Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation

October 15. 

P. M. — To Botrychium Swamp. 

A cold northwest wind. 

I see some black oak acorns on the trees still and in some places at least half the shrub oak acorns. The last are handsomer now that they have turned so much darker. 

I go along the east edge of Poplar Hill. This very cold and windy day, now that so many leaves have fallen, I begin to notice the silveriness of willows blown up in the wind, — a November sight. 

The hickories at Poplar Hill (and elsewhere, as far as I perceive) are all past prime now and most half-withered or bare, very different from last year. In warmer autumns, if I remember rightly, they last several weeks later than this in some localities, one succeeding an other with its splendid glow, an evidence of the genial-ness of the season. In cool and moist places, in a genial year, some are preserved green after others have changed, and by their later change and glow they prolong the season of autumnal tints very agreeably. 

This is a cold fall. 

The larches in A. Heywood's swamp, though a yellower green than the white pines, are not yet sharply distinguished from them by their form, as they will be. 

The oaks generally are very fair now at a distance. 

Standing on this hilltop this cold and blustering day, when dark and slate-colored clouds are flitting over the sky, the beauty of the scenery is enhanced by the contrast in the short intervals of sunshine. The whole surface of the country, both young woodlands and full- grown forests, whether they clothe sides of hills or their lit tops are seen over a ridge, — the birch phalanxes and huckleberry flocks [?], etc., — even to the horizon, is like a rug of many brilliant colors, with the towns in the more open and tawny spaces. 

The beauty or effect of the scene is enhanced, if, standing here, you see far in the horizon the red regiments of oaks alternately lit up by the sun and dimmed by the passing shadow of a cloud. As the shadows of these cold clouds flit across the landscape, the red banners of distant forests are lit up or disappear like the colors of a thousand regiments. 

Pratt says that he planted a ground-nut in his garden in good soil, but they grew no bigger than a bean. He did not know but it would take more than one year, even if he planted the tuber. 

The yellow birches are generally bare. 

Juniperus repens leaves have fallen, perhaps with red cedar.

The ash trees I see to-day are quite bare, apparently several or some days. 

The little leaves of the mitchella, with a whitish midrib and veins, lying generally flat on the mossy ground, perhaps about the base of a tree, with their bright-scarlet twin berries sprinkled over them, may properly be said to checker the ground. Now, particularly, they are noticed amid the fallen leaves. 

The bayberry leaves have fallen, and all the berries are gone. I suppose the birds have eaten them. 

Mountain laurel leaves are fallen. 

The yellow birches are bare, revealing the fruit (the short, thick brown catkins) now ripe and ready to scale off. How full the trees are! About as thick as the leaves were. 

The fever-bush is for the most part bare, and I see no berries. 

Rhus radicans too is bare. 

The maidenhair is for the most part withered. It is not evergreen, then. 

The mountain sumach which I see is bare, and some smooth ditto. 

That appears to be Aspidium cristatum which I find evergreen in swamps, but no fertile fronds now. It is broader and denser than the plate of the English one. It cannot be a described variety of spinulosum, for it is only once pinnate. 

I think I see myrtle-birds on white birches, and that they are the birds I saw on them a week or two ago, — apparently, or probably, after the birch lice. 

See a Fringilla hyemalis. 

The chickadees sing as if at home. They are not travelling singers hired by any Barnum. Theirs is an honest, homely, heartfelt melody. Shall not the voice of man express as much content as the note of a bird?  

Botrychium Lunaria has shed pollen, how long? 

The little larches in midst of Gowing's Swamp already changed, before others elsewhere. 

Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation. We hear of cow-commons and ministerial lots, but we want men- commons and lay lots, inalienable forever. Let us keep the New World new, preserve all the advantages of living in the country. There is meadow and pasture and wood-lot for the town's poor. Why not a forest and huckleberry-field for the town's rich? All Walden Wood might have been preserved for our park forever, with Walden in its midst, and the Easterbrooks Country, an unoccupied area of some four square miles, might have been our huckleberry-field. 

If any owners of these tracts are about to leave the world without natural heirs who need or deserve to be specially remembered, they will do wisely to abandon their possession to all, and not will them to some individual who perhaps has enough already. As some give to Harvard College or another institution, why might not another give a forest or huckleberry-field to Concord? A town is an institution which deserves to be remembered. 

We boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses? We are all schoolmasters, and our school-house is the universe. To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our fine schoolhouse standing in a cow-yard at last. 

The Kalmia glauca, now falling, is quite a brilliant scarlet. In this case you have the fresh liquid-green leaves of this year above the brilliant scarlet ones of last year. Most other evergreens exhibit only a contrast of green with yellow or yellowish. 

The balm-of-Gileads by Mrs. Ripley's bare. Those beyond Barrett's Bridge green and full of leaves. 

The spruce leaves have fallen, — how long? — and its seeds are falling. Larch seeds falling. 

Celtis berries ripe, how long? 

Solanum Dulcamara berries linger over water but mostly are shrivelled. 

