hardhack. 

I hear that some of the villagers were aroused from their sleep before light by the groans or bellowings of a bullock which an unskillful butcher was slaughtering at the slaughter-house. What morning or Memnonian music was that to ring through the quiet village ? What did that clarion sing of? What a comment on our village life! Song of the dying bullock! But no doubt those who heard it inquired, as usual, of the butcher the next day, "What have you got to-day?" "Sirloin, good beefsteak, rattleran," etc. 

I saw a month or more ago where pine-needles which had fallen (old ones) stood erect on low leaves of the forest floor, having stuck in, or passed through, them. They stuck up as a fork which falls from the table. Yet you would not think that they fell with sufficient force. 

The fruit of the sweet-gale is yellowing.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 28, 1859


Thick fogs these mornings. See July 22, 1851 ("The season of morning fogs has arrived. A great crescent over the course of the river, the fog retreats, and I do not see how it is dissipated, leaving this slight, thin vapor to curl over the surface of the still, dark water, still as glass. These are our fairest days, which are born in a fog."); August 7, 1860 ("If we awake into a fog it does not occur to us that the inhabitants of a neighboring town may have none)

White cornel berries mostly fallen. See August 28, 1856 ("The panicled cornel berries are whitening, but already mostly fallen."); August 28, 1852 ("The berries of the alternate leaved cornel have dropped off mostly.")

The rhexia in Ebby Hubbard's field is considerably past prime, and it is its reddish chalices which show most at a distance now.Still it is handsome with its large yellow anthers against clear purple petals. See.August 27, 1856 (“The rhexia greets me in bright patches on meadow banks.”); September 14, 1851 (" The chalices of the Rhexia Virginica, deer-grass or meadow beauty, are literally little reddish chalices now, though many still have petals, little cream pitchers. "); October 2, 1856 (“The scarlet leaves and stem of the rhexia, some time out of flower, makes almost as bright a patch in the meadow now as the flowers did,”) See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Rhexia Virginica (meadow-beauty)

August 28. See A Book of the Seasons, August 28

A clear flashing air –

 shorn fields bright and yellowish –

bobolinks, goldfinch.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  eautumn flowers.

 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 © 2009-2025

Apple trees, square and round, in the northwest landscape.

July 26. 

P. M. — To Great Meadows.

July 26, 2019

I see in Clark's (?) land, behind Garfield's, a thick growth of white birches, apparently three years old, blown from the wood on the west and southwest.

Looking from Peter's, the meadows are somewhat glaucous, with a reddish border, or bank, by the river, where the red-top and Agrostis scabra grow, and a greener stream where the pipes are, in the lowest part, by the Holt, and in some places yellowish-green ferns and now brown-topped wool-grass. 

There is much of what I call Juncus scirpoides now in its prime in the wetter parts, as also the Eleocharis palustris, long done, and Rhyncospora alba lately begun. Also buck-bean by itself in very wet places which have lost their crust. 

Elodea, how long? 

Now observe the darker shades, and especially the apple trees, square and round, in the northwest landscape. 

Dogdayish. 

Methinks the hardhack leaves always stand up, for now they do, and have as soon as they blossomed at least.

July 26, 2019

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 26, 1859

I see in Clark's land, behind Garfield's, a thick growth of white birches, apparently three years old, blown from the wood on the west and southwest. See January 7, 1854 ("The bird-shaped scales of the white birch are blown more than twenty rods from the trees"); January 7, 1856 ("I see birch scales (bird-like) on the snow on the river more than twenty rods south of the nearest and only birch, and trace them north to it”);  March 25, 1858 ("Going across A. Clark's field behind Garfield’s, I see many fox-colored sparrows flitting past in a straggling manner into the birch and pitch pine woods on the left"); November 8, 1860 ("Also a wet and brushy meadow some forty rods in front of Garfield's is being rapidly filled with white pines whose seeds must have been blown  [fifty rods].").

July 26. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 26

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

Now are the days to go a-berrying

July 18.

