A Book of the Seasons: The Arum Berries

I would make a chart of our life,

know why just this circle of creatures completes the world.

Henry Thoreau, April 18, 1852

Dense oval bunches

of arum berries startle 

the walker in swamps.

September 2, 1853

July 22.  The green berries of the arum are seen, and the now reddish fruit of the trillium, and the round green-pea-sized green berries of the axil-flowering Solomon's-seal.  July 22, 1852

August 22. Arum berries ripe. August 22, 1854.

August 22. The arum berries are mostly devoured, apparently by birds. August 22, 1852.

August 28. See the great oval masses of scarlet berries of the arum now in the meadows. August 28, 1856

September 1. Cohush berries appear now to be in their prime, and arum berries, and red choke-berries. September 1, 1856

September 1. The fruit of the arum is the most remarkable that I see this afternoon, such its brilliancy, color, and form; perhaps in prime now. It is among the most easily detected now on the floor of the swamp, its bright- scarlet cone above the fallen and withered leaves and amid its own brown or whitish and withering leaves. Its own leaves and stem perhaps soft and decaying, while it is perfectly fresh and dazzling. It has the brightest gloss of any fruit I remember, and this makes the green ones about as remarkable as the scarlet. With, perchance, a part of the withered spathe still investing and veiling it. The scarlet fruit of the arum spots the swamp floor. September 1, 1859

September 2.  The dense oval bunches of arum berries now startle the walker in swamps. They are a brilliant vermilion on a rich ground.  September 2, 1853

September 3. To fill my basket with the neglected but beautiful fruit of the various species of cornels and viburnums, poke, arum, medeola, thorns, etc. September 3, 1853

September 4.  Arum in prime. September 4, 1853

September 4.  In Corner Spring Swamp . . .There are many splendid scarlet arum berries there now in prime, forming a dense ovate head on a short peduncle; the individual berries of various sizes, between pear and mitre and club form, flattened against each other on a singular (now purple and white) core, which is hollow. What rank and venomous luxuriance in this swamp sprout-land! September 4, 1856

September 4. P. M. – To Bateman’s Pond. There is quite a collection of rare plants there  . . . Arum berries ripe.  Already, long before sunset, I feel the dew falling in that cold calla swamp. September 4, 1857

September 21.  I perceive that a spike of arum berries which I gathered quite green September 1 is now turned completely scarlet, and though it has lain on my desk in a dry and warm chamber all the while, the berries are still perfectly plump and fresh (as well as glossy) to look at, — as much so as any.  September 21, 1859

September 24. At brook, cohush and arum berries still fresh, and Viburnum acerifolium berries.. September 24, 1856

September 27.  The arum berries are now in perfection, cone-shaped spikes an inch and a half long, of scarlet or vermilion- colored, irregular, somewhat pear-shaped berries springing from a purplish core. They are exactly the color of bright sealing-wax, or, I believe, the painted tortoise's shell; on club-shaped peduncles. The changed leaves of this are delicately white, especially beneath. Here and there lies prostrate on the damp leaves or ground this conspicuous red spike. September 27, 1852

September 28.   The arum berries are still fresh and abundant, perhaps in their prime. A large cluster is two and a half inches long by two wide and rather flattish. One, which has ripened prematurely, the stalk being withered and drooping, resembles a very short thick ear of scarlet corn. This might well enough be called snake-corn. These singular vermilion-colored berries, about a hundred of them, surmount a purple bag on a peduncle six or eight inches long. It is one of the most remarkable and dazzling, if not the handsomest, fruits we have. These were by violet wood-sorrel wall. September 28, 1856

The arum berries 

are still fresh and abundant –

perhaps in their prime. 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Arum Berries

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

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-arum

A Book of the Seasons: September 2 (welcome coolness, expectant mInd, nature's fruit, fertile thought, now i can write)

The year is but a succession of days,

and I see that I could assign some office to each day

which, summed up, would be the history of the year.

Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852

September 2

The air of late is

cooler clearer autumnal

now after the rain.