Canoe birch is now at least half fallen or more, apparently with the small white; looks in color like an aspen.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 15, 1859

The hickories at Poplar Hill (and elsewhere, as far as I perceive) are all past prime now and most half-withered or bare, very different from last year. See October 15, 1858 ("Small hickories are the clearest and most delicate yellow in the shade of the woods.") See also October 8, 1856 ("The hickory leaves are among the handsomest now, varying from green through yellow, more or less broadly green-striped on the principal veins, to pure yellow, at first almost lemon-yellow, at last browner and crisped. This mingling of yellow and green on the same leaf, the green next the veins where the life is most persistent, is very pleasing."); October 22, 1857 ("The hickory leaves, now after they have fallen, are often if not oftenest a dark rich yellow, very conspicuous upon the brown leaves of the forest floor, seeming to have more life in them than those leaves which are brown."); October 4, 1858 ("The hickories on the northwest side of this hill are in the prime of their color, of a rich orange; some intimately mixed with green, handsomer than those that are wholly changed.")

The chickadees sing as if at home. Theirs is an honest, homely, heartfelt melody. See note to October 15, 1856 ("The chickadees are hopping near on the hemlock above. They resume their winter ways before the winter comes. A great part of the hemlock seeds fallen.")

The balm-of-Gileads by Mrs. Ripley's bare. Those beyond Barrett's Bridge green and full of leaves. See October 15,1858 ("The balm-of-Gileads are half bare. ")

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.")

That swamp is a singularly wild place

September 6.

 6 A. M. — To Merrick’s shore. 

Hear a warbling vireo, sounding very rare and rather imperfect. I think this is what I have mistaken for the young purple finch note. 

Also hear apparently a yellow-throated vireo. 

That fine spreading-panicled dark-purple grass, now rising all along the river near the waterside, is Panicum agrostoides; in prime. That finer and narrower-panicled, now out of bloom, is red-top, or else white bent; with the former.

River risen still higher, and weeds covered.

 P. M. — To Ledum Swamp. 

Going over Clamshell Plain, I see a very large flock of a hundred or more cowbirds about some cows. They whirl away on some alarm and alight on a neighboring rail fence, close together on the rails, one above another. Then away they whirl and settle on a white oak top near me. Half of them are evidently quite young birds, having glossy black breasts with a drab line down middle. The heads of all are light-colored, perhaps a slaty drab, and some apparently wholly of this color. 

On the hillside above Clamshell Ditch, grows that handsome grass of Sept. 1st (vide September 4th), evidently Sorghum nutans (Andropogon of Bigelow), chestnut beard grass, Indian grass, wood grass. It is much larger than what I saw before; is still abundantly in flower; four and a half feet high; leaves, perhaps arundinaceous, eighteen inches long; panicle, nine inches long. It is a very handsome, wild-looking grass, well enough called Indian grass, and I should have named it with the other andropogons, August 26th. 

With its narrow one-sided panicle of bright purple and yellow (I include the yellow anthers) often waving [?], raised high above the leaves, it looks like a narrow banner. It is of more vivid colors than its congeners, and might well have caught an Indian’s eye. These bright banners are now advanced on the distant hillsides, not in large armies, but scattered troops or single file, like the red men themselves. They stand thus fair and bright in our midst, as it were representative of the race which they are named after, but for the most part unobserved. It stands like an Indian chief taking a last look at his beloved hunting grounds. 

The expression of this grass haunted me for a week after I first passed and noticed it, like the glance of an eye. 

Aster patens past prime at Money-Diggers’ Hill. Polygonum tenue, how long? 

Solidago nemoralis is apparently in prime on Lupine Hill; some of it past. It is swarming with butterflies, — yellow, small red, and large, — fluttering over it. 

At Ledum Pool edge, I find the Woodwardia Virginica fern, its fruit mostly turned deep reddish-brown. It appears to grow only close to the pool, part of the fruit forming two lines parallel with the midrib. A third part of the nesaea there is turned scarlet. Kalmia glauca is again in bloom. The hairy huckleberries are rather scarce and soft. They are in sipid and leave a hairy skin in the month. 

That swamp is a singularly wild place, without any natural outlet. I hear of a marsh hawk’s nest there this summer. I see great spiders there of an uncommon kind, whose webs —the main supporting line — stretch six feet in the clear from spruce to spruce, as high as my head, with a dense web of the usual form some fifteen inches in diameter beneath. 

Stopped and talked with W. W. and ate a watermelon with him on the grass. Once his senseless democracy appeared. He spoke with an ignorant pride of Buchanan’s telegraphic message, of which most of us were ashamed; said he supposed he had more learning than Victoria! But the less said about them the better. 

Seeing a stake-driver flying up the river, he observed that when you saw that bird flying about it was a never failing sign of a storm approaching. How many of these sayings like this arise not from a close and frequent observation of the phenomena of nature, but from a distant and casual one!

I find very common in prime by roadsides, in dry ground, etc., Vilfa vaginaeflora, rush grass, hidden-flowered vilfa; also by Corner roadside, beyond brooks, Panicum filiforme with and like P. sanguinale, apparently in prime, and with last fills the old mullein-field in front of Bear Garden Hill. 

