I would make a chart of our life,
know why just this circle of creatures completes the world.
Henry Thoreau, April 18, 1852
Climbing the steep hills
through furnace-like heat / sweet-fern
as high as one's head.
I would rather sit at this table
with the sweet-fern twigs
between me and the sun
than at the king’s.
December 7, 1857
A warm reddish color –
wild and jagged leaf
alternately serrated
revealed by the snow.
March 9. Scare up a rabbit on the hillside by these ponds, which was gnawing a smooth sumach. See also where they have gnawed the red maple, sweet-fern, Populus grandidentata, white and other oaks (taking off considerable twigs at four or five cuts), amelanchier, and sallow; but they seem to prefer the smooth sumach to any of these. With this variety of cheap diet they are not likely to starve. March 9, 1855
March 12. As I passed the Joe Hosmer (rough-cast) house, I thought I never saw any bank so handsome as the russet hillside behind it. It is a very barren, exhausted soil, where the cladonia lichens abound, and the lower side is a flowing sand, There was the pale brown of the grass, red browns of some weeds (sarothra and pinweed probably), dark browns of huckleberry and sweet-fern stems, and the very visible green of the cladonias thirty rods off, and the rich brown fringes where the broken sod hung over the edge of the sand-bank. I did not see the browns of withered vegetation so rich last fall . . . A peculiar and unaccountable light seemed to fall on that bank or hillside, though it was thick storm all around. A sort of Newfoundland sun seemed to be shining on it. It was such a light that you looked around for the sun that might be shining on it . . . These tints of brown were as softly and richly fair and sufficing as the most brilliant autumnal tints . . . This kind of light, the air being full of rain and all vegetation dripping with it, brings out the browns wonderfully. March 12, 1859
March 26. This dry whitish-tawny or drab color of the fields — withered grass lit by the sun — is the color of a teamster’s coat. It is one of the most interesting effects of light now, when the sun, coming out of clouds, shines brightly on it. It is the fore-glow of the year. There is certainly a singular propriety in that color for the coat of a farmer or teamster or shepherd or hunter, who is required to be much abroad in our landscape at this season. It is in harmony with nature, and you are less conspicuous in the fields and can get nearer to wild animals for it . . . I had a suit once in which, methinks, I could glide across the fields unperceived half a mile in front of a farmer's windows. It was such a skillful mixture of browns, dark and light properly proportioned, with even some threads of green in it by chance. It was of loose texture and about the color of a pasture with patches of withered sweet-fern and lechea. I trusted a good deal to my invisibility in it when going across lots, and many a time I was aware that to it I owed the near approach of wild animals. March 26, 1860
April 4. On the barren railroad causeway, of pure sand, grow chiefly sallows, a few poplars, and sweet-fern and blackberry vines. When I look with my glass, I see the cold and sheeny snow still glazing the mountains. April 4, 1859
April 25. Though I see some amber on the sweet-fern, I am in doubt whether to say to-day or to-morrow. April 25, 1854
April 26. Sweet-fern (that does not flower) leafing. April 26, 1860
April 27. The meadow-sweet and sweet-fern are beginning to leaf, and the currant in garden. April 27, 1854
April 29. Sweet-fern at entrance of Ministerial Swamp. April 29, 1857
May 3. Sweet-fern opened apparently yesterday. May 3, 1855
May 3. Comptonia well out, how long? May 3, 1858
May 4. The second amelanchier, sweet-fern, and early thorn begin to leaf to-day. May 4, 1855
May 5. The sweet-fern now begins to shed its yellow pollen. May 5, 1852
May 10. From the hill, I look westward over the landscape. The deciduous woods are in their hoary youth, every expanding bud swaddled with downy webs. . . . (The sweet-fern leaves among odors now.) May 10, 1853
May 10. I observe that the fertile flowers of many plants are more late than the barren ones, as the sweet-gale (whose fertile are now in prime), the sweet-fern, etc. May 10, 1857
May 13. The sweet-fern shows minute green leaves expanding. May 13, 1852
May 17. I just notice the fertile sweet-fern bloom on tall plants, where the sterile catkins are falling off above it. Most plants have none. May 17, 1857
May 25. See the effect of frost on the sweet-fern. May 25, 1860
May 26. The air is full of terebinthine odors to-day, — the scent of the sweet-fern, etc. May 26, 1859
May 29. Farmer says that he finds the nests or holes or forms of the gray rabbit in holes about a foot or a foot and a half deep, made sideways into or under a tussock, especially amid the sweet-fern, in rather low but rather open ground. Has found seven young in one. May 29, 1860
June 9. The green fruit of the sweet-fern now. June 9, 1853
June 11. I perceive that scent from the young sweet-fern shoots and withered blossoms which made the first settlers of Concord to faint on their journey. June 11, 1856
June 14. Evening. — Went to Nawshawtuct by North Branch. Overtaken by a slight shower. The same increased fragrance from the ground-sweet-fern, etc.-as in the night, and for the like reason probably. June 14, 1851
July 5. It is growing warm again, but the warmth is different from that we have had. We lie in the shade of locust trees. Haymakers go by in a hay-rigging. I am reminded of berrying. I scent the sweet-fern and the dead or dry pine leaves . . . The warmth is something more normal and steady, ripening fruits . . . We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity. July 5, 1852
July 11. Passing now near Well Meadow Head toward Baker's orchard. The sweet-fern and indigo-weed fill the path up to one's middle, wetting us with dews so high. The leaves are shining and flowing. We wade through the luxuriant vegetation, seeing no bottom. July 11, 1851
