Counting rings of the stumps of a primitive wood cut in the last century

October 29.

P. M. – To Eb. Hubbard’s old black birch bill.

Henry Shattuck’s is a new pitch pine wood, say thirty years old.

The western, or greater, part contains not a single seed-bearing white pine.

It is a remarkable proof of my theory, for it contains thousands of little white pines but scarcely one little pitch pine. It is also well stocked with minute oak seedlings.

It is a dense wood, say a dozen rods wide by three or four times as long, running east and west, with an oak wood on the north, from which the squirrels brought the acorns.

A strip of nearly the same width of the pitch pine was cut apparently within a year on the south (a part of the above), and has just been harrowed and sown with rye, and still it is all dotted over with the little oak seedlings between the stumps, which are perhaps unnoticed by Shattuck, but if he would keep his plow and fire out he would still have a pretty green patch there by next fall.

A thousand little red flags (changed oak leaves) already wave over the green rye amid the stumps.

The farmer stumbles over these in his walk, and sweats while he endeavors to clear the land of them, and yet wonders how oaks ever succeed to pines, as if he did not consider what these are.

Where these pines are dense they are slender and tall.

On the edge or in open land they are more stout and spreading.

Again, as day before yesterday, sitting on the edge of a pine wood, I see a jay fly to a white oak half a dozen rods off in the pasture, and, gathering an acorn from the ground, hammer away at it under its foot on a limb of the oak, with an awkward and rapid seesaw or teetering motion, it has to lift its head so high to acquire the requisite momentum. The jays scold about almost every white oak tree, since we hinder their coming to it.

At some of the white oaks visited on the 11th, where the acorns were so thick on the ground and trees, I now find them perhaps nearly half picked up, yet perhaps little more than two thirds spoiled.

The good appear to be all sprouted now.

There are certainly many more sound ones here than at Beck Stow’s and Hubbard’s Grove, and it looks as if the injury had been done by frost, but perhaps some of it was done by the very heavy rains of September alone.

Yesterday and to-day I have walked rapidly through extensive chestnut woods without seeing what I thought was a seedling chestnut, yet I can soon find them in our Concord pines a quarter or half a mile from the chestnut woods.

Several have expressed their surprise to me that they cannot find a seedling chestnut to transplant.  I think that it is with them precisely as with the oaks; not only a seedling is more difficult to distinguish in a chestnut wood, but it is really far more rare there than in the adjacent pine, mixed, and oak woods.

After considerable experience in searching for these and seedling oaks, I have learned to neglect the chestnut and oak woods and go only to the neighboring woods of a different species for them. Only that course will pay.

On the side of E. Hubbard’s hill I see an old chestnut stump some two feet in diameter and nearly two feet high, and its outside and form well kept, yet all the inside gone; and from this shot up four sprouts in a square around it, which were cut down seven or eight years ago.

Their rings number forty-six, and they are quite sound, so that the old stump was cut some fifty-three years ago. This is the oldest stump of whose age I am certain.

Hence I have no doubt that there are many stumps left in this town which were cut in the last century.

I am surprised to find on this hill (cut some seven or eight years ago) many remarkably old stumps wonderfully preserved, especially on the north side the hill, — walnuts, white oak and other oaks, and black birch.

One white oak is eighteen and a half inches in diameter and has one hundred and forty-three rings. This is very one-sided in its growth, the centre being just four inches from the north side, or thirty - six rings to an inch. Of course I counted the other side.

Another, close by, gave one hundred and forty-one rings, another white oak fifteen and a half inches in diameter had one hundred and fifty-five rings. It has so smooth (sawed off) and solid, almost a polished or marble- ike, surface that I could not at first tell what kind of wood it was.

Another white oak the same as last in rings, i. e. one hundred and fifty-five, twenty-four inches in  diameter. All these were sound to the very core, so that I could see the first circles, and I suspect that they were seedlings.

The smaller, but oldest ones had grown very slowly at first, and yet more slowly at last, but after some sixty five years they had then grown much faster for about fifteen years, and then grew slower and slower to the last. The rings were exceedingly close together near the outside, yet not proportionably difficult to count.

For aught that appeared, they might have continued to grow a century longer.

The stumps are far apart, so that this formed an open grove, and that probably made the wood sounder and more durable.

On the south slope many white pines had been cut about forty-six years ago, or when the chestnut was, amid the oaks. I suppose that these were seedlings, and perhaps the hill was cleared soon after the settlement of the town, and after a while pines sprang up in the open land, and seedling oaks under the pines, and, the latter being cut near the end of the seventeenth century, those oaks sprang up, with or without pines, but all but these were cut down when they were about sixty years old.

If these are seedlings, then seedlings make much the best timber.

I should say that the pasture oaks generally must be seedlings on account of their age, being part of the primitive wood.

I suspect that sprouts, like the chestnut, for example, may grow very rapidly, and make large trees in comparatively few years, but they will be decaying [?] as fast at the core as they are growing at the circumference.  The stumps of chestnuts, especially sprouts are very shaky. 

It is with men as with trees; you must grow slowly to last long.


The oldest of these oaks began their existence about 1697.  I doubt if there were any as old trees in our primitive wood as stood in this town fifty years ago.

The healthiest of the primitive wood, having at length more room, light, and air, probably grew larger than its ancestors.

Some of the black birch stumps gave about one hundred rings.

The pasture oak which Sted Buttrick cut some seven or eight years ago, northeast of this, was, as near as I could tell, — one third was calculation, — some one hundred years old only, though larger than any of these.

The fine chips which are left on the centre of a large stump preserve it moist there, and rapidly hasten its decay.

The site of the last - named pasture oak was easily discovered, by a very large open grass - sward where no sweet - fern, lambkill, huckleberry, and brakes grew, as they did almost everywhere else.

This may be because of the cattle assembling under the oak, and so killing the bushes and at the same time manuring the ground for grass.