JULY 18, 2014

Sonchus oleraceus well in bloom. 

8.30 a. m. — To Sudbury meadows with W. E. C. by boat.

Hardhack in bloom perhaps a day or two. The button-bush beginning to open generally. The late, or river, rose spots the copses over the water, — a great ornament to the river's brink now. Three utricularias and perhaps the horned also common now. Rhexia, a day or two. The pads are now much eaten. 

Thoroughwort. Meadow haying has commenced. There is no pause between the English and meadow haying. There are thousands of yellow butterflies on the pontederia flowers, and of various colors on the button-bush. 

In the Sudbury meadows are dense fields of pipes three feet high bordering the river. The common large rush, flowering at top, makes black-looking squads there. The fields of pontederia are in some places four or five rods wide and almost endless, but, crossing from side to side on shore, are the open white umbels of the hemlock, and now the sium begins to show. 

These meadows, with their meandering stream, through whose weeds it is hard to push a boat, are very wild. 

The stake-driver and the virescens rise and go off with sluggish flight from time to time. 

What is that continual dry chucking sound heard about the pads? The darting of a fish, or of an insect? 

The heart-leaves are eaten and turned dark, but the less decayed part in the centres, still green, is of the form and appearance of the less cut leaves of the Ranunculus Purshii, — either leading to or following after that. As they decay, such a leaf as the less divided ones of the R. Purshii is left, or promises to be left, — is suggested. 

That smaller narrow-leaved polygonum which forms the first and lower rank in the river is in many places in blossom, rose-colored, whitish. 

What is that rather tall, coarse kind of aster, with a few broad rays, in the copse behind Bittern Cliff?  Is it Diplopappus cornifolius ? 

Now are the days to go a-berrying.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 18, 1853



Rhexia, a day or two. See July 18, 1852 ("The petals of the rhexia have a beautiful clear purple with a violet tinge."); and note to August 5, 1858 ("I cannot sufficiently admire the rhexia, one of the highest-colored purple flowers, but difficult to bring home in its perfection, with its fugacious petals.")

There are thousands of yellow butterflies on the pontederia flowers, See July 18, 1852(" The pontederias are alive with butterflies.")

The fields of pontederia are in some places four or five rods wide and almost endless. See July 18, 1852 ("The pontederias are now in their prime . . .They are very freshly blue. In the sun, when you are looking west, they are of a violaceous blue.")


Now are the days to go a-berrying. See July 18, 1854 ("As I go along the Joe Smith road, every bush and bramble bears its fruit; the sides of the road are a fruit garden; blackberries, huckleberries, thimble-berries, fresh and abundant, no signs of drought; all fruits in abundance; the earth teems")

July 18. See A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 18

A Book of 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

The colors of the world.

April 24. 

April 24, 2017

6 a. m. — Water has fallen an inch and a half since last night, — which is at a regular rate. 

Now that the sun shines and the sky is blue, the water is a dark blue which in the storm was light or whitish. It follows the sky's, though the sky is a lighter blue.

The lilac buds have looked as forward as any for many weeks. 

2 p. m. — To Carlisle Bridge via Flint's Bridge, bank of river, rear of Joel Barrett's, returning by bridle-road. 

The elms are now fairly in blossom. 

It is one of those clear, washing days, — though the air is cold, — such as succeed a storm, when the air is clear and flowing, and the cultivated ground and the roads shine. 

Passed Flint's road on the wall. 

Sorrel is well under weigh, and cinquefoil. 

White oaks still hold their leaves. 

The pitch pine is a cheerful tree at this season, with its lively yellow-green in the sunshine, while the landscape is still russet and dead-grass colored.

Sitting by the road beyond N. Barrett's, the colors of the world are: 

• overhead a very light blue sky, darkest in the zenith, lightest in the horizon, with scattered white clouds seeming thickest in the horizon;

• all around the undulating earth a very light tawny color, from the dead grass, with the reddish and gray of forests mingled with evergreen;

• and, in the lap of earth, very dark blue rippled water, answering to the light blue above; 

• the shadows of clouds flitting over all below;

• the spires of woods fringing the horizon on every side, and, nearer, single trees here and there seen with dark branches against the sky. T

• this tawny ground divided by walls and houses, white, light slate, and red sprinkled here and there. 