Is that narrowly-linear-leaved potamogeton, all immersed and now forming dense beds in the Assabet, a distinct species, or only the immersed leaves of one? Vide pressed. 

A year ago last spring I gave to Edith Emerson and to Sophia some clasping hound’s-tongue seeds, it being very rare hereabouts, wishing to spread it. Now and for a long time it has been a pest in the garden (it does not bloom till the second year), by its seeds clinging to our clothes. Mrs. E. has carried it to Boston thus, and I have spent twenty minutes at once in clearing myself of it. So it is in a fair way to be dispersed.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 6, 1858


Hear a warbling vireo, sounding very rare and rather imperfect. I think this is what I have mistaken for the young purple finch note. See note to  September 6, 1859 ("I hear occasionally a half-warbled strain from a warbling vireo in the elm-tops, as I go down the street nowadays"); also  September 3, 1858 ("I hear a faint warble from time to time from some young or old birds, from my window these days. Is it the purple finch again, — young birds practicing?"); August 25, 1858 ("The note of a warbling vireo sounds very rare")


Now and for a long time it has been a pest in the garden. See June 5, 1858 ("Clasping hound's-tongue in garden.")

A song sparrow's nest in a little spruce

June 13. 

Louring all day. 

P. M. – To Ledum Swamp. 

Lambkill, maybe one day. 

Strawberries. 

In the great apple tree front of the Miles house I hear young pigeon woodpeckers. 

The ledum is apparently past prime. 

The Kalmia glauca and the Andromeda Polifolia are done, the kalmia just done. 

The ledum has grown three or four inches (as well as the andromeda). It has a rather agreeable fragrance, between turpentine and strawberries. It is rather strong and penetrating, and some times reminds me of the peculiar scent of a bee. The young leaves, bruised and touched to the nose, even make it smart.

It is the young and expanding ledum leaves which are so fragrant. There is a yellow fungus common on its leaves, and a black one on the andromeda. 

The Vaccinium Oxycoccus grows here and is abundantly out; some days certainly. 

I hear and see the parti-colored warbler, blue yellow-backed, here on the spruce trees. It probably breeds here. 

Also, within three feet of the edge of the pond-hole, where I can hardly stand in india-rubber shoes without the water flowing over them, a large ant-hill swarming with ants, – though not on the surface because of the mizzling rain. 

One of the prevailing front-rank plants here, standing in the sphagnum and water, is the elodea. 

I see a song sparrow's nest here in a little spruce just by the mouth of the ditch. It rests on the thick branches fifteen inches from the ground, firmly made of coarse sedge without, lined with finer, and then a little hair, small within, — a very thick, firm, and portable nest, an inverted cone; — four eggs. They build them in a peculiar manner in these sphagnous swamps, elevated apparently on account of water and of different materials. Some of the eggs have quite a blue ground. 

Go to Conantum end. 

The Rubus frondosus will not bloom apparently for a day or two, though the villosus is apparently in prime there. 

I hear the peculiar notes of young bluebirds that have flown. 

Arenaria lateriflora, how long? 

The Scheuchzeria palustris, now in flower and going to seed, grows at Ledum Pool, as at Gowing's Swamp. 

See now in meadows, for the most part going to seed, Carex scoparia, with its string of oval beads; and C. lupulina, with its inflated perigynia; also what I take to be C. stipata, with a dense, coarse, somewhat sharp triangular mass of spikelets; also C. stellulata, with a string of little star-like burs. The delicate, pendulous, slender-peduncled C. debilis.

Catbirds hatched.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 13, 1858

Lambkill, maybe one day. See June 9, 1855 ("Lambkill out."); June 10, 1855 ("The Kalmia glauca is done before the lambkill is begun here"); June 13, 1854 ("How beautiful the solid cylinders of the lamb-kill now just before sunset, — small ten-sided, rosy-crimson basins, about two inches above the recurved, drooping dry capsules of last year");


In the great apple tree front of the Miles house I hear young pigeon woodpeckers. See May 17, 1858 ("Measured the large apple tree in front of the Charles Miles house. It is nine feet and ten inches in circumference ");  June 13, 1855 ("C. finds a pigeon woodpecker’s nest in an apple tree, five of those pearly eggs, about six feet from the ground."); June 10, 1856 ("In a hollow apple tree, hole eighteen inches deep, young pigeon woodpeckers, large and well feathered. . . .")

A song sparrow's nest here in a little spruce just by the mouth of the ditch. See  April 30, 1858 ("I find a Fringilla melodia nest with five eggs. Part, at least, must have been laid before the snow of the 27th, but it is perfectly sheltered under the shelving turf and grass on the brink of a ditch."); June 14, 1855 ("A song sparrow’s nest in ditch bank under Clamshell, of coarse grass lined with fine, and five eggs nearly hatched and a peculiar dark end to them."); July 12, 1857 ("A song sparrow's nest in a small clump of alder, two feet from ground! Three or four eggs.")