There is more chestnut in the northern part of the town than I was aware of.

The first large wood north of Ponkawtasset is oak and chestnut. East of my house.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 29, 1860

It is a remarkable proof of my theory, for it contains thousands of little white pines . stocked with minute oak seedlings. See May 13, 1856 ("I suspect that I can throw a little light on the fact that when a dense pine wood is cut down oaks, etc., may take its place. "); September 24, 1857("You would have said that there was not a hardwood tree in it, young or old, though I afterward found . . . on looking closely over its floor, that, . . .there was, as often as every five feet, a little oak, three to twelve inches high, and in one place I found a green acorn dropped by the base of a tree. I was surprised, I confess, to find my own theory so perfectly proved."); June 3, 1856 (“As I have said before, it seems to me that the squirrels, etc., disperse the acorns, etc., amid the pines, . . . If the pine wood had been surrounded by white oak, probably that would have come up after the pine.”) and The Succession of Forest Trees (“If a pine wood is surrounded by a white-oak one chiefly, white-oaks may be expected to succeed when the pines are cut.”)

It is with men as with trees; you must grow slowly to last long. See November 5, 1860 ("Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to an extreme old age.  This wood is a hundred to a hundred and sixty years old.”);   July 19, 1851 (“Methinks my seasons revolve more slowly than those of nature; I am differently timed. . . . If my curve is large, why bend it to a smaller circle?”)

As day before yesterday, sitting on the edge of a pine wood, I see a jay fly to a white oak half a dozen rods off in the pasture, and, gathering an acorn from the ground, hammer away at it under its foot on a limb of the oak See October 27, 1860 (“I see a jay, which was screaming at me, fly to a white oak eight or ten rods from the wood in the pasture and directly alight on the ground, pick up an acorn, and fly back into the woods with it. This was one, perhaps the most effectual, way in which this wood was stocked with the numerous little oaks which I saw under that dense white pine grove.”) ;  The Succession of Forest Trees (“I can confirm what William Bart ram wrote to Wilson, the ornithologist, that " The jay is one of the most useful agents in the economy of nature, for disseminating forest trees"”) 

To Baker’s old chestnut lot near Flint’s Pond

October 26. 

P. M. – To Baker’s old chestnut lot near Flint’s Pond.

As I go through what was formerly the dense pitch pine lot on Thrush Alley (G. Hubbard’s), I observe that the present growth is scrub oak, birch, oaks of various kinds, white pines, pitch pines, willows, and poplars. Apparently, the birch, oaks, and pitch pines are the oldest of the trees.

From the number of small white pines in the neighboring pitch pine wood, I should have expected to find larger and also more white pines here. It will finally become a mixed wood of oak and white and pitch pine.

There is much cladonia in the lot. 

Observed yesterday that the row of white pines set along the fence on the west side of Sleepy Hollow had grown very fast, apparently from about the time they were set out, or the last three years. Several had made grow the fastest at just this age, or after they get to be about five feet high? 

I see to-day sprouts from chestnut stumps which are two and a half feet in diameter (i. e. the stumps). One of these large stumps is cut quite low and hollowing, so as to hold water as well as leaves, and the leaves prevent the water from drying up. It is evident that in such a case the stump rots sooner than if high and roof like. 

I remember that there were a great many hickories with R. W. E.’s pitch pines when I lived there, but now there are but few comparatively, and they appear to have died down several times and come up again from the root. I suppose it is mainly on account of frosts, though perhaps the fires have done part of it.

Are not hickories most commonly found on hills? There are a few hickories in the open land which I once cultivated there, and these may have been planted there by birds or squirrels. It must be more than thirty-five years since there was wood there. 

I find little white pines under the pitch pines (of E.), near the pond end, and few or no little pitch pines, but between here and the road about as many of one as of the other, but the old pines are much less dense that way, or not dense at all. 

This is the season of the fall when the leaves are whirled through the air like flocks of birds, the season of birch spangles, when you see afar a few clear-yellow leaves left on the tops of the birches. 

It was a mistake for Britton to treat that Fox Hollow lot as he did. I remember a large old pine and chestnut wood there some twenty years ago . He came and cut it off and burned it over, and ever since it has been good for nothing. I mean that acre at the bottom of the hollow.

It is now one of those frosty hollows so common in Walden Woods, where little grows, sheep’s fescue grass, sweet-fern, hazelnut bushes, and oak scrubs whose dead tops are two or three feet high, while the still living shoots are not more than half as high at their base. They have lingered so long and died down annually.

At length I see a few birches and pines creeping into it, which at this rate in the course of a dozen years more will suggest a forest there.

Was this wise? 

Examined the stumps in the Baker chestnut lot which was cut when I surveyed it in the spring of’52.  They were when cut commonly from fifty to sixty years old (some older, some younger).

The sprouts from them are from three to six inches thick, and may average-the largest — four inches, and eighteen feet high. The wood is perhaps near half oak sprouts, and these are one and a half to four inches thick, or average two and a half, and not so high as the chestnut.

Some of the largest chestnut stumps have sent up no sprout, yet others equally large and very much more decayed have sent up sprouts. Can this be owing to the different time when they were cut? The cutting was after April.

The largest sprouts I chanced to notice were from a small stump in low ground. Some hemlock stumps there had a hundred rings.

Was overtaken by a sudden thunder-shower.

Cut a chestnut sprout two years old. It grew about five and a half feet the first year and three and a half the next, and was an inch in diameter. The tops of these sprouts, the last few inches, had died in the winter, so that a side bud continued them, and this made a slight curve in the sprout, thus: There was on a cross-section, of course, but one ring of pores within the wood, just outside the large pith, the diameter of the first year’s growth being just half an inch, radius a fourth of an inch.