September 2, 1859

September 2, 2016

It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart. September 2, 1851

There is a stillness in nature for want of singing birds, commenced a month or more ago; only the crickets’ louder creak to supply their place. September 2, 1852

Bathe at Hubbard’s. The water is surprisingly cold on account of the cool weather and rain, but especially since the rain of yesterday morning. It is a very important and remarkable autumnal change. It will not be warm again probably. September 2, 1854

The first coolness is welcome, so serious and fertile of thought. September 2, 1851

Now, after the first rain raising the river, the first assault on the summer's sluggishness, the air is of late cooler and clearer, autumnal,  September 2, 1859

It commonly chances that I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I am in a thrilled and expectant mood. . . .My expectation ripens to discovery. I am prepared for strange things. September 2, 1856

The dense oval bunches of arum berries now startle the walker in swamps. They are a brilliant vermilion on a rich ground. September 2, 1853

Large yellow birches branch low and form a dense broom-like head of many long tapering branches. September 2, 1857

The autumnal dandelion is conspicuous on the shore. September 2, 1854

The sarothra grows thickly, and is now abundantly in bloom, on denuded places, i.e., where the sod and more or less soil has been removed, by sandy roadsides. September 2, 1859

Solidago nemoralis apparently in prime, and S. stricta  . . . johnswort, now merely lingering.  September 2, 1860

Sept. 2. P. M. - Collected and brought home in a pail of water this afternoon the following asters and diplopappi, going by Turnpike and Hubbard's Close to Saw Mill Brook, and returning by Goose Pond: 

(1) A. Tradescanti  now well under way , most densely flowered, by low roadsides ; 
(2) dumosus, perhaps the most prevalent of the small whitish ones , especially in wood - paths ; 
(3) Diplopappus linariifolius, quite common ;
(4) A. patens, at present by far the most common of the decidedly purple asters, in dry ground ; 
(5) undulatus, just begun to be common ;
(6) acuminatus, low whorl , leafy , under a shady copse , where it appears to have been rayless , scarce ; 
(7) longifolius, within a few days quite common in low ground ; and 
(8) puniceus, very common in like places for a good while ;
(9) Radula, now rather pale and stale in low grounds ; 
(10) miser  not as yet widely dispersed , but common in Saw Mill Brook Path ; 
(11) Diplopappus umbellatus, abundant in low grounds ; 
(12) lævis, I did not chance to see in this walk  but found it common the next morning, on hillside by Moore's Swamp.

Thes twelve are all I know excepting corymbosus  in Miles Swamp and elsewhere, long time, not common ; also macrophyllus , long since  not blooming this year; multiflorus, in dry roadsides  not yet (at least) common; and Diplopappus cornifolius, Bittern Cliff woods, prob-ably out of bloom. September 2, 1853

Some bass trees blossomed sparingly after all, for I see some fruit. September 2, 1857

The maple-leaved viburnum berries are a dark purple or black now. September 2, 1853

The medeola berries are now dull glossy and almost blue-black; about three, on slender threads one inch long, arising in the midst of the cup formed by the purple bases of the whorl of three upper leaves. September 2, 1853

Some of the small early blueberry bushes are a clear red (Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum), and the lingering clusters of blueberries contrast strangely with the red leaves of the V. vacillans. September 2, 1856

I feel this difference between great poetry and small: that in the one, the sense outruns and overflows the words; in the other, the words the sense. September 2, 1856

We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto  . . . Expression is the act of the whole man . . .  A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing.   September 2, 1851

September 2, 2015

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,\:

The Luxury of  Bathing

Summer

the Autumnal Dandelion

St. Johns-wort (Hypericum)

 Helianthus

 The Basswood

 the Yellow Birch

Cucumber Root (medeola)

Arum Berries

The Blueberries

Viburnum lentago  (nannyberry)

September

to effect the quality of the day

September 2, 2013

September 2, 2014

May 6, 1854 ("Every important worker will report what life there is in him.”)

June 3, 1857 (“The bass at the Island will not bloom this year. (?)”)

July 9, 1857 ( I see no flowers on the bass trees by this river this year, nor at Conantum.”)

August 12, 1856 (“The sarothra — as well as small hypericums generally — has a lemon scent.”)

August 16, 1856 ("By the discovery of one new plant all bounds seem to be infinitely removed“)

August 27, 1851 ("The Medeola Virginica, cucumber-root, the whorl-leaved plant, is now in green fruit.")

August 30, 1856 ("The sarothra is now apparently in prime on the Great Fields, and comes near being open now, at 3 p. m. Bruised, it has the fragrance of sorrel and lemon, rather pungent or stinging, like a bee.”)