See Carex now in meadows. See June 11, 1855 ("Carex cephalophora (?) on Heywood’s Peak. That fine, dry, wiry wild grass in hollows in woods and sprout-lands, never mown, is apparently the C. Pennsylvanica, or early sedge. ")

I hear the peculiar notes of young bluebirds that have flown. See. June 13, 1852 (" I hear the feeble plaintive note of young bluebirds, just trying their wings or getting used to them")

June 13. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, June 13

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

The floating surface of Gowing's Swamp

February  1

Measured Gowing's Swamp two and a half rods northeast of the middle of the hole, i. e. in the andromeda and sphagnum near its edge, where I stand in the summer; also five rods northeast of the middle of the open hole, or in the midst of the andromeda. 

In both these places the pole went hard at first, but broke through a crust of roots and sphagnum at about three feet beneath the surface, and I then easily pushed the pole down just twenty feet. This being a small pole, I could not push it any further holding it by the small end; it bent then. With a longer and stiffer pole I could probably have fathomed thirty feet. 

It seems, then, that there is, over this andromeda swamp, a crust about three feet thick, of sphagnum, andromeda (calyculata and Polifolia), and Kalmia glauca, etc., beneath which there is almost clear water, and, under that, an exceedingly thin mud.

There can be no soil above that mud, and yet there were three or four larch trees three feet high or more between these holes, or over exactly the same water, and there were small spruces near by. For aught that appears, the swamp is as deep under the andromeda as in the middle. 

The two andromedas and the Kalmia glauca may be more truly said to grow in water than in soil there. When the surface of a swamp shakes for a rod around you, you may conclude that it is a network of roots two or three feet thick resting on water or a very thin mud. The surface of that swamp, composed in great part of sphagnum, is really floating. 

It evidently begins with sphagnum, which floats on the surface of clear water, and, accumulating, at length affords a basis for that large-seeded sedge (?), andromedas, etc. The filling up of a swamp, then, in this case at least, is not the result of a deposition of vegetable matter washed into it, settling to the bottom and leaving the surface clear, so filling it up from the bottom to the top; but the vegetation first extends itself over it as a film, which gradually thickens till it supports shrubs and completely conceals the water, and the under part of this crust drops to the bottom, so that it is filled up first at the top and the bottom, and the middle part is the last to be reclaimed from the water. 

Perhaps this swamp is in the process of becoming peat. 

This swamp has been partially drained by a ditch. 

I fathomed also two rods within the edge of the blue berry bushes, in the path, but I could not force a pole down more than eight feet five inches; so it is much more solid there, and the blueberry bushes require a firmer soil than the water andromeda. 

This is a regular quag, or shaking surface, and in this way, evidently, floating islands are formed. I am not sure but that meadow, with all its bushes in it, would float a man-of-war.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 1, 1858

There is a crust about three feet thick of sphagnum, andromeda  and Kalmia glauca, beneath which there is almost clear water. See January 30, 1858 ("To my surprise, I found clear water under this crust of sphagnum"); February 3, 1860 ("I accurately pace the swamp in two directions and find it to be shaped thus"): —

August 23, 1854 ("There is . . . an abrupt edge next the water, this on a dense bed of quaking sphagnum, in which I sink eighteen inches in water, upheld by its matted roots, where I fear to break through”).

This swamp has been partially drained by a ditch. See November 23, 1857 ("This swamp appears not to have had any natural outlet, though an artificial one has been dug. The same is perhaps the case with the C. Miles Swamp. And is it so with Beck Stow's These three are the only places where I have found the Andromeda Polifolia. The Kalmia glauca in Gowing's, C. Miles's, and Holden's swamps. The latter has no outlet of any kind.")

The shaking surface

composed in part of sphagnum

is really floating.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The floating surface of Gowing's Swamp

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

I called them “a moccasin-print.”

November 24.

P. M. — To Andromeda Ponds. 

Cold Thanksgiving weather again, the pools freezing. 

The first or northernmost Andromeda Pond, considering the main portion north of the isthmus, is surrounded, except at the isthmus, by dry hills, twenty-five to forty feet high perhaps, covered with young oaks. Its interior, or far the greater part of the whole, is filled with a uniformly dense and level bed of brown andromeda, in which I detect nothing else from the hills except some white cotton-grass waving over it. 

Between the andromeda and the hills, there is a border, from one to two rods wide, of coarse and now yellowish sedge all the way round, except, of course, at the isthmus, and part of the way, just within the edge of the andromeda, mixed with it, a second inner border of gray bushes, chiefly, I suppose, blueberry, etc., with a few small birches, maples, pines, etc. As I remember, it lies somewhat thus: — 


The southerly continuation of this and the other two ponds are much more wet, — have open water and less andromeda, much more sedge in proportion. Why does the sedge grow thus around the andromeda in a regular ring next the hill? I think it is because it is more wet there. It would be open water there all the way round if it were not for the sedge, but I could walk through the andromeda if I could get to it. Why should it be more wet there? I do not know, unless the springs are at the base of the hills. The sedge can evidently bear more water than the andromeda, and the andromeda than the blueberry bushes, etc. Perhaps the sedge prepares the ground for the andromeda some times, furnishing a base and support for it. I see the latter, as it were, making its way out thinly into the sedge here and there. Perhaps the sedge once covered the whole or greater part. 