The thickness of the second year’s growth was the same, or one fourth, but it was distinctly marked to the naked eye with about seven concentric lighter lines, which, I suppose, marked so many successive growths or waves of growth, or seasons in its year.

These were not visible through a microscope of considerable power, but best to the naked eye.

Probably you could tell a seedling chestnut from a vigorous sprout, however old or large, provided the heart were perfectly sound to the pith, by the much more rapid growth of the last the first half-dozen years of its existence. 

There are scarcely any chestnuts this year near Britton’s, but I find as many as usual east of Flint’s Pond. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 26, 1860

It was a mistake for Britton to treat that Fox Hollow lot as he did. He came and cut it off and burned it over, and ever since it has been good for nothing. See  October 16, 1860 (" I have come up here this afternoon to see the dense white pine lot beyond the pond, . . .To my surprise and chagrin, I find that the fellow who calls himself its owner has burned it all over and sowed winter-rye here.. . .He needs to have a guardian placed over him. A forest-warden should be appointed by the town. Overseers of poor husbandmen.")

Probably you could tell a seedling chestnut from a vigorous sprout, however old or large, by the much more rapid growth of the last the first half-dozen years of its existence. See November 6, 1857 ("seventy years ago . . .there was a large old chestnut by the roadside there, which being cut, two sprouts came up which have become the largest chestnut trees by the wall now.")

There are scarcely any chestnuts this year near Britton’s, but I find as many as usual east of Flint’s Pond. See August 14, 1856 ("All the Flint's Pond wood-paths are strewn with these gay-spotted chestnut leaves") October 18, 1856 ("A-chestnutting down Turnpike and across to Britton's, thinking that the rain now added to the frosts would relax the burs which were open and let the nuts drop . . ."); October 22, 1857("Chestnut trees are almost bare. Now is just the time for chestnuts."); October 23, 1855 ("Now is the time for chestnuts. A stone cast against the trees shakes them down in showers upon one’s head and shoulders."); December 22, 1859 ("I see in the chestnut woods near Flint's Pond where squirrels have collected the small chestnut burs left         the trunks on the snow.")

October 26. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, October 26 and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The seasons and all their changes are in me.

Seedling shrub oaks in a birch wood.

September 7. 

P. M. – To Cardinal Shore  

I see many seedling shrub oaks springing up in Potter's  field by the swamp-side, some (of last year) in the open pasture, but many more in the birch wood half a dozen rods west from the shrub oaks by the path. 

The former were dropped by the way. They plant in birch woods as in pines. This small birch wood has been a retreat for squirrels and birds. 

When I examine the little oaks in the open land there is always an effete acorn with them. 

Common rose hips as handsome as ever.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 7, 1860

They plant in birch woods as in pines. See June 3, 1856 (“As I have said before, it seems to me that the squirrels, etc., disperse the acorns, etc., amid the pines,") See also The Succession of Forest Trees ("It has long been known to observers that squirrels bury nuts in the ground, but I am not aware that any one has thus accounted for the regular succession of forests. . . .In short, they who have not attended particularly to this subject are but little aware to what an extent quadrupeds and birds are employed, especially in the fall, in collecting, and so disseminating and planting the seeds of trees.")


When I examine the little oaks in the open land there is always an effete acorn with them. See May 29, 1859 ("I pick up an oak tree three inches high with the acorn attached.")

A beautiful law of distribution.

April 22 

The Salix purpurea in prime, out probably three or four days; say 19th. 

Arbor-vitae, how long? 

P. M. — In a fine rain, around Walden. 

I go by a Populus grandidentata on the eastern sand slope of the Deep Cut just after entering, whose aments (which apparently here began to shed pollen yesterday) in scattered clusters at the ends of the bare twigs, but just begun to shed their pollen, not hanging loose and straight yet, but curved, are a very rich crimson, like some ripe fruit, as mulberries, seen against the sand. I cannot represent the number in a single cluster, but they are much the handsomest now before the crimson anthers have burst, and are all the more remarkable for the very open and bare habit of the tree. 

When setting the pines at Walden the last three days,

I was sung to by the field sparrow.

For music I heard their jingle from time to time.

That the music the pines were set to, and

I have no doubt they will build many a nest

under their shelter. 

It would seem as if such a field as this —

a dry open or half-open pasture in the woods,

with small pines scattered in it —

was well-nigh, if not quite, abandoned to

this one alone among the sparrows. 

The surface of the earth is portioned out among them.

By a beautiful law of distribution,

one creature does not too much interfere with another.

          I do not hear the song sparrow here. 

As the pines gradually increase,

and a wood-lot is formed,

these birds will withdraw to new pastures,

and the thrushes, etc., will take their place. 

[S]o my pines were established

by the song of the field sparrow.

They commonly place their nests here

under the shelter of a little pine in the field. 

As I planted there, wandering thoughts visited me, which I have now forgotten. My senses were busily suggesting them, though I was unconscious of their origin. 

E. g., I first consciously found myself entertaining the thought of a carriage on the road, and directly after I was aware that I heard it. No doubt I had heard it before, or rather my ears had, but I was quite unconscious of it, — it was not a fact of my then state of existence; yet such was the force of habit, it affected my thoughts nevertheless, so double, if not treble, even, are we. 

Sometimes the senses bring us information quicker than we can receive it. Perhaps these thoughts which run in ruts by themselves while we are engaged in some routine may be called automatic. 

I distinctly entertained the idea of a carriage, without the slightest suspicion how it had originated or been suggested to my mind. I have no doubt at all that my ears had heard it, but my mind, just then preoccupied, had refused to attend to it. 

This suggests that most, if not all, indeed, of our ideas may be due to some sort of sensuous impression of which we may or may not be conscious. 

April 22, 2019

This afternoon there is an east wind, and a rain-storm accordingly beginning, the eighth of the kind with this wind. 

I still see a large flock of grackles. 