Ball's Hill and the rest are deep sunk in the flood. 

The level water-line appears to best advantage when it appears thus to cut the trees and hills. It looks as if the water were just poured into its basin and simply stood so high. No permanent shore gives you this pleasure.

Saw the honey-bees on the staminate flowers of the willow catkins by the roadside (such as I described April 23d), with little bottles of the yellow pollen, apparently, as big as pin-heads on their thighs. With these flowers, then, come bees. Is there honey in staminate flowers? 

The innocent odor of spring flowers, flavorless, as a breakfast. They will be more spiced by and by.

Went over the cladonia hills toward Tarbell's.

A small tree, an oak for instance, looks large on a bare hilltop. 

The farmers, whom the storm has delayed, are busily plowing and overhauling their manure. 

Observed the ants at work on a large ant-heap. They plainly begin as soon as the snow is off and the ground thawed. 

Gold-thread, an evergreen, still bright in the swamps.

The rattlesnake-plantain has fresh leaves. 

A wall running over the top of a rocky hill, with the light seen through its chinks, has a pretty effect. 

The sparrows, frogs, rabbits, etc., are made to resemble the ground for their protection; but so is the hawk that preys on them; but he is of a lighter color beneath, that creeping things over which he hovers may confound him with the sky. The marsh hawk is not easily distinguished from the meadow or the stems of the maples. 

The water is still over the causeway on both sides of Carlisle Bridge for a long distance. It is a straight flood now for about four miles. Fortunately for the bridge the wind has not been very high since the flood was at its height. 

The leaves of the hardhack, curled up, show their white under sides. 

On the bridle-road observed the interesting light-crimson star-like flowers of the hazel, the catkins being now more yellowish. 

This is a singular and interesting part of Concord, extensive and rather flat rocky pastures without houses or cultivated fields on any but this unused bridle-road, from which I hear the frogs peep. These are Channing's "moors." He went in on this road to chop, and this is the scene of his "Woodman." 

Heard again (in the village) that vetter-vetter-vetter- vetter-vef, or tchi-tchi-tchi-tchi-tchi-tchi-tchi' very rapidly repeated, which I heard April 23d, and perhaps the same that I saw April 17th (described April 18th). I am pretty sure it is the pine warbler, yellow beneath, with faint olivaceous marks on the sides, olivaceous above, tail forked, about the size of a yellow-bird. 

I have not seen the fox-colored sparrow for some weeks.

Thought I saw a loon on Walden yesterday.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 24, 1852

The pitch pine is a cheerful tree at this season, with its lively yellow-green in the sunshine, , while the landscape is still russet and dead-grass colored. See April 24, 1857 ("Now the sun comes out and shines on the pine hill west of Ball's Hill, lighting up the light-green pitch pines and the sand and russet-brown lichen-clad hill. That is a very New England landscape.")See also April 11, 1852 ("The light of the setting sun on the pitch pines on Fair Haven and Bear Hill lights them up warmly.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Pitch Pine.

The leaves of the hardhack, curled up, show their white under sides. See April 24, 1860 ("The meadow-sweet and hardhack have begun to leaf.”)

Saw the honey-bees on the staminate flowers of the willow catkins . . . with little bottles of the yellow pollen, apparently, as big as pin-heads on their thighs. See April 9, 1853 (“Bees also in the female willows, of course without pellets. It must be nectar alone there.”); April 17, 1855 (“A bee curved close on each half-opened catkin, intoxicated with its early sweet, —one perhaps a honey-bee, — so intent on its sweets or pollen that they do not dream of flying. Various kinds of bees — some of the honey bees — have little yellow masses of pollen on their thighs; some seem to be taking it into their mouths”) 

Willows now in bloom 

resound with the hum of bees 

this warm afternoon. 

