Signs of Spring. Geese overhead.

March 27 and March 28. 

Surveying Ed. Hoar's farm in Lincoln. 

Fair, but windy and rather cool. 

March 27, 2020

Louis Minor tells me he saw some geese about the 23d.

If you scan the horizon at this season of the year
you are very likely to see
the undulating line
of migrating geese against the sky.

March 28, 1859

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 27 and 28, 1860

 Louis Minor tells me he saw some geese about the 23d. See March 23, 1856 ("I spend a considerable portion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals, my brute neighbors. By their various movements and migrations they fetch the year about to me. Very significant are the flight of geese"); March 24, 1859 ("C. sees geese go over again this afternoon. How commonly they are seen in still rainy weather like this! He says that when they had got far off they looked like a black ribbon almost perpendicular waving in the air"); March 27, 1857 (" Farmer says that he heard geese go over two or three nights ago."); March 28, 1858 ("After a cloudy morning, a warm and pleasant afternoon. I hear that a few geese were seen this morning. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: Geese Overhead

Twinflower

June 1.

A very windy day, the third, drowning the notes of birds, scattering the remaining apple blossoms. 

Rye, to my surprise, three or four feet high and glaucous. 

Cloudy and rain, threatening withal. 

Surveying at Holden wood-lot, I notice the Equisetum hyemale, its black-scaled flowerets now in many cases separated so as to show the green between, but not yet in open rings or whorls like the limosum.

Twinflower
(Linnaea borealis)

I find the Linnaea borealis growing near the end of the ridge in this lot toward the meadow, near a large white pine stump recently cut. 

C. has found the arethusa out at Hubbard’s Close; say two or three days at a venture, there being considerable.






H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 1, 1855

I find the Linnaea borealis [twinflower] See June 4, 1855 ("The Linnæa borealis has grown an inch."); June 7, 1854 ("Linnæa abundantly out"); June 10, 1856 ("I find some linnaea well out and  note to June 9, 1851 ("Gathered the Linnæa borealis.")  See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Linnaea borealis (Twinflower) and  Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest, 19; On the Trail of Twinflower

Arethusa at Hubbard's Close. See May 30, 1854 ("I am surprised to find arethusas abundantly out in Hubbard's Close, maybe two or three days ... This high-colored plant shoots up suddenly, all flower, in meadows where it is wet walking. A superb flower.”); May 29, 1856 ("Arethusa bulbosa at Hubbard’s Close apparently a day or two.”).

June 1. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, June 1

Third windy day

scattering  apple blossoms

and drowning bird song.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Twinflower

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