Within a few days I pricked my fingers smartly against the sharp, stiff points of some sedge coming up. At Heywood's meadow, by the railroad, this sedge, rising green and dense with yellow tips above the withered clumps, is very striking, suggesting heat, even a blaze, there. 

Scare up partridges feeding about the green springy places under the edge of hills. See them skim or scale away for forty rods along and upward to the woods, into which they swiftly scale, dodging to right and left and avoiding the twigs, yet without once flapping the wings after having launched themselves.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 22, 1859

I go by a Populus grandidentata on the eastern sand slope of the Deep Cut  whose aments are a very rich crimson. See April 3, 1853 ("The female Populus tremuliformis catkins, narrower and at present more red and somewhat less downy than the male, west side of railroad at Deep Cut, quite as forward as the male in this situation");  April 8, 1853 ("The male Populus grandidentata . . .shows some of its red anthers long before it opens. There is a female on the left, on Warren's Path at Deep Cut.") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Big-toothed Aspen

A field as this — a dry open or half-open pasture in the woods, with small pines scattered in it — [is]abandoned to this one alone among the sparrows. See  April 19, 1860 ("Hear the field sparrow sing on his dry upland, it being a warm day, and see the small blue butterfly hovering over the dry leaves.") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Field Sparrow

Our ideas may be due to some sort of sensuous impression of which we may or may not be conscious. Compare November 18, 1851 ("The chopper who works in the woods all day for many weeks or months at a time becomes intimately acquainted with them in his way. He is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them. He really forgets himself, forgets to observe, and at night he dreams of the swamp, its phenomena and events. Not so the naturalist; enough of his unconscious life does not pass there.")

At Heywood's meadow, by the railroad, this sedge, rising green and dense with yellow tips above the withered clumps, is very striking. See June 19, 1859 ("The prevailing sedge of Heywood Meadow by Bartlett Hill-side, that which showed yellow tops in the spring, is the Carex stricta. On this the musquash there commonly makes its stools. A tall slender sedge with conspicuous brown staminate spikes") See also April 22, 1852 ("The early sedge (Carex marginata) grows on the side of the Cliffs in little tufts with small yellow blossoms, i. e. with yellow anthers, low in the grass.") and  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Sedges in Early Spring

This afternoon there is an east wind, and a rain-storm accordingly beginning, the eighth of the kind with this wind. See April 22, 1852 ("It still rains. The water is over the road at Flint's Bridge . . . This makes five stormy days. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday."); April 22, 1856 ("It has rained two days and nights, and now the sun breaks out, but the wind is still easterly, and the storm probably is not over . . . These rain-storms -- this is the third day of one -- characterize 'the season, and belong rather to winter than to summer.")

Scare up partridges feeding about the green springy places under the edge of hills. See April 22, 1852 ("Our dog sends off a partridge with a whir, far across the open field and the river, like a winged bullet. ") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Partridge.

This country is so new that species of fishes and birds and quadrupeds inhabit it which science has not yet detected.

November 27. 

Those barren hollows and plains in the neighborhood of Walden are singular places. I see many which were heavily wooded fifteen or thirty years ago now covered only with fine sedge, sweet-fern, or a few birches, willows, poplars, small wild cherries, panicled cornels, etc. 

They need not amount to hollows at all: many of them are glades merely, and all that region is elevated, but the surrounding higher ground, though it may be only five or ten feet higher, will be covered with a good growth. 

One should think twice before he cut off such places. Perhaps they had better never be laid bare, but merely thinned out. We do not begin to understand the treatment of woodland yet. 

On such spots you will see various young trees—and some of them which I have named —dead as if a fire had run through them, killed apparently by frost. 

I find scarlet oak acorns like this

in form not essentially different from those of the black oak, except that the scales of the black stand out more loose and bristling about the fruit. So all scarlet oak acorns do not regularly taper to a point from a broad base, and Emerson represents but one form of the fruit. The leaf of this was not very deeply cut, was broad for its length. 

I got seventeen more of those little bream of yesterday. As I now count, the dorsal fin-rays are 9-10 (Girard says 9-11), caudal 17 (with apparently 4 short on each side), anal 3-11, pectoral 11, ventral 1-5. They have about seven transverse dark bars, a vertical dark mark under eye, and a dark spot on edge of operculum. They appear to be the young of the Pomotis obesus, described by Charles Girard to the Natural History Society in April, ’54, obtained by Baird in fresh water about Hingham and Charles River in Holliston. 

I got more perfect specimens than the bream drawn above. They are exceedingly pretty seen floating dead on their sides in a bowl of water, with all their fins spread out. From their size and form and position they cannot fail to remind you of coins in the basin.

The conspicuous transverse bars distinguish them at once. The dorsal fin consists of two parts, the foremost of shorter stiff, spiny rays, the other eleven at least half as long again and quite flexible and waving, falling together like a wet rag out of water. So, with the anal fin, the three foremost rays are short (and spiny, as I see, and one of each of the ventral (according to Girard, and to me). These foremost rays in each case look like slender raking masts, and their points project beyond the thin web of the fin, whose edge looks like the ropes which stretch from masthead to masthead, loopwise. 

The stiff and spiny foremost part of the fins evidently serves for a cut-water which bears the brunt of any concussion and perhaps may serve for weapons of offense, while the more ample and gently waving flexible after part more especially guides the motions of the fish. 

The transverse bars are continued across these parts of the dorsal and anal fins, as the markings of a turtle across its feet or flippers; methinks the fins of the minnows are peculiarly beautiful. 

How much more remote the newly discovered species seems to dwell than the old and familiar ones, though both inhabit the same pond! Where the Pomotis obesus swims must be a new country, unexplored by science. The seashore may be settled, but aborigines dwell unseen only thus far inland. This country is so new that species of fishes and birds and quadrupeds inhabit it which science has not yet detected. The water which such a fish swims in must still have a primitive forest decaying in it.