September 1, 1859 ("The autumnal dandelion is a prevailing flower now, but since it shuts up in the afternoon it might not be known as common unless you were out in the morning or in a dark afternoon")

This beautiful spot

at the top of the moss trail

clear September day

The shadows lengthen —

sun flashes between the trees

walking briskly home.

~zphx20160902

September 3, 1860 ("Here is a beautiful, and perhaps first decidedly autumnal, day, -- a, cloudless sky, a clear air, with, maybe, veins of coolness”)

September 6, 1858 ("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")

September 7, 1858 ("It is an early September afternoon, melting warm and sunny; the thousands of grasshoppers leaping before you reflect gleams of light; a little distance off the field is yellowed with a Xerxean army of Solidago nemoralis between me and the sun") 

September 28, 1856 (“The arum berries are still fresh and abundant, perhaps in their prime. . . .It is one of the most remarkable and dazzling, if not the handsomest, fruits we have.”)

October 18, 1855 (“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”)

November 4, 1858 ("We cannot see any thing until we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly see anything else. In my botanical rambles I find that first the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my thoughts, though it may at first seem very foreign to this locality, and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it and expecting it unconsciously, and at length I surely see it, and it is henceforth an actual neighbor of mine. This is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants which I could name.”)

November 18, 1857 "Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of”)

January 23, 1858. (" It is in vain to write on the seasons unless you have the seasons in you.")

September 2, 2017

If you make the least correct 

observation of nature this year,

 you will have occasion to repeat it

 with illustrations the next, 

and the season and life itself is prolonged.

  April 7, 1853 

September 1 <<<<<<<<<<    September 2 >>>>>>>>>>>  September 3

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  September 2 

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 © 2009-2023

https://tinyurl.com/HDT02SEPT 

August has been a month of berries and melons, small fruits.

September  2. 

P. M. – To Walden.

The seringo, too, has long been silent like other birds.

The red prinos berries ripe in sunny places.

Rose hips begin to be handsome.

Small flocks of pigeons are seen these days. Distinguished from doves by their sharper wings and bodies.

August has been a month of berries and melons, small fruits.

First in the descent from summer's culminating-point.

There is a stillness in nature for want of singing birds, commenced a month or more ago; only the crickets’ louder creak to supply their place.

I have not heard a bullfrog this long time.

The small cornel, or bunch-berry, is in bloom now (!!) near the pond.

What great tuft-like masses the cow-wheat makes now in sprout-lands! 

As I look over the pond now from the eastern shore, I am obliged to employ both my hands to defend my eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for they appear equally bright; and between my hands I look over the smooth and glassy surface of the lake.

The skaters make the finest imaginable sparkle.

Otherwise it is literally as smooth as glass, except where a fish leaps into the air or a swallow dips beneath its surface.

Sometimes a fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is a bright flash where it emerges and another where it strikes the water.

A slight haze at this season makes the shore-line so much the more indistinct.

Looking across the pond from the Peak toward Fair Haven, which I seem to see, all the earth beyond appears insulated and floated, even by this small sheet of water, the heavens being seen reflected, as it were beneath it, so that it looks thin.

The scenery of this small pond is humble though very beautiful, and does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented it, or lived by its shore.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  September 2, 1852 

August has been a month of berries and melons. See August 10, 1853 ("August, royal and rich. Green corn now, and melons have begun. That month, surely, is distinguished when melons ripen.");August 12, 1854 ("It takes all the heat of the year to produce these yellow flowers. It is the 3 o'clock p. m. of the year when they begin to prevail, — when the earth has absorbed most heat, when melons ripen and early apples and peaches. It is already the yellowing year.")