April 28, 1860

See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Bees

The interesting light-crimson star-like flowers of the hazel. See April 9, 1856 ("the stigmas already peep out, minute crimson stars"); April 11, 1856 ("the crimson stigmas of the hazel, like little stars peeping forth") April 13, 1855 ("many minute, but clear crystalline crimson stars at the end of a bare and seemingly dead twig.")

I am pretty sure it is the pine warbler, yellow beneath, with faint olivaceous marks on the sides, olivaceous above, tail forked, about the size of a yellow-bird. See April 9, 1856 ("Its bright yellow or golden throat and breast, etc., are conspicuous at this season, — a greenish yellow above, with two white bars on its bluish-brown wings. It sits often with loose-hung wings and forked tail.");  August 18, 1856 ("Clear-yellow throat and breast, greenish-yellow head, conspicuous white bar on wings, white beneath, forked tail, bluish legs. Can it be pine warbler? The note, thus faint, is not like it.")

I have not seen the fox-colored sparrow for some weeks. See April 24, 1855 ("Have not seen the F. hyemalis for a week.,"); April 17, 1855 ("A sudden warm day, like yesterday and this, takes off some birds and adds others. It is a crisis in their career. The fox-colored sparrows seem to be gone"). See also   A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Fox-colored Sparrow.

Thought I saw a loon on Walden yesterday. See October 8, 1852 ("At length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged unearthly howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain.")

A man at work on the Ledum Pool, draining it.

October 23

P. M. — To Ledum Swamp. 

One tells me that he saw geese go over Wayland the 17th.

Large wild cherries are half fallen or more, the few remaining leaves yellowish. Choke-cherries are bare; how long?

Amelanchier bare. 

Viburnum nudum half fallen or more; when wet and in shade, a light crimson. 

Hardhack, in low ground, where it has not withered too soon, inclines to a very light scarlet. 

Sweet-gale is not fallen, but a very dull yellowish and scarlet. 

You see in woods many black (?) oak sprouts, forming low bushes or clumps of green and dark crimson. (C. says they are handsome, like a mahonia.) 

The meadow-sweet is yellowish and yellow-scarlet. 

In Ledum Swamp the white azalea is a dirty brown scarlet, half fallen, or more. 

Panicled andromeda reddish-brown and half fallen. 

Some young high blueberry, or sprouts, never are a deeper or brighter crimson-scarlet than now. 

Wild holly fallen. 

Even the sphagnum has turned brownish-red on the exposed surfaces, in the swamp, looking like the at length blushing pellicle of the ripe globe there. 

The ledum is in the midst of its change, rather conspicuous, yellow and light-scarlet and falling. I detect but few Andromeda Polifolia and Kalmia glaucaleaves turned a light red or scarlet. 

The spruce is changed and falling, but is brown and inconspicuous.

A man at work on the Ledum Pool, draining it, says that, when they had ditched about six feet deep, or to the bottom, near the edge of this swamp, they came to old flags, and he thought that the whole swamp was once a pond and the flags grew by the edge of it. Thought the mud was twenty feet deep near the pool, and that he had found three growths of spruce, one above another, there. He had dug up a hard-pan with iron in it (as he thought) under a part of this swamp, and in what he cast out sorrel came up and grew, very rankly indeed.

I notice some late rue turned a very clear light yellow. 

I see some rose leaves (the early smooth) turned a handsome clear yellow, — and some (the R. Carolina) equally clear and handsome scarlet or dark red. This is the rule with it. 

Elder is a dirty greenish yellow and apparently mostly fallen. 

Beach plum is still green with some dull red leaves, but apparently hardly any fallen. 

Butternuts are bare. 