H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 27, 1858

I got seventeen more of those little bream of yesterday. See November 26, 1858 (" a great many minnows about one inch long . . . shaped like bream, but had the transverse bars of perch.")

So all scarlet oak acorns do not regularly taper to a point from a broad base. See September 12, 1854 ("[White oak acorns] are small and very neat light-green acorns, with small cups, commonly arranged two by two close together, often with a leaf growing between them"); January 19, 1859 ("Gathered a scarlet oak acorn . . .with distinct fine dark stripes or  rays, such as a Quercus ilicifolia has.");  September 18, 1858 ("the small shrub oak . . .with its pretty acorns striped dark and light alternately. [The black oak acorns also slightly marked thus.]") also  September 30, 1854 ("The conventional acorn of art is of course of no particular species, but the artist might find it worth his while to study Nature’s varieties again.")

This country is so new that species of fishes and birds and quadrupeds inhabit it which science has not yet detected. See September 9, 1856 ("The skin and skull of a panther (Felis concolor) (cougar, catamount, painter, American lion, puma) . . . gave one a new idea of our American forests and the vigor of nature here.").

November 27. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  November 27

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."

I passed through that chestnut wood in the hollow southeast of Curly-pate.

November 6. 

Very warm but rather cloudy weather, after rain in the night. 

Wind southwest. Thermometer on north of the house 70° at 12 M. Indian summer. The cocks crow in the soft air. They are very sensitive to atmospheric changes. 

P. M. — To Curly-pate via old Carlisle road. 

Stedman Buttrick tells me that Dr. Ripley used to have his pork packed with the best pieces at the top of the barrel, and when some parishioner wondered at it, that he should thus eat these first, he answered that when packed thus the topmost were the best all the way through. 

He said that his grandfather lived in the Jarvis house, and that the other old house whose upper story projected over the lower like the Hunt house, and which I saw in the picture of Concord Fight, stood close to his own house, and he pulled it down when he was sixteen. 

I passed through that chestnut wood in the hollow southeast of Curly-pate. Turning over the wet chestnut leaves in the hollows, looking for nuts, I found a red backed salamander, between three and four inches long, bluish-gray beneath (Salamandra erythronota). It jerked itself about in a lively manner, trying to hide itself under the leaves, and would quickly slip out of my fingers. Its motions appeared to partake of those of a snake and a frog, — between a squirm and a hop. It was not particularly swift, yet, from the character of the motion and its glossiness, it was glancing. 

A dozen rods further I turned another, very similar but without a red back, but rather slightly clay-colored. I did not observe any transverse bands; else it might be the S. fasciata. 

When I came out on to the old Carlisle road in the dusk on my return, I saw Brooks Clark coming homeward, with his axe in his hand and both hands behind his back, being bent almost double. He said he was over eighty. Some years ago he bought some land up that way, and, the birches having sprung up there, he called it his birch pasture. There was enough birch wood there to carry him through the winter, and he was now cutting it. 

He remembered when they began to burn lime there, and bought the right to get out stone of Easterbrooks more than sixty years ago. It was Peter Barrett that began it. The lime sold for $5.00 a cask (larger casks than now). But the stone was difficult to get out.

He remembers seeing the mowers at work in the meadow where Stedman Buttrick's handsome pine and maple wood is, seventy years ago, and where there was a large old chestnut by the roadside there, which being cut, two sprouts came up which have become the largest chestnut trees by the wall now. 

As for the yellow birch cellar-hole, Ephraim Brown told him that old Henry Flint (an ancestor of Clark's wife) dug it, and erected the frame of a house there, but never finished it, selling out, going to live by the river. It was never finished. 

Clark's father told him that he remembered when there were no fences between his house and Lawrence's; it was all open. This road was the new one; the bridle-road the old one. 

Minott is a very pleasing figure in nature. He improves every scenery, — he and his comrades, Harry Hooper, John Wyman, Oliver Williams, etc. If he gets into a pond hole he disturbs it no more than a water-spirit for me.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 6, 1857

The yellow birch cellar-hole. See May 18, 1857 ("There is a very grand and picturesque old yellow birch in the old cellar northwest the yellow birch swamp."); September 2, 1857 ("The third, or largest, yellow birch, at the cellar was. . . ten feet nine inches in circumference.. . .The roots inclose some cellar stones. ")

I found a red backed salamander, between three and four inches long, bluish-gray beneath (Salamandra erythronota). See June 17, 1856 ("Went to Rev. Horace James’s reptiles (Orthodox). . . .Showed me . . . alive in bottle, with moss and water, the violet-colored salamander (S. venenosa) with yellow spots (five or six inches long), probably same I found in stump at Walden; and, in spirits, smaller, the S. erythronota, with a conspicuous red back.")

Brooks Clark remembers seeing the mowers at work in the meadow where Stedman Buttrick's handsome pine and maple wood is, seventy years ago . . .See October 20, 1857 ("That very dense and handsome maple and pine grove opposite the pond-hole on this old Carlisle road is Ebby Hubbard's. [Sted Buttrick's, according to Melvin.] Melvin says there are those alive who remember mowing there.")

This is the way forests are planted.

September 24. 

Thursday. A. M. — Up the Assabet. 

The river is considerably raised and also muddied by the recent rains. 

I saw a red squirrel run along the bank under the hemlocks with a nut in its mouth. He stopped near the foot of a hemlock, and, hastily pawing a hole with his fore feet, dropped the nut, covered it up, and re treated part way up the trunk of the tree, all in a few moments. 

I approached the shore to examine the deposit, and he, descending betrayed no little anxiety for his treasure and made two or three motions to recover the nut before he retreated. Digging there, I found two pignuts joined together, with their green shells on, buried about an inch and a half in the soil, under the red hemlock leaves. 