The sphagnum, apparently, having some slight solid core to grow around, like an andromeda or blueberry stem, builds itself up a foot or more and may make a soil for noble plants thus. On the dry hillside next the water, there is another belt, i.e. of lambkill, pretty dense, running apparently quite round the pond a rod or more in width. Probably it occurs very far off, or high, thinly, but here it is a thick growth and has relation to the swamp. 

According to this, then, you have clear open water, but shallow; then, in course of time, a shallow lake with much sedge standing in it; then, after a while, a dense andromeda bed with blueberry bushes and perhaps a wet border of sedge (as here at present); and finally, a maple swamp. Spruce and larch appear to flourish very well at the same time with the andromeda. 

Looking toward the sun, the andromeda in front of me is a very warm red brown and on either side of me, a pale silvery brown; looking from the sun, a uniform pale brown. 

Perhaps the Andromeda Polifolia and Kalmia glauca prefer stagnant water. 

These andromeda swamps charmed me more than twenty years ago, — I knew not why, — and I called them “a moccasin-print.” 

The Fringilla hyemalis appear to be flitting about in a more lively manner on account of the cold. They go off with a twitter from the low weeds and bushes. Nowadays birds are so rare I am wont to mistake them at first for a leaf or mote blown off from the trees or bushes. 

Some poets have said that writing poetry was for youths only, but not so. In that fervid and excitable season we only get the impulse which is to carry us onward in our future career. Ideals are then exhibited to us distinctly which all our lives after we may aim at but not attain. The mere vision is little compared with the steady corresponding‘ endeavor thitherward. It would be vain for us to be looking ever into promised lands toward which in the meanwhile we were not steadily and earnestly travelling, whether the way led over a mountain-top or through a dusky valley. In youth, when we are most elastic and there is a spring to us, we merely receive an impulse in the proper direction. To suppose that this is equivalent to having travelled the road, or obeyed the impulse faithfully throughout a lifetime, is absurd. We are shown fair scenes in order that we may be tempted to inhabit them, and not simply tell what we have seen.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 24, 1857

It would be open water there all the way round if it were not for the sedge, but I could walk through the andromeda if I could get to it. See January 24, 1855 (“But I observe that the andromeda does not quite fill the pond, but there is an open wet place, with coarse grass, swamp loosestrife, and some button-bush, about a rod wide, surrounding the whole.”)

Looking toward the sun, the andromeda in front of me is a very warm red brown and on either side of me, a pale silvery brown; looking from the sun, a uniform pale brown. See November 24, 1852 ("At this time last year the andromeda in the Ministerial Swamp was red . Now it has not turned from brown."): See also  April 19 1852  ("That phenomenon of the andromeda seen against the sun cheers me exceedingly. . . . These little leaves are the stained windows in the cathedral of my world..”); January 24, 1855 ("Those Andromeda Ponds are very attractive spots to me. They are filled with a dense bed of the small andromeda, a dull red mass as commonly seen, brighter or translucent red looking toward the sun, grayish looking from it...); January 10,1855 ("As I go toward the sun now at 4 P. M., the translucent leaves are lit up by it and appear of a soft red, more or less brown, like cathedral windows, but when I look back from the sun, the whole bed appears merely gray and brown or less reddish.”). See also note to May 5, 1855 (“I can neither get the red cathedral-window light looking toward the now westering sun in a most favorable position, nor the gray colors in the other direction, but it is all a grayish green.”); November 17, 1859 (“How fair and memorable this prospect when you stand opposite to the sun, these November afternoons, and look over the red andromeda swamp”) Also The Andromeda Phenomenon

The Fringilla hyemalis . . .go off with a twitter from the low weeds and bushes.See November 4, 1855 ("See some large flocks of F. hyemalis, which fly with a clear but faint chinking chirp, and from time to time you hear quite a strain, half warbled, from them. They rise in a body from the ground and fly to the trees as you approach.”)

Some poets have said that writing poetry was for youths only, but not so. . . .In youth, when we are most elastic and there is a spring to us, we merely receive an impulse in the proper direction. . . .See January 17, 1852 ("It appears to me that at a very early age the mind of man, perhaps at the same time with his body, ceases to be elastic. His intellectual power becomes some thing defined and limited. He does not think expansively, as he would stretch himself in his growing days. What was flexible sap hardens into heart-wood, and there is no further change. I. . .  It is the transition from poetry to prose. The young man can run and leap; he has not learned exactly how far, he knows no limits. The grown man does not exceed his daily labor. He has no strength to waste.”)

A walk through Gowing’s Swamp.

November 23. 

Gowing’s Swamp
August 23, 1854

Monday. P. M. — To Gowing's Swamp. 

Garfield, who was working in what was Moore's Swamp, tells me that he sometimes digs up frogs in the winter, when ditching in springy places, one at a time. He is very much troubled by the short-tailed meadow mouse in that meadow. They live under the stumps, and gnaw his potatoes in the fall. He thought that his little dog, a terrier, had killed a bushel of them the past year. 

