Distant elms seen from the hilltops.

October 12. 

October 12, 2017

October 12, 2017

P. M. – To Annursnack. 

The eighth fine day, warmer than the last two. 

I find one or two house-leek blossoms even yet fresh, and all the rest crisp. 

The fringed gentian by the brook opposite is in its prime, and also along the north edge of the Painted-Cup Meadows. 

The stems of the blue vervain, whose flowers and leaves are withered and brown, are nearly as handsome and clear a purple as those of the poke have been, from top to bottom. 

Looking from the Hill. 

October 12, 2017

The autumnal tints generally are much duller now than three or four days ago, or before the last two frosts. I am not sure but the yellow now prevails over the red in the landscape, and even over the green. The general color of the landscape from this hill is now russet, i.e. red, yellow, etc., mingled. The maple fires are generally about burnt out. Yet I can see very plainly the colors of the sproutland, chiefly oak, on Fair Haven Hill, about four miles distant, and also yellows on Mt. Misery, five miles off, also on Pine Hill, and even on Mt. Tabor, indistinctly. 

Eastward, I distinguish red or yellow in the woods as far as the horizon, and it is most distant on that side, — six miles, at least. - The huckleberries on Nagog Hill are very red. The smaller and tenderer weeds were in their prime, me thinks, some weeks ago. They have felt the frosts earlier than the maples and other trees, and are now withered generally. 

I see a very distant mountain house in a direction a little to the west of Carlisle, and two elms in the horizon on the right of it. Measuring carefully on the map of the county, I think it must be the Baptist Church in North Tewksbury, within a small fraction of fourteen miles from me. I think that this is the greatest distance at which I have seen an elm without a glass. There is another elm in the horizon nearly north, but not so far. It looks very much larger than it is. Perhaps it looms a little. 

The elm, I think, can be distinguished further than any other tree, and, however faintly seen in the distant horizon, its little dark dome, which the thickness of my nail will conceal, just rising above the line of the horizon, apparently not so big as a prominence on an orange, it suggests ever the same quiet rural and domestic life passing beneath it. 

It is the vignette to an unseen idyllic poem. Though that little prominence appears so dark there, I know that it is now a rich brownish-yellow canopy of rustling leaves, whose harvest-time is already come, sending down its showers from time to time. 

Homestead telegraphs to homestead through these distant elms seen from the hilltops. I fancy I hear the house-dog’s bark and lowing of the cows asking admittance to their yard beneath it. The tea-table is spread; the master and mistress and the hired men now have just sat down in their shirt-sleeves. 

Some are so lifted up in the horizon that they seem like portions of the earth detached and floating off by themselves into space. Their dark masses against the sky can be seen as far, at least, as a white spire, though it may be taller. Some of these trees, seen through a glass, are not so large.

. . . 

This was what those scamps did in California. The trees were so grand and venerable that they could not afford to let them grow a hair's breadth bigger, or live a moment longer to reproach themselves. They were so big that they resolved they should never be bigger. They were so venerable that they cut them right down. It was not for the sake of the wood; it was only because they were very grand and venerable.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 12, 1857

The fringed gentian by the brook opposite is in its prime, and also along the north edge of the Painted-Cup Meadows. See October 2, 1857 ("The fringed gentian at Hubbard's Close has been out some time, and most of it already withered. ") October 19, 1852 ("It is too remarkable a flower not to be sought out and admired each year, however rare. It is one of the errands of the walker, as well as of the bees, for it yields him a more celestial nectar still. It is a very singular and agreeable surprise to come upon this conspicuous and handsome and withal blue flower at this season, when flowers have passed out of our minds and memories; the latest of all to begin to bloom ..."). See also A Book of the Seasons by Henry Thoreau, The Fringed Gentian

Botanizing the Assabet near House-leek Rock

August 5. 

August 5, 2016

A. M. — On river. 

Mikania a day or two. Polygonum amphibium in water, slightly hairy, well out. Polygonum orientate, how long? 

P. M. — To house-leek via Assabet Bath. 

Trichostema, maybe several days in some places. Nightshade berries, how long ? 