This, then, is the way forests are planted. This nut must have been brought twenty rods at least and was buried at just the right depth. If the squirrel is killed, or neglects its deposit, a hickory springs up.


P. M. — I walk to that very dense and handsome white pine grove east of Beck Stow’s Swamp. It is about fifteen rods square, the trees large, ten to twenty inches in diameter. It is separated by a wall from another pine wood with a few oaks in it on the south east, and about thirty rods north and west are other pine and oak woods. 

Standing on the edge of the wood and looking through it,—for it is quite level and free from underwood, mostly bare, red-carpeted ground, you would have said that there was not a hardwood tree in it, young or old, though I afterward found on one edge a middling-sized sassafras, a birch, a small tupelo, and two little scarlet oaks, but, what was more interesting, I found, on looking closely over its floor, that, alternating with thin ferns and small blueberry bushes, there was, as often as every five feet, a little oak, three to twelve inches high, and in one place I found a green acorn dropped by the base of a tree. 

I was surprised, I confess, to find my own theory so perfectly proved. These oaks, apparently, find such a locality unfavorable to their growth as long as the pines stand. I saw that some had been browsed by the cows which resort to the wood for shade. As an evidence that hardwood trees would not flourish under those circumstances, I found a red maple twenty five feet high recently prostrated, as if by the wind, but still covered with green leaves, the only maple in the wood, and also two birches decaying in the same position.

The ground was completely strewn with white pine cones, apparently thrown down by the squirrels, still generally green and closed, but many stripped of scales, about the base of almost every pine, sometimes all of them. Now and for a week a good time to collect them. You can hardly enter such a wood but you will hear a red squirrel chiding you from his concealment in some pine-top. It is the sound most native to the locality.

Minott tells of their finding near a bushel of chestnuts in a rock, when blasting for the mill brook, at that ditch near Flint's Pond. He said it was a gray squirrel's depot. 

I find the Lycopodium dendroideum, not quite out, just northwest of this pine grove, in the grass. It is not the variety obscurum, which grows at Trillium Wood, is more upright-branched and branches round.

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

I was surprised, I confess, to find my own theory so perfectly proved. See June 3, 1856 (“As I have said before, it seems to me that the squirrels, etc., disperse the acorns, etc., amid the pines,  . . .  If the pine wood had been surrounded by white oak, probably that would have come up after the pine.”) and The succession of forest trees (“If a pine wood is surrounded by a white-oak one chiefly, white-oaks may be expected to succeed when the pines are cut.”)

Now and for a week a good time to collect them. See September 16, 1857 ("On the trees many are already open. Say within a week have begun.”); October  16, 1855 “(P. M. —To the white pine grove beyond Beck Stow’s. What has got all the cones?”) and note to September 9, 1857 (“To the Hill for white pine cones.”)

Postpone your journey till the May storm is over.

May 20. 

Began to rain the latter part of yesterday, and rains all day against all desire and expectation, raising the river and, in low land, rotting the seed. Gardeners wish that their land had not been planted nor plowed. Postpone your journey till the May storm is over.

Starflower
May 20, 2017

It has been confidently asserted and believed that if the cold in the winter exceeded a certain degree it surely killed the peach blossoms. Last winter we had greater cold than has ever been generally observed here, and yet it is a remarkable spring for peach blossoms; thus once for all disproving that assertion. 

Everything in the shape of a peach tree blossoms this season, even a mutilated shrub on the railroad causeway, sprung from a stone which some passenger cast out. Nevertheless the lowest limbs, which were covered by the drifts, have blossomed much the earliest and fullest, as usual, and this after-blow is quite unexpected. Peach trees are revealed along fences where they were quite unobserved before. 

The expression in Sophocles' (Edipus at Colonos, "White Colonos," said to refer to the silvery soil, reminded me at first of the tracts now whitened by the pyrus blossoms, which may be mistaken for hoary rocks. Vide this description of Colonos. 

Have all the Canada plums that striking pink color at the base of the blossoms at last? 

I find that the corydalis sprig which I brought home five days ago keeps fresh and blossoms remarkably well in water, — its delicate bright flesh-colored or pink flowers and glaucous leaves! 

How suddenly, after all, pines seem to shoot up and fill the pastures! 

I wonder that the farmers do not earlier encourage their growth. To-day, perchance, as I go through some run-out pasture, I observe many young white pines dotting the field, where last year I had noticed only blackberry vines; but I see that many are already destroyed or injured by the cows which have dived into them to scratch their heads or for sport (such is their habit; they break off the leading shoot and bend down the others of different evergreens), or perchance where the farmer has been mowing them down, and I think the owner would rather have a pasture here than a wood-lot. A year or two later, as I pass through the same field, I am surprised to find myself in a flourishing young wood-lot, from which the cows are now carefully fenced out, though there are many open spaces, and I perceive how much further advanced it would have been if the farmer had been more provident and had begun to abet nature a few years earlier. 

It is surprising by what leaps — two or three feet in a season — the pines stretch toward the sky, affording shelter also to various hardwoods which plant themselves in their midst. 

I do not know a white pine in the town which has been set out twenty-five years.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 20, 1857

Postpone your journey till the May storm is over. See May 17, 1853 ("Does not summer begin after the May storm?”); compare May 13, 1852 (" They who do not walk in the woods in the rain never behold them in their freshest, most radiant and blooming beauty.”)

Have all the Canada plums that striking pink color at the base of the blossoms at last? See note to May 10, 1856 (“Mr. Prichard’s Canada plum will open as soon as it is fair weather.”)

White pines. See April 29, 1857 (“I am surprised to see how some blackberry pastures and other fields are filling up with pines, trees which I thought the cows had almost killed two or three years ago; so that what was then a pasture is now a young wood-lot.”); May 18, 1857 ("Many are now setting out pines and other evergreens, transplanting some wildness into the neighborhood of their houses. I do not know of a white pine that has been set out twenty-five years in the town. It is a new fashion.”); May 19, 1854 ("The white pine shoots are now two or three inches long generally, — upright light marks on the body of dark green.”); July 4, 1860 ("The white pine shoot which on the 19th of June had grown sixteen and a quarter inches and on the 27th twenty and three quarters is now twenty-three and an eighth inches long.”)