At the back of Gowing's hillside, just west of his swamp, in the midst of shrub oaks and other dry up land trees, the ground slopes regularly on all sides to a deep round hollow, perhaps fifteen feet lower than the lowest side and thirty feet in diameter at the bottom. The bottom is rather wet and covered with sphagnum, and many stiff and dead-looking button-bushes stand in it, while all around a dense high hedge of high blueberry curves over it. So sudden a change there will be in the vegetation with a change of soil. Many such a dimple with its peculiar vegetations have I seen in a dry wood-lot. The Vaccinium corymbosum and panicled andromeda in a dense hedge, in a circular or oval or other curved form, surrounding and slanting over it so as almost to conceal it; and in the same manner the blueberry, etc., will grow around and overhang the largest ponds. 

Walked through Gowing's Swamp from west to east. You may say it is divided into three parts, – first, the thin woody; second, the coarse bushy or gray; and third, the fine bushy or brown. 

First: The trees are larch, white birch, red maple, spruce, white pine, etc. 

Second: The coarse bushy part, or blueberry thicket, consists of high blueberry, panicled andromeda, Amelanchier Canadensis var. oblongifolia, swamp-pink, choke-berry, Viburnum nudum, rhodora, (and probably prinos, holly, etc., etc., not distinguishable easily now), but chiefly the first two. Much of the blueberry being dead gives it a very gray as well as scraggy as pect. It is a very bad thicket to break through, yet there are commonly thinner places, or often opens, by which you may wind your way about the denser clumps. Small specimens of the trees are mingled with these and also some water andromeda and lamb-kill. 

Third: There are the smooth brown and wetter spaces where the water andromeda chiefly prevails, together with purplish lamb-kill about the sides of them, and hairy huckleberry; but in the midst and wettest part the narrow revolute and glaucous (beneath) leaves of the Andromeda Polifolia and Kalmia glauca are seen, and in the sphagnum the Vaccinium Oxycoccus. In one of the latter portions occurs that open pool.

Sphagnum is found everywhere in the swamp. 

First, there is the dark wooded part; second, the scraggy gray blueberry thicket; third, the rich brown water andromeda spaces. 

The high blueberry delights singularly in these localities. You distinguish it by its gray spreading mass; its light-gray bark, rather roughened; its thickish shoots, often crimson; and its plump, roundish red buds. Think of its wreaths and canopies of cool blue fruit in August, thick as the stars in the Milky Way! The panicled andromeda is upright, light-gray, with a rather smoother bark, more slender twigs, and small, sharp red buds lying close to the twig. The blueberry is particularly hard to break through, it is so spreading and scraggy, but a hare can double swiftly enough beneath it. The ground of sphagnum is now thickly strewn with the leaves of these shrubs. 

The water andromeda makes a still more uniformly dense thicket, which must be nearly impervious to some animals; but as man lifts his head high above it, finds but little difficulty in making his way through it, though it sometimes comes up to his middle, and if his eye scans its surface it makes an impression of smoothness and denseness, – its rich brown, whole some surface, even as grass or moss. 

Ascending the high land on the south, I looked down over the large open space with its navel pool in the centre. This green stagnant pool, rayed with the tracks or trails of musquash and making but a feeble watery impression, reminded me of portions of the map of the moon. 

This swamp appears not to have had any natural outlet, though an artificial one has been dug. The same is perhaps the case with the C. Miles Swamp. And is it so with Beck Stow's These three are the only places where I have found the Andromeda Polifolia. The Kalmia glauca in Gowing's, C. Miles's, and Holden's swamps. The latter has no outlet of any kind. 

I am interested in those plants, like panicled andromeda, shrub oak, etc., for which no use that I know has been discovered. The panicled andromeda, instead of the date tree, might be my coat-of arms. 

Fresh slender shoots of the Viburnum nudum make very good withes, I find. 

Austin Bacon told me that the worst swamp he ever found was not in Vermont or up country where he had surveyed, but in Newton (?), where he surveyed for a road once. The water was about two feet deep, and you jumped from tussock to tussock; these generally tipped over with you into the water. 

There is a strong and warm southwest wind, which brings the frost out of the ground, — more than I thought was in it, — making the surface wet. 

Walking along the top of Gowing's hill wood-lot, I see from time to time large ant-hills amid the young oaks. Often their tops have been disturbed and flattened, by some creature apparently. Some may be deserted. The sedge-grass has sprung up long and thick about the sides of these mounds, though there may be none amid the oaks around. The working of the ants keeps clear a little space amid the bushes. 

In the evening heavy rain and some thunder and lightning, and rain in the night.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 23, 1857

I looked down over the large open space with its navel pool in the centre. See May 31, 1857 (“That central meadow and pool in Gowing's Swamp is its very navel,”); August 23, 1854 ("There is in the middle an open pool, twenty or thirty feet in diameter,. . .an abrupt edge next the water, this on a dense bed of quaking sphagnum, in which I sink eighteen inches in water, upheld by its matted roots, where I fear to break through. On this the spatulate sundew abounds.”).