Mountain-ash of both kinds either withered or bare.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 23, 1858

Geese go over Wayland the 17th. See October 24, 1858 ("A northeast storm, though not much rainfalls to-day, but a fine driving mizzle or “drisk.” This, as usual, brings the geese, and at 2.30 P. M. I see two flocks go over. . . .This weather warns of the approach of winter, and this wind speeds them on their way.")");    October 27, 1857 ("I hear that Sammy Hoar saw geese go over to-day. The fall (strictly speaking) is approaching an end in this probably annual northeast storm"); November 13, 1858 ("A large flock of geese go over just before night. "); November 8 , 1857 ("About 10 A.M. a long flock of geese are going over from northeast to southwest"); November 13, 1855 ("Seventy or eighty geese, in three harrows successively smaller, flying southwest—pretty well west—over the house. A completely overcast, occasionally drizzling forenoon. "); November 13, 1858 ("A large flock of geese go over just before night. ");November 18, 1854 (" Sixty geese go over the Great Fields, in one waving line, broken from time to time by their crowding on each other and vainly endeavoring to form into a harrow, honking all the while."); November 20, 1853 ("Methinks the geese are wont to go south just before a storm, and, in the spring, to go north just after one, say at the end of a long April storm.");   November 30, 1857 ("The air is full of geese. I saw five flocks within an hour, about 10 A. M., containing from thirty to fifty each, and afterward two more flocks, making in all from two hundred and fifty to three hundred at least"); December 1, 1857 ("I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day."); December 6, 1855 ("10 P. M. — Hear geese going over.")

The ledum is in the midst of its change, rather conspicuous. I detect but few Andromeda Polifolia and Kalmia glauca. See February 4, 1858 ("Discover the Ledum latifolium, quite abundant over a space about six rods in diameter just east of the small pond-hole, growing with the Andromeda calyculata, Polifolia, Kalmia glauca, etc.")

The spruce is changed and falling, but is brown and inconspicuous. See February 12, 1858 ("About the ledum pond-hole there is an abundance of that abnormal growth of the spruce. . . , which have an impoverished look, altogether forming a broom-like mass, very much like a heath. ")

A man at work on the Ledum Pool, draining it. See November 8, 1857 ("I have no doubt that a good farmer, who, of course, loves his work, takes exactly the same kind of pleasure in draining a swamp, seeing the water flow out in his newly cut ditch, that a child does in its mud dikes and water-wheels. Both alike love to play with the natural forces.")

In the toad pool by Cyrus Hubbard’s corner.

August 21

P. M. — A-berrying to Conantum. 

I notice hardhacks clothing their stems now with their erected leaves, showing the whitish under sides. A pleasing evidence of the advancing season. 

How yellow that kind of hedgehog sedge (Cyperus phymatodea), in the toad pool by Cyrus Hubbard’s corner. 

I still see the patch of epilobium on Bee Tree Hill as plainly as ever, though only the pink seed-vessels and stems are left.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 21, 1858

The patch of epilobium on Bee Tree Hill. See July 28, 1858  ("Saw a pinkish patch on side-hill west of Baker Farm, which turned out to be epilobium.")

Bee Tree Hill. See September 30, 1852 ("After we got to the Baker Farm, to one of the open fields nearest to the tree I had marked, . . . We then took the path to Clematis Brook on the north of Mt. Misery,. . . and so repaired at once to the tree I had found, a hemlock two feet and a half in diameter on a side-hill a rod from the[Fair Haven] pond.")

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 © 2009-2025

Talked with Minott, who sits in his wood-shed

August 16.

Hear it raining again early when I awake, as it did yesterday, still and steady, as if the season were troubled with a diabetes.

P. M. — To Cardinal Ditch.

I hear these birds on my way thither, between two and three o’clock:

• goldfinches twitter over;
• the song sparrow sings several times; hear a low warble from bluebirds, with apparently their young,
• the link of many bobolinks (and see large flocks on the fences and weeds; they are largish-looking birds with yellow throats); 
• a large flock of red-wings goes tchucking over; 
• a lark twitters; 
• crows caw; 
• a robin peeps; 
• kingbirds twitter, as ever.

At sunset I hear a low short warble from a golden robin, and the notes of the wood pewee.

