4.30 A.M.––Up river for lilies
No dew even where I keep my boat. The driest night yet, threatening the sultriest day. Yet I see big crystalline drops at the tips or the bases of the pontederia leaves.
The few lilies begin to open about 5.
The nest of a brown thrasher with three eggs, on some green-briar, perfectly concealed by a grape vine running over it; eggs greenish brown; nest of dry sticks, lined with fibres of grape bark and with roots. Bird scolded me much.
Carpet weed out.
I have got a pan full of lilies open.
We have not had rain, except a mere sprinkling in the night of the 17th, since the 26th of May.
P.M. To Conantum.
The warmest day yet. For the last two days I have worn nothing about my neck. This change or putting off of clothing is, methinks, as good an evidence of the increasing warmth of the weather as meteorological instruments.
I thought it was hot weather perchance when a month ago, I slept with a window wide open and laid aside a comfortable, but by and by I found that I had got two windows open, and to-night two windows and the door are far from enough.
Hypericum perforatum just out.
This year the time when the locust was first heard was the time to put on summer clothes.
Early on the morning of the 18th the river felt lukewarm to my fingers when my paddle dipped deeper than usual.
The galium with three small white petals (G. trifidum) has been out some time, and I find that erectish, broad-leaved, three-nerved, green-flowered one, perhaps G. circazans at Corner Spring.
Peltandra Virginica, perhaps a week, for many of its flowers are effete and curved downward .
The Hypericum ellipticum by the riverside.
The only violets I notice nowadays are a few white lanceolate ones in the meadows.
The river has got down quite low, and the muddy shores are covered here and there with a sort of dark brown paper, the dried filaments of confervæ which filled the water. Now is their fall.
The bright little flowers of the Ranunculus reptans var filiformis are seen peeping forth between its interstices.
Calopogon out. I think it surpasses the pogonia, though the latter is sometimes high colored and is of a handsome form; but it is inclined to be pale ,is sometimes even white.
Now see many bright red amelanchier berries and some purple or dark-blue ones amid them. They are mostly injured by insects or apparently pecked and deformed by birds, but, from the few perfectly sound and ripe I have eaten to-day, I should pronounce them superior to either blueberries or huckleberries. Those of the Botryapium have a soft skin; of the shorter bush with a stiffer leaf, a tough skin. This is a little before blueberries.
The panicled cornel is the only one of the cornels or viburnums that now is noticed in flower , generally speaking. The last of our cornels – the C. sericea I think it must be – is just beginning.
The farmers have commenced haying. With this the summer culminates. The most extended crop of all is ready for the harvesting.
Lint still comes off the leaves and shoots.
It is so hot I have to lift my hat to let the air cool my head.
I notice that that low, rather rigid fern, about two feet high, on the Great Hubbard Meadow, which a month ago was yellow, but now is green and in fruit, and with a harsh-feeling fruit atop, is decidedly inclined to grow in hollow circles from one foot to six or eight feet in diameter.– often, it is true, imperfect on one side, or, if large, filled up in the middle. How to account for it? Can it have anything to do with the hummocks deposited on the meadow? Many small stems near together in circles i. e. not a single line. Is it the Osmunda spectabilis?
Now I hear the spotted (?) flies about my head,–- flies that settle and make themselves felt on the hand sometimes.
The morning-glory still fresh at 3 P.M. A fine, large, delicate bell with waved border, some pure white ,some reddened. The buds open perfectly in a vase I find them open when I wake at 4 A .M. Is not this one of the eras or culminating places in the flower season? Not this till the sultry mornings come.
Angelica, perhaps a day or more. Elder just opening.
The four leaved asclepias, probably some days, rather handsome flower, with the peculiar fragrance of the milkweeds.
Observed three or four sweet-briar bushes with white flowers of the usual size, by the wall under Conantum Cliff,– very slightly tinted with red or rose. In the paucity and form of prickles at least I make them answer to the micrantha, but not else Is it intermediate? Opened at home in a vase in the shade. They are more distinctly rose-tinted. Leaves and all together in the water, they have a strong spirituous or rummy scent.
There are no flowers nor flower-buds on the bass this year, though it was so full last year.
Where the other day I saw a pigeon woodpecker tapping and enlarging a hole in the dead limb of an apple tree ,when as yet probably no egg was laid, to-day I see two well grown young woodpeckers about as big as the old looking out at the hole, showing their handsome spotted breasts and calling lustily for something to eat, or, it may be, suffering from the heat. Young birds in some situations must suffer greatly from heat these days, so closely packed in their nests and perhaps insufficiently shaded. It is a wonder they remain so long there patiently.
I saw a yellowbird's nest in the willows on the causeway this afternoon and three young birds nearly ready to fly, overflowing the nest ,all holding up their open bills and keeping them steadily open for a minute or more, on noise of my approach.
Still see cherry-birds in flocks.
Dogsbane and Prinos verticillatus.
My white lilies in the pan are mostly withering the first day, the weather is so warm.
At sunset to Island.
The white anemone is withering with drought; else would probably have opened.
Return while the sun is setting behind thunder clouds, which now shadow us. Between the heavy masses of clouds, mouse colored, with dark blue bases, the patches of clear sky are a glorious cobalt blue, as Sophia calls it.
How happens it that the sky never appears so intensely, brightly, memorably blue as when seen between clouds and, it may be, as now in the south at sunset? This, too, is like the blue in snow.
For the last two or three days it has taken me all the forenoon to wake up.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 21, 1853
4.30 A.M.––Up river for lilies . . .The few lilies begin to open about 5. See July 26, 1856 ("At five [A.M.] the lilies had not opened, but began about 5.15 and were abundantly out at six") and note to July 17, 1854 ("I go to observe the lilies. ")The summer culminates. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Haymaking
Calopogon . . . surpasses the pogonia, See.June 23, 1853 ("Pogonias are now very abundant in the meadow-grass, and now and then a calopogon is mixed with them .The last is broader and of more singular form, commonly with an unopened bud above on one side."); June 24, 1852 (""The calopogon is a more bluish purple than the pogonia.); July 5, 1852 (The calopogon, or grass-pink, now fully open, . . — its four or five open purple flowers — . . . makes a much greater show than the pogonia. It is of the same character with that and the arethusa. "); July 7, 1852 ("The Arethusa bulbosa, " crystalline purple;" Pogonia ophioglossoides, snake-mouthed arethusa, "pale purple;" and the Calopogon pulchellus, grass pink, "pink purple," make one family in my mind, — next to the purple orchis, or with it, — being flowers par excellence, all flower, all color, with inconspicuous leaves, naked flowers,")
Now see many bright red amelanchier berries and some purple or dark-blue ones amid them. See June 25, 1853 (" An unusual quantity of amelanchier berries . . . I never saw nearly so many before. It is a very agreeable surprise") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Shad-bush,Juneberry, or Service-berry (Amelanchier canadensis)How happens it that the sky never appears so intensely, brightly, memorably blue as when seen between clouds and, it may be, as now in the south at sunset? See December 14. 1851 ("There is a beautifully pure greenish-blue sky under the clouds now in the southwest just before sunset."); January 11, 1852 ("The glory of these afternoons, . . . is in the ineffably clear blue, or else pale greenish-yellow, patches of sky in the west just before sunset "); January 17, 1852 ("Those western vistas through clouds to the sky show the clearest heavens, clearer and more elysian than if the whole sky is comparatively free from clouds.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Western Sky