Water andromeda chiefly prevails, together with purplish lamb-kill about the sides of them, and hairy huckleberry; but in the midst and wettest part the narrow revolute and glaucous (beneath) leaves of the Andromeda Polifolia and Kalmia glauca are seen, and in the sphagnum the Vaccinium Oxycoccus. See February 17, 1854 (“In these swamps, then, you have three kinds of andromeda. The main swamp is crowded with high blueberry, panicled andromeda, prinos, swamp-pink, etc., etc., and then in the middle or deepest part will be an open space not yet quite given up to water, where the Andromeda calyculata and a few A. Polifolia reign almost alone.”); August 23, 1854 (“Next comes, half a dozen rods wide, a dense bed of Andromeda calyculata, — the A. Polifolia mingled with it, — the rusty cotton- grass, cranberries, — the common and also V. Oxycoccus, — pitcher-plants, sedges, and a few young spruce and larch here and there,”); August 30, 1856 ("Consider how remote and novel that swamp. Beneath it is a quaking bed of sphagnum, and in it grow Andromeda Polifolia, Kalmia glauca, menyanthes (or buck -bean), Gaylussacia dumosa, Vaccinium Oxycoccus, — plants which scarcely a citizen of Concord ever sees.”) See also Gowing's; Swamp historical survey and botanical inventory (2010) (Rare or unusual plants remaining today at Gowing’s Swamp include:

• Black spruce (Picea marianna)
• Bog rosemary (Andromeda polifolia)
• Bog or pale laurel (Kalmia polifolia)
• Purple pitcher-plant (Sarracenia purpurea)
• Round-leaved sundew (Drosera rotundifolia)
• Small-flowered cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccus)
• Tawny cotton sedge (Eriophorum virginicum)
• 53 lichen species, including 3 not found elsewhere in the local area (Cladoniaincrassata, Parmeliopsis subambigua, and Pseudevernia consocians)
• Mountain holly (Nemopanthus mucronatus))

Andromeda polifolia. See July14, 1853 (“Saw something blue, or glaucous, in Beck Stow's Swamp to-day; approached and discovered the Andromeda Polifolia, in the midst of the swamp at the north end, not long since out of bloom. This is another instance of a common experi ence. When I am shown from abroad, or hear of, or in any [way] become interested in, some plant or other thing, I am pretty sure to find it soon. Within a week R. W. E. showed me a slip of this in a botany, as a great rarity which George Bradford brought from Watertown. I had long been interested in it by Linnaeus's account. I now find it in abundance.”)

V. Oxycoccus.  See August 23, 1854 (“I find a new cranberry on the sphagnum amid the A. calyculata, — V. Oxycoccus . . .It has small, now purplish-dotted fruit, flat on the sphagnum, some turned scarlet partly, on terminal peduncles, with slender, thread-like stems and small leaves strongly revolute on the edges.”)

Kalmia glauca var. rosmarinifolia. See January 9, 1855 (“Make a splendid discovery this afternoon. Walking through Holden’s white spruce swamp,  I see peeping above the snow-crust some slender delicate evergreen shoots very much like the Andromeda Polifolia, amid sphagnum, lambkill, Andromeda calyculata, blueberry bushes, etc., though there is very little to be seen above the snow. It is, I have little doubt, the Kalmia glauca var. rosmarinifolia.”)

I break my way into the midst of Holden Swamp to get a specimen of Kalmia glauca leaf

November 15. 

The obvious falling of leaves (i.e., not to include the fall of the pitch pines and larches and the complete fall of the birches, white willows, etc.) ended about the first of November. 

A very few bright-colored leaves on small shrubs, such as oak sprouts, black cherry, blueberry, etc., have lingered up to this time in favorable places. By the first of November, or at most a few days later, the trees generally wear, in the main, their winter aspect, their leaves gradually falling until spring. 

P. M. — To Holden Swamp and C. Miles Swamp. 

Where the earth has been freshly exposed and so lies light, it is now heaved up and white with asbestos like crystals two or three inches long, which sink and are crunched by my feet. Cold pools in shady woods and under the north sides of walls are now skimmed over. Ice a quarter of an inch thick. I see its large flaky crystals like low undulations, a mosaic of slightly concave, perhaps triangular pieces. The paths whose surface was frozen each night are now thawing and wet. 

The water of the brook beyond Hubbard’s Grove, where it spreads out a little, though not frozen, is clear, cold, and deserted of life. There are no water-bugs nor skaters on it. Rennie, in “ Library of Entertaining Knowledge,” says they are seen all winter on some pools in England, i. e. the Gyrinus natator. 

I see no ants on the great ant-hills, and methinks I have not for three weeks at least. There is but little insect-life abroad now. You wonder what nourishment the cattle can extract from the withered and bleached grass. This cold blast has swept the water-bugs from the pools. My walk is the more lonely when I perceive that there are no ants now upon their hillocks in field or wood. These are deserted mounds. They have commenced their winter's sleep. 

I break my way into the midst of Holden Swamp to get a specimen of Kalmia glauca leaf. The surface is composed of great porous tussocks, or hummocks, of sphagnum, fifteen or twenty inches high or more, about the stems of blueberry bushes, choke-berry, water andromeda, swamp-pink, spruce, etc., etc., in which my feet sink five or six inches, and my shoes are filled with the rubbish. The water is frozen solid in the leaves of the pitcher plants. This is the thickest ice I’ve seen. This water was most exposed in the cool swamp. I part the scraggy bushes with my hands and press my way through them. I come out covered with the fragments of lichens and rotten twigs and sphagnum.