In my boating of late I have several times scared up a couple of summer ducks of this year, bred in our meadows. They allowed me to come quite near, and helped to people the-river. I have not seen them for some days. Would you know the end of our intercourse? Goodwin shot them, and Mrs. , who never sailed on the river, ate them. Of course, she knows not' what she did. What if I should eat her canary? Thus we share each other’s sins as well as burdens. The lady who watches admiringly the matador shares his deed. They belonged to me, as much as to any one, when they were alive, but it was considered of more importance that Mrs. should taste the flavor of them dead than that I should enjoy the beauty of them alive.

A three-ribbed goldenrod on railroad causeway, two to three feet high, abundantly out before Solidago nemoralis. 

I notice that when a frog, a Rana halecina, jumps, it drops water at the same instant, as a turtle often when touched as she is preparing to lay. I see many frogs jump from the side of the railroad causeway toward the ditch at its base, and each drops some water. They apparently have this supply of water with them in warm and dry weather, at least when they leave the water, and, returning to it, leave it behind as of no further use.

Thalictrum Comuti is now generally done.

The hardhack commonly grows in low meadow-pastures which are uneven with grassy clods or hummocks, such as the almshouse pasture by Cardinal Ditch.

I am surprised to find that where of late years there have been so many cardinal-flowers, there are now very few. So much does a plant fluctuate from season to season. Here I found nearly white ones once. Charming tells me that he saw a white bobolink in a large flock of them to-day. Almost all flowers and animals may be found white. As in a large number of cardinal-flowers you may find a white one, so in a large flock of bobolinks, also, it seems, you may find a white one.

Talked with Minott, who sits in his wood-shed, having, as I notice, several seats there for visitors, —one a block on the sawhorse, another a patchwork mat on a wheelbarrow, etc., etc. His half-grown chickens, which roost overhead, perch on his shoulder or knee. According to him, the Holt is at the “ diving ash,” where is some of the deepest water in the river. He tells me some of his hunting stories again. He always lays a good deal of stress on the kind of gun he used, as if he had bought a new one every year, when probably he never had more than two or three in his life. In this case it was a “half-stocked” one, a little “cocking-piece,” and whenever he finished his game he used the word “gavel,” I think in this way, “gave him gavel,” i. e. made him bite the dust, or settled him. Speaking of foxes, he said: “As soon as the nights get to be cool, if you step outdoors at nine or ten o’clock when all is still, you’ll hear them bark out on the flat behind the houses, half a mile off, or sometimes whistle through their noses. I can tell ’em. I know what that means. I know all about that. They are out after something to eat, I suppose.” He used to love to hear the goldfinches sing on the hemp which grew near his gate.

At sunset paddled to Hill.

Goodwin has come again to fish, with three poles, hoping to catch some more of those large eels.

A blue heron, with its great undulating wings, prominent cutwater, and leisurely flight, goes over southwest, cutting off the bend of the river west of our house. 

Goodwin says he saw one two or three days ago, and also that he saw some black ducks. 

A muskrat is swimming up the stream, betrayed by two long diverging ripples, or ripple-lines, two or three rods long each, and inclosing about seventy-five degrees, methinks. The rat generally dives just before reaching the shore and is not seen again, probably entering some burrow in the bank.

Am surprised to see that the snapping turtle which I found floating dead June 16th, and placed to rot in the cleft of a rock, has been all cleaned, so that there is no smell of carrion. The scales have nearly all fallen Off, and the sternum fallen apart, and the bony frame of the back is loose and dropping to pieces, as if it were many years old. It is a wonderful piece of dovetailing, the ends of the ribs (which are narrow and rib-like) set into sockets in the middle of the marginal bones, .whose joints are in each case between the ribs. There are many large fish-bones within the shell. Was it killed by the fish it swallowed? The bones not being dispersed, I suppose it was cleaned by insects.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 16, 1858

 A blue heron, with its great undulating wings, prominent cutwater, and leisurely flight. See  April 29, 1854 ("Off the Cliffs, I meet a blue heron flying slowly down stream. He flaps slowly and heavily, his long, level, straight and sharp bill projecting forward, then his keel-like neck doubled up, and finally his legs thrust out straight behind."); August 14,1859 ("If you would know the depth of the water on these few shoalest places of Musketaquid, ask the blue heron that wades and fishes there")

August 16. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  August 16

 

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

These might be called the pewee-days.

