The willow twigs on the right of the Red Bridge causeway are bright greenish-yellow and reddish as in the spring

November 14.

November 14, 2024

The river is slightly over the meadows. 

The willow twigs on the right of the Red Bridge causeway are bright greenish-yellow and reddish as in the spring. Also on the right railroad sand-bank at Heywood's meadow. Is it because they are preparing their catkins now against another spring? 

The first wreck line -- of pontederia, sparganium, etc. -- is observable. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 14, 1854

The river is slightly over the meadows . . . The first wreck line . . . is observable. See November 14, 1855 ("The rain has raised the river an additional foot or more, and it is creeping over the meadows. The old weedy margin is covered and a new grassy one acquired.") See also November 8, 1853 ("To riverside as far down as near Peter’s, to look at the water-line before the snow covers it.")

The willow twigs on the right of the Red Bridge causeway are bright greenish-yellow and reddish as in the spring. See November 18, 1858 ("Notice the short bright-yellow willow twigs on Hubbard’s Causeway. They are prominent now, first, because they are bare; second, because high-colored always and this rarity of bright colors at present; third, because of the clear air and November light."); March 17, 1859 ("The blushing twigs retain their color throughout the winter and appear more brilliant than ever the succeeding spring. They are winter fruit. It adds greatly to the pleasure of late November, of winter or of early spring walks to look into these mazes of twigs of different colors"); March 18, 1861 ("When I pass by a twig of willow, though of the slenderest kind, rising above the sedge in some dry hollow early in December, or in midwinter above the snow, my spirits rise as if it were an oasis in the desert."); See also December 2, 1852 (" It is an anticipation, a looking through winter to spring.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Osier in Winter and early Spring

Pontederia, sparganium, etc.  See September 28, 1851 ("The pontederia, which apparently makes the mass of the weeds by the side of the river, is all dead and brown and has been for some time; the year is over for it."); October 16, 1859 ("So surely as the sun appears to be in Libra or Scorpio, I see the conical winter lodges of the musquash rising above the withered pontederia and flags.")

November 14. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  November 14

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 © 2009-2024

Purple panic grass.

September 4.

Much rain, with thunder and lightning. 

September 4, 2018
(avesong)

Our large-fruited sparganium is evidently S. ramosum, still a little, at least, in flower. 

My large grass of the riverside with a narrow or spike-like appressed panicle, long since out, at the end of a long bare culm, leafy below, is apparently Phalaris arundinacea. 

Piper grass is apparently Triticum repens; now done.

What I called Panicum capillare (after Hoar, without examining) is P. sanguinale, crab grass, finger grass, or purple panic grass. Panicum capillare (very different and like Eragrostis capillaris, the fine purple grass) is now in prime in garden.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 4, 1858

(Eragrostis capillaris, the fine purple grass) See August 13, 1860 ("Purple grass (Eragrostis pectinacca), two or three days. E. capillaris, say as much.")

I see the heart beating in the embryo fish.

April 14. 

Rains still, with one or two flashes of lightning, but soon over. 

The yew plucked yesterday blossoms in house to day. 

P. M. — Up Assabet. 

The river is a little higher on account of rain. 

I see much sweet flag six or eight inches long, floating, it having been cut up apparently by musquash. (The 17th I see much of the sparganium cut up close to the bottom along a musquash-path at the bottom of a meadow where there was one foot of water.) 

My Rana halecina spawn in tumbler is now flatted out and begins to betray the pollywog form. I had already noticed a little motion in it from time to time, but nothing like the incessant activity of the embryo fishes.  

I find no suckers’ nests yet. There has been no rise of the river of any consequence. 

At Ed. Hoar's in the evening. I look at one of his slides through a microscope, at the infusorial skeletons of the navicula and dumb-bell infusoria etc. etc. with his microscope I see the heart beating in the embryo fish and the circulations distinctly along the body.

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

The river is a little higher on account of rain. See April 14, 1855 (“The river has been steadily rising since the first of April.”)

My Rana halecina spawn in tumbler is now flatted out and begins to betray the pollywog form. See April 7, 1858 (“ Putting some of the Rana halecina spawn in a tumbler of water. . . .”); April 17, 1858 (“The Rana halecina spawn in tumbler begins to struggle free of the ova”); April 18, 1858 (“Put some R. halecina spawn which has flatted out in a ditch on Hubbard’s land.”);April 19, 1858 ("I find that my Rana halecina spawn in the house is considerably further advanced than that left in the meadows.")

I see the heart beating in the embryo fish and the circulations distinctly along the body. See April 7, 1858 (" I see the embryo, already fish-like (?), curved round the yolk, with a microscope"); April 16, 1858 (" For more than a week the embryos have been conspicuously active, as they lie curved in the egg. This morning I found that they were suddenly hatched, and more than half of them were free of the egg.")

. 

Ranunculus reptans is abundantly out at mouth of brook

July 8. 

3 P. M. — To Baker Farm by boat. 

River down to lower side of long rock.  When I land on Hosmer flat shore, start a large water adder, apparently running on the bank. It ran at once into the river and was lost under the pads. 

Ranunculus reptans is abundantly out at mouth of brook, Baker shore. Is that small sparganium there, now abundantly out, about eighteen inches high, with leaves narrow and convex below, concave above, the same species with the larger? Some in press. 

Got the downy woodpecker’s nest, some days empty.

Find several large and coarse Potentilla arguta, two and a half feet high and more, at Bittern Cliff, nearly out of bloom. Flowers in crowded corymbs. They are white, not yellow, as Gray calls them. 

In the side hill wood-lot (or spring wood-lot) behind, where the wood was cut last winter, poke-leaved milkweed (Asclepias phytolaccoides), apparently a day or two, and Circaea alpina, some days, a foot high with opaque leaves and bracts (in press). This I find to be the same with the small, also bracted, one at Corner Spring (whose leaves were perhaps more transparent when in shade, but which now grows larger in sun).

Sophia saw this afternoon two great snap-turtles fighting near the new stone bridge, making a great commotion in the river and not regarding the spectators, she and another, and a teamster who stopped his team to observe them. 

Sam Wheeler, who did not know there were snap turtles here, says he saw opposite to his boarding house, on the sidewalk, in New York, the other day, a green turtle which weighed seven hundred and twenty pounds, which in a short time dropped eggs enough to fill a vessel some feet in diameter. He partook of some of the soup made of it, and there were several eggs in it, which were luscious. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  July 8, 1856


Today's entry continues:

After Jules Gérard, the lion-killer, had hunted lions for some time, and run great risk of losing his life, though he struck the lions in the right place with several balls, the lions steadily advancing upon him even though they had got a death-wound, he discovered that it was not enough to be brave and take good aim, — that his balls, which were of lead, lacked penetration and were flattened against the lions’ bones; and accordingly he sent to France and obtained balls which were pointed with steel and went through and through both shoulder blades.

So I should say that the weapons or balls which the Republican Party uses lacked penetration, and their foe steadily advances nevertheless, to tear them in pieces, with their well-aimed balls flattened on his forehead.

In Gérard’s book I find, according to a Mohammedan tradition, “when the lion roars, he says, ‘Ya rabbi, ma tecallot mi a la ed-dabeome,’ which signifies ‘Seignior, deliver to my power the wicked only, and let the good go free.”’