First in the descent from summer's culminating-point. See June 6, 1857 ("Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration."); July 5, 1852 ("We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity.") July 15, 1854 ("We seem to be passing a dividing line between spring and autumn, and begin to descend the long slope toward winter"); July 19, 1851 ("Yesterday it was spring, and to-morrow it will be autumn."); July 24, 1852 ("When the first crop of grass is off, and the aftermath springs, the year has passed its culmination."); July 26, 1853 ("This the afternoon of the year. How apt we are to be reminded of lateness, even before the year is half spent!");; July 28, 1854 ("Methinks the season culminated about the middle of this month, — . . . and, having as it were attained the ridge of the summer, commenced to descend the long slope toward winter, the afternoon and down-hill of the year"); August 5, 1854 ("It is one long acclivity from winter to midsummer and another long declivity from midsummer to winter."); August 6, 1852 ("Methinks there are few new flowers of late. An abundance of small fruits takes their place. Summer gets to be an old story. Birds leave off singing, as flowers blossoming."); August 6, 1852 ("Has not the year grown old ? . . . It is the signs of the fall that affect us most. It is hard to live in the summer content with it."); August 7, 1854 ("There is a light on the earth and leaves, as if they were burnished. It is the glistening autumnal side of summer."); August 7, 1854 (" Do you not feel the fruit of your spring and summer beginning to ripen?") August 18, 1853 ("What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now, — as if the rest of the year were down-hill.") August 19, 1851("Nature rests no longer at her culminating point than at any other. If you are not out at the right instant, the summer may go by and you not see it.”); August 23, 1858 ("There is no plateau on which Nature rests at midsummer, but she instantly commences the descent to winter."); August 28, 1858 ("When. . . I see these bright leaves strewing the moist ground . . .I am reminded that I have crossed the summit ridge of the year and have begun to descend the other slope."

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,

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

Gray goldenrod at Hosmer's secluded turtle field near the bridge,

September 2. 

P . M . – To Annursnack. 

Solidago nemoralis apparently in prime, and S. stricta  The former covers A. Hosmer's secluded turtle field near the bridge, together with johnswort, now merely lingering.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 2, 1860

Solidago nemoralis [Gray Goldenrod] apparently in prime. See August 18, 1854 ("The solidago nemoralis is now abundantly out on the Great Fields.”); September 1, 1856 ("S. nemoralis, not quite in prime, but very abundant."); September 6, 1858 ("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"); September 7, 1858 ("It is an early September afternoon, melting warm and sunny; the thousands of grasshoppers leaping before you reflect gleams of light; a little distance off the field is yellowed with a Xerxean army of Solidago nemoralis between me and the sun"); September 12, 1859 ("The golden-rod on the top and the slope of the hill are the Solidago nemoralis . . . Many a dry field now, like that of Sted Buttrick's on the Great Fields, is one dense mass of the bright golden recurved wands of the Solidago nemoralis, waving in the wind and turning upward to the light hundreds, if not a thousand, flowerets each. It is the greatest mass of conspicuous flowers in the year, uniformly from one to two feet high, just rising above the withered grass all over the largest fields, now when pumpkins and other yellow fruits begin to gleam, now before the woods are noticeably changed.")   See also September 27, 1857 ("Solidago nemoralis nearly done"); October 6, 1858 ("Most S. nemoralis, and most other goldenrods, now look hoary, killed by frost."); October 8, 1856 ("Asters and goldenrods are now scarce; no longer that crowd along the low roadsides. . . S. nemoralis, done, many hoary, though a very few flowers linger."); October 23, 1853 (" I notice these flowers still along the railroad causeway: fresh sprouts from the root of the Solidago nemoralis in bloom"); November 10, 1858 ("Some very handsome Solidago nemoralis in bloom on Fair Haven Hill. (Look for these late flowers —November flowers — on hills, above frost.)")

A. Hosmer's secluded turtle field near the bridge, See October 10, 1858 (" . . .the turtle field of A. Hosmer’s by Eddy Bridge.");  See also  May 1, 1859 ("Over Hosmer's meadow, about half covered with water, see hundreds of turtles, chiefly picta, now first lying out in numbers on the brown pieces of meadow which rise above the water. . . .There is to-day a general resurrection of them, and there they bask in the sun. It is their sabbath. ") [ Hosmer Flat Meadow is a Sudbury River meadow just northeast of Clamshell Hill.~ Place Names of Henry David Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts compiled by Ray Angelo]



<<<<< September 1, 1860: ("Cherries are especially birds' food, and . . . I shall think the birds have the best right to them..")

September 3, 1860 ("Here is a beautiful, and perhaps first decidedly autumnal, day, -- a, cloudless sky, a clear air, with, maybe, veins of coolness”) >>>>

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,

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

The air is of late cooler and clearer, autumnal.

September 2. 

P. M. — To Ledum Swamp. 

The pontederia leaves are now decidedly brown or brownish, and this may be the effect of frost, since we have had some considerable in low places. Perhaps they occupy particularly cold places. 