August 14. 

P. M. — To the one-arched bridge. 

Hardhacks are probably a little past prime. 

Stopped by the culvert opposite the centaurea, to look at the sagittaria leaves. Perhaps this plant is in its prime (?). Its leaves vary remarkably in form. I see, in a thick patch six or eight feet in diameter, leaves nearly a foot long and others, as long or longer,  with all the various intermediate ones. The very narrow ones, perhaps, around the edge of the patch, being also of a darker green, are not distinguished at first, but mistaken for grass.

Suggesting to C. an Indian name for one of our localities, he thought it had too many syllables for a place so near the middle of the town, — as if the more distant and less frequented place might have a longer name, less understood and less alive in its syllables. 

The Canada thistle down is now begun to fly, and I see the goldfinch upon it. Carduelis. Often when I watch one go off, he flies at first one way, rising and falling, as if skimming close over unseen billows, but directly makes a great circuit as if he had changed his mind, and disappears in the opposite direction, or is seen to be joined there by his mate.

We walked a little way down the bank this side the Assabet bridge. The broad-leaved panic grass, with its hairy sheaths or collars, attracts the eye now there by its perfectly fresh broad leaf. 

We see from time to time many bubbles rising from the sandy bottom, where it is two or more feet deep, which I suspect to come from clams there letting off air. I think I see the clams, and it is often noticed there.

I see a pickerel nearly a foot long in the deep pool under the wooden bridge this side the stone one, where it has been landlocked how long?

There is brought me this afternoon Thalictrum Cornuti, of which the club-shaped filaments (and sepals?) and seed-vessels are a bright purple and quite showy. 

To speak from recollection, the birds which I have chanced to hear of late are (running over the whole list): — 

• The squealing notes of young hawks. 
• Occasionally a red-Wing's tchuck. 
• The link of bobolinks. 
• The chickadee and phebe note of the chickadees, five or six together occasionally. 
• The fine note of the cherry-bird, pretty often. 
• The twitter of the kingbird, pretty often. 
• The wood pewee, with its young, peculiarly common and prominent. 
• Only the peep of the robin. 
• The pine warbler, occasionally. 
• The bay-wing, pretty often. 
• The seringo, pretty often. 
• The song sparrow, often. 
• The field sparrow, often. 
• The goldfinch, a prevailing note, with variations into a fine song. 
• The ground-robin, once of late. 
• The flicker‘s cackle, once of late. 
• The nighthawk, as usual. 

I have not been out early nor late, nor attended particularly to the birds. The more characteristic notes would appear to be the wood pewee’s and the goldfinch’s, with the squeal of young hawks. These might be called the pewee-days.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 14, 1858

The Canada thistle down is now begun to fly, and I see the goldfinch upon it.  See August 12, 1854 (“I see goldfinches nowadays on the lanceolate thistles, apparently after the seeds.”); August 15, 1854 (“On the top of the Hill I see the goldfinch eating the seeds of the Canada thistle. I rarely approach a bed of them or other thistles nowadays but I hear the cool twitter of the goldfinch about it.“);  August 28, 1856 ("A goldfinch twitters away from every thistle now, and soon returns to it when I am past. I see the ground strewn with the thistle-down they have scattered on every side."); September 4, 1860 (“The goldfinch is very busy pulling the thistle to pieces.”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau the Goldfinch and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Thistles

These are the wildest and richest gardens that we have

August 5. 

I can tell the extent to which a man has heard music by the faith he retains in the trivial and mean, even by the importance he attaches to what is called the actual world. Any memorable strains will have unsettled so low a faith and substituted a higher. Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted. 

Hearing that one with whom I was acquainted had committed suicide, I said I did not know when I had planted the seed of that fact that I should hear of it. 