When I crossed the new stone bridge a great water adder lay on it, full five feet long and nearly as big round as my arm. It turned and ran along, with a coarse grating rustle, to the end of the railing, and then dropped deliberately head foremost from the last abutment, full nine feet, to the gravelly ground, amid the osiers, making a loud sound when he struck; at once took to the water, and showed his head amid the pads. I also saw another similar one at House-leek Rock. 

Centaurea well out, how long? 

Aster dumosus, apparently a day or two, with its large conspicuous flower-buds at the end of the branchlets and linear-spatulate involucral scales. 

At haunted house site, as at Bittern Cliff grain-field, I see much apparent Euphorbia maculata semi-erect in the grass. Eupatorium pubescens, by Pear Path. 

I now find an abundance of the clustered rubus ripe. It is not large and has a clammy, subacid taste, but some are very sweet. Clusters generally drooping.

Hypericum mutilum, dwart St. John’s-wort,
August 2, 2019

Now, at 4 p. m. this dog-day, cloudy weather, the Hypericum mutilum is abundantly open in the Solidago lanceolata path, sometimes fifteen inches high, while the Canadense and angulatum are shut.

S. lanceolata, some days. S. nemoralis, two or three days. 

Choke-cherries near House-leek Rock 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. Along fences or hedgerows. 

Sempervivium
(houseleek ~ hen & chickens)

To my surprise one house-leek (apparently Sempervivum tectorum of Dewey) has shot up twenty-two inches high and is apparently nearly out, though the petals are erect, not spread. The stem is clothed with the same thick leaves, only smaller and lessening up ward and forming a column about one and a half inches in diameter (with the leaves). The top is a broad raceme (?), about eight inches wide and two thirds as long, of eleven long, spreading, and recurved branches, lined with flowers on the upper side only. These consist of twelve to thirteen lanceolate calyx-segments and as many still longer dull-purple petals and about twenty pistils within and short stamens around them. It is a strange but rather stately cactus-like plant. 

The children call the pretty clusters of radical leaves hen and chickens. In this case the radical leaves are withered, and a fusiform root sustains the flower. This one is not on the bare rock, but lower amid the huckleberry bushes. 

At the Assabet stone bridge, apparently freshly in flower, — though it may have been out nearly as long as the androscemifolium, — apparently the Apocynum cannabinum var. hypericifolium (?). The tallest is four feet high. The flowers very small (hardly more than an eighth of an inch in diameter), the segments of the corolla not revolute but nearly erect. There are twenty to thirty flowers at end of a branch. The divisions of the calyx are longer than in the common, long ovate. Yet it differs from Gray's hypericifolium in having flowers rose-streaked within like the common, the cymes not shorter than the leaves, and the tube of the corolla rather longer than the divisions of the calyx. The leaves are hardly more downy or heart-shaped below than the common. Hypericifolium is a separate species in Pursh and some others. And the branches are less ascending than the common, making an angle of about 62° with the stem (the four lower), while three of the lower of a common one make an angle of 44°.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 5, 1856

Now, at 4 p. m . . .The Hypericum mutilum is abundantly open . .. sometimes fifteen inches high, while the Canadense and angulatum are shut.  See August 12, 1856 ("11 a. m. . . .  The Hypericum mutilum is well out at this hour.");   August 17, 1856 ("Hypericum Canadense well out at 2 p. m"); .August 19, 1856 ("I see Hypericum Canadense and mutilum abundantly open at 3 p. m");  August 27, 1856  ("Hypericum Canadense and mutilum now pretty generally open at 4 P.M., thus late in the season, it being more moist and cooler."). See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, St. Johns-wort (Hypericum)

A great water adder . . .full five feet long and nearly as big round as my arm . . . See July 23, 1856("water adder killed on the 15th and left hanging on a twig"); July 15, 1856 ("It was about three feet long, but large round in proportion, with about one hundred and forty abdominal plates and a long, slender tail. . . .").

Choke-cherries. . .scarcely edible, but their beauty atones for it. See September 3, 1853 ("Now is the season for those comparatively rare but beautiful wild berries which are not food for man. . . ., it is strange that we do not devote an hour in the year to gathering those which are beautiful to the eye. It behooves me to go a-berrying in this sense once a year at least. . . .”)

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