The farmer is obliged to hide his melon-patch in the midst of his corn or potatoes, far away. I sometimes stumble on it as I am going across lots. I see one to day where the watermelons are intermixed with carrots in a carrot-bed, and so concealed by the general resemblance of leaf, etc., at a little distance. 

Going along Clamshell Hill, I look over the meadows. Now, after the first rain raising the river, the first assault on the summer's sluggishness, the air is of late cooler and clearer, autumnal, and the meadows and low grounds, which, of course, have been shorn, acquire a fresh yellowish green as in the spring. This is another phase of the second spring, of which the peeping of hylas by and by is another. 

I once did some surveying for a man who remarked, but not till the job was done, that he did not know when he should pay me. I did not pay much heed to this, though it was unusual, supposing that he meant to pay me some time or other. But after a while he sent to me a quart of red huckleberries, and this I thought was ominous and he distinguished me altogether too much by this gift, since I was not his particular friend. I saw it was the first installment, which would go a great way toward being the last. In course of years he paid a part of the debt in money, and that is the last I have heard of it. 

The sarothra grows thickly, and is now abundantly in bloom, on denuded places, i.e., where the sod and more or less soil has been removed, by sandy roadsides. 

At Ledum Swamp the frosts have now touched the Polygonum Careyi pretty extensively, the leaves and stem, leaving the red spikes; also some erechthites and poke and the tenderest high blueberry shoots, their tips (from where the bushes were cut down). But the Woodwardia Virginica is not touched. (Vide back, August 23d.) 

Poke berries begin at Corner Spring.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 2, 1859

Now, after the first rain raising the river, the first assault on the summer's sluggishness, the air is of late cooler and clearer, autumnal. See September 2, 1854 ("Bathe at Hubbard’s. The water is surprisingly cold on account of the cool weather and rain, but especially since the rain of yesterday morning. It is a very important and remarkable autumnal change. It will not be warm again probably"); September 3, 1860 ("Here is a beautiful, and perhaps first decidedly autumnal, day, -- a, cloudless sky, a clear air, with, maybe, veins of coolness”); September 11, 1853 ("Cool weather. Sit with windows shut, and many by fires. . . .The air has got an autumnal coolness which it will not get rid of again.")

The meadows acquire a fresh yellowish green as in the spring. This is another phase of the second spring, of which the peeping of hylas by and by is another. See  August 4, 1853("The low fields which have been mown now look very green again in consequence of the rain, as if it were a second spring."); August 7, 1852 ("At this season we have gentle rain-storms, making the aftermath green . . . as if it were a second spring."); September 14, 1852 ("The grass is very green after the rains, like a second spring,"); October 23, 1853 ("Many phenomena re mind me that now is to some extent a second spring, — not only the new-springing and blossoming of flowers, but the peeping of the hylodes for some time, and the faint warbling of their spring notes by many birds.")

But after a while he sent to me a quart of red huckleberries, and this I thought was ominous.See January 25, 1858 ("I am amused to see what airs men take upon themselves when they have money to pay me.")

The sarothra grows thickly, and is now abundantly in bloom. See August 30, 1856 ("The sarothra is now apparently in prime on the Great Fields, and comes near being open now, at 3 p. m. Bruised, it has the fragrance of sorrel and lemon, rather pungent or stinging, like a bee.”); August 12, 1856 (“The sarothra — as well as small hypericums generally — has a lemon scent.”)

The Woodwardia Virginica is not touched. See September 6, 1858 ("At Ledum Pool edge, I find the Woodwardia Virginica fern, its fruit mostly turned deep reddish-brown")

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,

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

Lyme grass or wild rye

September 2. 

Up Assabet. 

September 2, 2018

The common light-sheathed Scirpus Eriophorum still.

At the Pokelogan, apparently Cinna arundinacea (?) in prime (one stamen); also Elymus Virginias (?).

Lyme grass or wild rye, apparently lately done. 

That rich, close, erect-panicled grass of the meadows, apparently for a month in bloom, seems to be Glyceria obtusa. Very common in the meadow west of Brooks Clark’s.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 2, 1858

That rich, close, erect-panicled grass very common in the meadow west of Brooks Clark’s. See September 14, 1858 ("The Glyceria obtusa, about eighteen inches high, quite common, in the meadow west of Brooks Clark’s, has turned a dull purple, probably on account of frosts")

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,

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