P. M. —To C. Miles's blueberry swamp. 

There is a pond-hole there perfectly covered with the leaves of the floating-heart and whiter than ever with its small white flowers, as if a slight large-flaked snow had fallen on it. The ground rises gently on every side, and first by the edge grow a few gratiolas, then the Lysimachia stricta, with a few blossoms left, then, a rod or two distant, in the higher rows of this natural coliseum, the red-panicled racemes of the hardhack rise. 

That is a glorious swamp of Miles's, — the more open parts, where the dwarf andromeda prevails. Now, perhaps, an olivaceous green is the tint, not at all reddish, the lambkill and the bluish or glaucous rhodora and the pyrus intermixed making an extensive rich moss like bed, in which you sink three feet to a dry bottom of moss or dead twigs, or, if peaty ground, it is covered with cup lichens; surrounded all by wild-looking woods, with the wild white spruce advancing into it and the pitch pine here and there, and high blueberry and tall pyrus and holly and other bushes under their countenance and protection. 

These are the wildest and richest gardens that we have. Such a depth of verdure into which you sink. They were never cultivated by any. 

Descending wooded hills, you come suddenly to this beautifully level pasture, comparatively open, with a close border of high blueberry bushes. You cannot believe that this can possibly abut on any cultivated field. Some wood or pasture, at least, must intervene. Here is a place, at last, which no woodchopper nor farmer frequents and to which no cows stray, perfectly wild, where the bittern and the hawk are undisturbed. 

The men, women, and children who perchance come hither blueberrying in their season get more than the value of the berries in the influences of the scene. 

How wildly rich and beautiful hang on high there the blueberries which might so easily be poisonous, the cool blue clusters high in air. Choke-berries, fair to the eye but scarcely palatable, hang far above your head, weighing down the bushes. The wild holly berry, perhaps the most beautiful of berries, hanging by slender threads from its more light and open bushes and more delicate leaves. The bushes, eight feet high, are black with choke-berries, and there are no wild animals to eat them. 

I cannot sufficiently admire the rhexia, one of the highest-colored purple flowers, but difficult to bring home in its perfection, with its fugacious petals. 

The Hieracium scabrum is just opening. 

Large spotted polygonum by the river, with white flowers on a slender spike. 

Lechea racemulosa (?) of Bigelow, — not in Gray, — a fine, almost leafless, bushy, sometimes reddish, low plant in dry fields.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 5, 1852

The men, women, and children who perchance come hither blueberrying in their season get more than the value of the berries in the influences of the scene. See June 26, 1853 ("Many of my fellow-citizens might go fishing a thousand times, perchance, before the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure, -- before they began to angle for the pond itself.”); August 30, 1856 (“It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels”);  December 28, 1856 (“getting what they went for, though they may not be aware of it, i. e. a wilder experience than the town affords.”); July 30, 1860 (“Am glad to press my way through Miles's Swamp.”)

Choke-berries, fair to the eye but scarcely palatable. See August 5, 1856 (“”Choke-cherries . . .begin to be ripe, though still red. They are scarcely edible, but their beauty atones for it. See those handsome racemes of ten or twelve cherries each, dark glossy red, semi- transparent. You love them not the less because they are not quite palatable”)

I cannot sufficiently admire the rhexia, one of the highest-colored purple flowers. See August 1, 1856 (“They make a splendid show, these brilliant rose-colored patches, especially in the neighborhood of Copan. It is about the richest color to be seen now. Yet few ever see them in this perfection”); August 27, 1856 (“The rhexia greets me in bright patches on meadow banks.”); August 28, 1859 ("The rhexia in Ebby Hubbard's field is considerably past prime, and it is its reddish chalices which show most at a distance now. I should have looked ten days ago. Still it is handsome with its large yellow anthers against clear purple petals. It grows there in large patches with hardhack."):  October 2, 1856 (“The scarlet leaves and stem of the rhexia, some time out of flower, makes almost as bright a patch in the meadow now as the flowers did,”)

August 5. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August 5

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