Going by my owl-nest oak, I saw that it had broken off at the hole and the top fallen, but, seeing in the cavity some leaves, I climbed up to see what kind of nest it was and what traces of the owls were left. Having shinned up with some difficulty to the top of this great. stump some fifteen or eighteen feet high, I took out the leaves slowly, watching to see what spoils had been left with them. Some were pretty green, and all had evidently been placed there this fall. 

When I had taken all out with my left hand, holding on to the top of the stump with my right, I looked round into the cleft, and there I saw, sitting nearly erect at the bottom in one corner, a little Mus leucopus, panting with fear and with its large black eyes upon me. I held my face thus within seven or eight inches of it as long as I cared to hold on there, and it showed no sign of retreating. When I put in my hand, it merely withdrew downward into a snug little nest of hypnum and apparently the dirty-white wool-like pappus of some plant as big as a batting-ball. 

Wishing to see its tail, I stirred it up again, when it suddenly rushed up the side of the cleft, out over my shoulder and right arm, and leaped off, falling down through a thin hemlock spray some fifteen or eighteen feet to the ground, on the hillside, where I lost sight of it, but heard it strike. It will thus make its nest at least sixteen feet up a tree, improving some cleft or hollow, or probably bird's nest, for this purpose. These nests, I suppose, are made when the trees are losing their leaves, as those of the squirrels are. 

At C. Miles Swamp, I see that the larches have finished falling since the 8th (say the 12th ?). 

Find plenty of Andromeda Polifolia there, where you can walk dry-shod in the spruce wood, together with Kalmia glauca. The former is linear, about twice as long and two thirds as broad as the latter, alternate mucronate, round-stemmed. The Kalmia glauca has fewer leaves now, opposite, glossy above; a very sharp two-edged twig, the edges springing from the base of the leaves and decussating like them, so that when the twig is held up to the light it appears alternately thicker and thinner. This plant is commonly seen now with only a few narrow and erect young leaves in a tuft near the end of the twigs, but in many cases older, broader, and nearly horizontal ones, half a dozen of them along the last four or five inches of the twig. The andromeda is most white beneath; the other is more greenish. 

The white willows, which retain many of their leaves even yet, are of a peculiar buff (?) or fawn (?) color. 

Raspberry shoots, too, have their bloom like the thimble-berry, but they are not so rank nor smooth. 

Of the evergreen trees described by Loudon, methinks these it would be worth the while to have on one's premises: — 

• Pinus sylvestris, Scotch pine or fir; the most valuable pine of Europe. Looks like our pitch pine. 
• Pinus Pinaster, which is planted on the sands in France. 
• Abies excelsa, the lofty or Norway spruce fir. 
• Perhaps Picea pectinata, the comb-like-leaved sil ver fir. 
• The Scotch larch, which is not indigenous in Britain, but on the mountains of the middle of Europe. I have, 

Of western American trees: — 

• The Pinus Lambertiana, the gigantic or Lambert's pine, Columbia River, one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet high, twenty to near sixty in circumference, allied closely to P. Strobus. 
• Abies Douglassii, northwestern America, one hundred to one hundred and eighty feet high. 
• Picea grandis, great silver fir, northern California, one hundred and seventy to two hundred feet high.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 15, 1857


Going by my owl-nest oak . . .   See May 26, 1855 ("At Kalmia Swemp ... At the screech owl’s nest I now find two young slumbering."); May 7, 1855 ("I observe a middling-sized red oak standing a little aslant on the side-hill over the swamp, with a pretty large hole in one side about fifteen feet from the ground, where apparently a limb on which a felled tree lodged had been cut some years before and so broke out a cavity. . . .This is a very fit place for hawks and owls to dwell in, — the thick woods just over a white spruce swamp, in which the glaucous kalmia grows.").

Find plenty of Andromeda Polifolia there, where you can walk dry-shod in the spruce wood, together with Kalmia glauca. See December 6, 1856 ("I can walk through the spruce swamp now dry-shod, amid the water andromeda and Kalmia glauca.")

The Kalmia glauca has fewer leaves now, opposite, glossy above; a very sharp two-edged twig ... See January 9, 1855 ("Make a splendid discovery this afternoon. Walking through Holden’s white spruce swamp, I see peeping above the snow-crust some slender delicate evergreen shoots . . .the Kalmia glauca var.rosmarinifolia.Very delicate evergreen opposite linear leaves, strongly revolute, somewhat reddish-green above, the blossom-buds quite conspicuous. . . .The pretty little blossom-buds arranged crosswise in the axils of the leaves as you look down on them.")

.At C. Miles Swamp, I see that the larches have finished falling since the 8th (say the 12th?). See November 1, 1857 ("The larches are at the height of their change."); November 4, 1855 ("Larches are now quite yellow, — in the midst of their fall.") November 5, 1857 ("The pitch pines generally have lost their leaves now, and the larches are fast falling.”); November 16, 1858 (“Probably the larch about fallen.”)