A sudden and decided progress in the season.

April 29. 

Purple finch sings on R. W. E.'s trees. 

P. M. — To Dugan Desert. 

At Tarbell's watering-place, see a dandelion, its conspicuous bright-yellow disk in the midst of a green space on the moist bank. It is thus I commonly meet with the earliest dandelion set in the midst of some liquid green patch. It seems a sudden and decided progress in the season. 

On the pitch pines beyond John Hosmer's, I see old cones within two feet of the ground on the trunk, — sometimes a circle of them around it, — which must have been formed on the young tree some fifteen years ago. 

Sweet-fern at entrance of Ministerial Swamp. 

A partridge there drums incessantly. C. says it makes his heart beat with it, or he feels it in his breast. 

I find that that clayey-looking soil on which the baeomyces grows is a very thin crust on common sand only. 

I have seen that pretty little hair-cap moss (Pogonatum brevicaule?) for a fortnight out at least; like little pine trees; the staminate pretty, cup-shaped and shorter. 

A steel-blue-black flattish beetle, which, handled, imparted a very disagreeable carrion-like scent to fingers. 

Miles's Pond is running off. The sweet-gale, willows, etc., which have been submerged and put back, begin to show themselves and are trying to catch up with their fellows. 

I am surprised to see how some blackberry pastures and other fields are filling up with pines, trees which I thought the cows had almost killed two or three years ago; so that what was then a pasture is now a young wood-lot. 

A little snow still lies in the road in one place, the relic of the snow of the 21st.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 29, 1857

See a dandelion, its conspicuous bright-yellow disk in the midst of a green space on the moist bank. See April 29, 1852 ("F. Wheeler, Jr., saw dandelions in bloom the 20th of April. Garfield's folks used them for greens . They grew in a springy place behind Brigham' s in the Corner.") April 29, 1855 ("Dandelions out yesterday, at least.");April 29, 1859 ("First observe the dandelion well out in R. W. E.'s yard"). See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Dandelion in Spring

C. says it makes his heart beat with it, or he feels it in his breast. See April 25, 1854 ("The first partridge drums in one or two places, as if the earth's pulse now beat audibly with the increased flow of life. It slightly flutters all Nature and makes her heart palpitate.”)

Get a glimpse of a hawk, the first of the season.

March 8. 

P. M. - To Hill. 

When I cut a white pine twig the crystalline sap instantly exudes. How long has it been thus?

Get a glimpse of a hawk, the first of the season. 

The tree sparrows sing a little on this still sheltered and sunny side of the hill, but not elsewhere. 

A partridge goes off from amid the pitch pines. It lifts each wing so high above its back and flaps so low, and withal so rapidly, that they present the appearance of a broad wheel, almost a revolving sphere, as it whirs off like a cannon-ball shot from a gun. 

Minott told me again the reason why the bushes were coming in so fast in the river meadows. Now that the mower takes nothing stronger than molasses and water, he darsn’t meddle with anything bigger than a pipe-stem.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 8, 1857

. . .the crystalline sap instantly exudes. . . .See March 9, 1855 ("bedewed with crystal drops of turpentine, . . . each one reflecting the world, colorless as light, like drops of dew heaven-distilled and trembling to their fall.")March 9, 1855

Get a glimpse of a hawk, the first of the season. See February 16, 1854 ("See two large hawks circling over the woods by Walden, hunting, — the first I have seen since December 15th."); March 15, 1856  ("Hear two hawks scream. There is something truly March-like in it, like a prolonged blast or whistling of the wind . . ."); March 15, 1860("A hen-hawk sails away from the wood southward.

 

These hawks, as usual, began to be common about the first of March, showing that they were returning from their winter quarters."); March 19, 1855 ("I see a hawk circling over a small maple grove through this calm air, ready to pounce on the first migrating sparrow that may have arrived. "); March 29, 1854 ("See two marsh hawks, white on rump . . . A hen-hawk, - two - circling over Cliffs."); March 30, 1853("The motions of a hawk correcting the flaws in the wind by raising his shoulder from time to time, are much like those of a leaf yielding to them. For the little hawks are hunting now. You have not to sit long on the Cliffs before you see one.")

It whirs off like a cannon-ball shot from a gun. See April 22, 1852 (" Our dog sends off a partridge with a whir, far across the open field and the river, like a winged bullet."); January 31, 1855 (".At length, on some signal which I did not perceive, they go with a whir, as if shot, off over the bushes."); December 14, 1855 ("They shoot off swift and steady . . .whirs off like a cannon-ball shot from a gun."); September 18, 1857 ("We started a pack of grouse, which went off with a whir like cannon-balls."). See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Partridge.

That grand old poem called Winter is round again

December 7

Sunday. P. M. — Take my first skate to Fair Haven Pond. 

It takes my feet a few moments to get used to the skates. I see the track of one skater who has preceded me this morning. This is the first skating. I keep mostly to the smooth ice about a rod wide next the shore commonly, where there was an overflow a day or two ago. There is not the slightest overflow to-day, and yet it is warm (thermometer at 25 at 4.30 p. m.). It must be that the river is falling. 

Now I go shaking over hobbly places, now shoot over a bridge of ice only a foot wide between the water and the shore at a bend, — Hubbard Bath, — always so at first there. Now I suddenly see the trembling surface of water where I thought were black spots of ice only around me. 

The river is rather low, so that I cannot keep the river above the Clamshell Bend. I am confined to a very narrow edging of ice in the meadow, gliding with unexpected ease through withered sedge, but slipping sometimes on a twig; again taking to the snow to reach the next ice, but this rests my feet; straddling the bare black willows, winding between the button-bushes, and following narrow threadings of ice amid the sedge, which bring me out to clear fields unexpectedly. 

Occasionally I am obliged to take a few strokes over black and thin-looking ice, where the neighboring bank is springy, and am slow to acquire confidence in it, but, returning, how bold I am! 

Where the meadow seemed only sedge and snow, I find a complete ice connection. 

At Cardinal Shore, as usual, there is a great crescent of hobbly ice, where, two or three days ago, the northwest wind drove the waves back up-stream and broke up the edge of the ice. This crescent is eight or ten rods wide and twice as many long, and consists of cakes of ice from a few inches to half a dozen feet in diameter, with each a raised edge all around, where apparently the floating sludge has been caught and accumulated. (Occasionally the raised edge is six inches high!) This is mottled black and white, and is not yet safe. It is like skating over so many rails, or the edges of saws. 

Now I glide over a field of white air-cells close to the surface, with coverings no thicker than egg-shells, cutting through with a sharp crackling sound. There are many of those singular spider-shaped dark places amid the white ice, where the surface water has run through some days ago. 

As I enter on Fair Haven Pond, I see already three pickerel-fishers retreating from it, drawing a sled through the Baker Farm, and see where they have been fishing, by the shining chips of ice about the holes. 

Others were here even yesterday, as it appears. The pond must have been frozen by the 4th at least. 

Some fisherman or other is ready with his reels and bait as soon as the ice will bear, whether it be Saturday or Sunday. Theirs, too, is a sort of devotion, though it be called hard names by the preacher, who perhaps could not endure the cold and wet any day. Perhaps he dines off their pickerel on Monday at the hotel. 

The ice appears to be but three or four inches thick. 

That grand old poem called Winter is round again without any connivance of mine. As I sit under Lee's Cliff, where the snow is melted, amid sere pennyroyal and frost-bitten catnep, I look over my shoulder upon an arctic scene. 

I see with surprise the pond a dumb white surface of ice speckled with snow, just as so many winters before, where so lately were lapsing waves or smooth reflecting water. 

I see the holes which the pickerel-fisher has made, and I see him, too, retreating over the hills, drawing his sled behind him. The water is already skimmed over again there. I hear, too, the familiar belching voice of the pond. 

It seemed as if winter had come without any interval since midsummer, and I was prepared to see it flit away by the time I again looked over my shoulder. It was as if I had dreamed it. 

But I see that the farmers have had time to gather their harvests as usual, and the seasons have revolved as slowly as in the first autumn of my life. 

The winters come now as fast as snowflakes. It is wonderful that old men do not lose their reckoning. It was summer, and now again it is winter. Nature loves this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeating it. 

So sweet and wholesome is the winter, so simple and moderate, so satisfactory and perfect, that her children will never weary of it. What a poem! an epic in blank verse, enriched with a million tinkling rhymes. It is solid beauty. 

It has been subjected to the vicissitudes of millions of years of the gods, and not a single superfluous ornament remains. The severest and coldest of the immortal critics have shot their arrows at and pruned it till it cannot be amended. 

The swamp white oak leaves are like the shrub oak in having two colors above and beneath. They are considerably curled, so as to show their silvery lining, though firm. Hardy and handsome, with a fair silver winter lining. 

Am pleased to see the holes where men have dug for money, since they remind me that some are dreaming still like children, though of impracticable things, — dreaming of finding money, and trying to put their dream in practice. It proves that men live Arabian nights and days still. I would they should have even that kind of faith than none at all. If any silly or abominable or superstitious practice ever prevailed among any savage race, just that may be repeated in the most civilized society to-day. 

You will see full-grown woods where the oaks and pines or birches are separated by right lines, growing in squares or other rectilinear figures, because different lots were cut at different times.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 7, 1856


Take my first skate to Fair Haven Pond. See  December 6, 1854 ("I see thick ice and boys skating all the way to Providence, but know not when it froze, I have been so busy writing my lecture.");  December 13, 1859 ("My first true winter walk is perhaps that which I take on the river, or where I cannot go in the summer. . . . Now that the river is frozen we have a sky under our feet also."); December 14, 1850 ("I walk on Loring's Pond to three or four islands there which I have never visited, not having a boat in the summer."); December 14. 1851 ("The boys have been skating for a week, but I have had no time to skate for surveying. I have hardly realized that there was ice, though I have walked over it about this business."): December 15, 1855 ("The boys have skated. a little within two or three days, but it has not been thick enough to bear a man yet."); December 19, 1854 (" Last night was so cold that the river closed up almost everywhere, and made good skating where there had been no ice to catch the snow of the night before."); December 20, 1854 ( P. M. — Skate to Fair Haven.”)

The winters come now as fast as snowflakes. It was summer, and now again it is winter. See July 19, 1851 ("Yesterday it was spring, and to-morrow it will be autumn. Where is the summer then?”) Compare January 24, 1858 ("Between winter and summer there is, to my mind, an immeasurable interval.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, As the Seasons Revolve

That grand old poem called Winter is round again . . . See December 5, 1856 ("I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold,");  December 8, 1850 ( "The dear privacy and retirement and solitude which winter makes possible!"); December 11, 1855 ("The winter, with its snow and ice, . . . is as it was designed and made to be."); December 20, 1854 ("It has been a glorious winter day, its elements so simple . . ."); December 21, 1855 ("A few simple colors now prevail.”)

You will see full-grown woods where the oaks and pines or birches are separated by right lines. See October 16, 1860 ("I observe at a distance an oak wood- lot some twenty years old, with a dense narrow edging of pitch pines . . . I understand it and read its history easily before I get to it.")

December 7. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, December 7

That grand old poem

called Winter is round again –

Nature loves this rhyme.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, That grand old poem called Winter

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

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