July 13. Looking across the river to Conantum from the open plains, I think how the history of the hills would read, since they have been pastured by cows, if every plowing and mowing and sowing and chopping were recorded. These plains are covered with shrub oaks, birches, aspens, hickories, mingled with sweet-fern and brakes and huckleberry bushes and epilobium, now in bloom, and much fine grass. July 13, 1851
August 10. The heat is furnace-like while I am climbing the steep hills covered with shrubs on the north of Walden, sweet-fern as high as one's head. The goldfinch sings. August 10, 1853
August 23. High blackberries now in their prime, their great racemes of shining black fruit, mixed with red and green, bent over amid the sweet-fern and sumach on sunny hill sides, or growing more rankly with larger fruit by rich roadsides and in lower ground . . . I see dense patches of the pearly everlasting, maintaining their ground in the midst of dense green sweet-fern, a striking contrast of snow-white and green. August 23, 1858
September 30. The pearly everlasting is an interesting white at present . . . Its very brown centre now affects us as a fresh and original color. It monopolizes a small circle, in the midst of sweet-fem perchance, on a dry hillside. September 30, 1858
October 12. The sweet-fern is losing its leaves. October 12, 1851
October 12. Young sweet-fern, where it had been burned in the spring, is quite green. October 12, 1858
October 20. Looking up the side of the hill toward the sun, I see a little gossamer on the sweet-fern, etc.; and, from my boat, little flocks of white gossamer occasionally, three quarters of an inch long, in the air or caught on twigs, as if where a spider had hauled in his line. October 20, 1856
October 20. . . .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. October 20, 1860
October 22. Hornets’ nests are now being exposed, deserted by the hornets; and little wasp (?) nests, one and a half inches wide, on huckleberry (?) and sweet-fern (?). October 22, 1858
October 22. I notice that the first shrubs and trees to spring up in the sand on railroad cuts in the woods are sweet-fern, birches, willows, and aspens, and pines, white and pitch; but all but the last two chiefly disappear in the thick wood that follows. The former are the pioneers. October 22, 1860
November 10. The Jersey tea is fallen, all but the terminal leaves. These, however, are the greenest and apparently least changed of any indigenous plant, unless it be the sweet-fern. November 10, 1858
November 14. Now I begin to notice the silver downy twigs of the sweet-fern in the sun (lately bare), the red or crimson twigs and buds of the high blueberry. The different colors of the water andromeda in different lights. November 14, 1858
November 16. The sweet-fern in some places has still many green [leaves], more than any indigenous shrub or tree, though far the greater part of them (the sweet-ferns) are bare or withered. November 16, 1858
November 17. We are interested at this season by the manifold ways in which the light is reflected to us. Ascending a little knoll covered with sweet-fern, shortly after, the sun appearing but a point above the sweet-fern, its light was reflected from a dense mass of the bare downy twigs of this plant in a surprising manner which would not be believed if described. It was quite like the sunlight reflected from grass and weeds covered with hoar frost. Yet in an ordinary light these are but dark or dusky looking twigs with scarcely a noticeable downiness. Yet as I saw it, there was a perfect halo of light resting on the knoll as I moved to right or left. A myriad of surfaces are now prepared to reflect the light. This is one of the hundred silvery lights of November. November 17, 1858
November 20. In the woods and about swamps, as Ministerial, also, there are several kinds of twigs, this year’s shoots of shrubs, which have a slight down or hairiness, hardly perceptible in ordinary lights though held in the hand, but which, seen toward the sun, reflect a cheering silvery light. Such are not only the sweet-fern, but the hazel in a less degree, alder twigs, and even the short huckleberry twigs, also lespedeza stems. It is as if they were covered with a myriad fine spiculae which reflect a dazzling white light, exceedingly warming to the spirits and imagination. This gives a character of snug warmth and cheerfulness to the swamp, as if it were a place where the sun consorted with rabbits and partridges. Each individual hair on every such shoot above the swamp is bathed in glowing sunlight and is directly conversant with the day god. November 20, 1858
November 26. A good many leaves of the sweet-fern, though withered now, still hold on; so that this shrub may be put with the oaks in this respect. So far as I remember, it is peculiar among shrubs in this. November 26, 1858
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. November 27, 1858
December 7. It is a fair, sunny, and warm day in the woods for the season. We eat our dinners on the middle of the line, amid the young oaks in a sheltered and very unfrequented place. I cut some leafy shrub oaks and cast them down for a dry and springy seat. As I sit there amid the sweet-fern, talking with my man Briney, I observe that the recent shoots of the sweet-fern — which, like many larger bushes and trees, have a few leaves in a tuft still at their extremities – toward the sun are densely covered with a bright, warm, silvery down, which looks like frost, so thick and white. Looking the other way, I see none of it, but the bare reddish twigs. Even this is a cheering and compensating discovery in my otherwise barren work. I get thus a few positive values, answering to the bread and cheese which make my dinner. I owe thus to my weeks at surveying a few such slight but positive discoveries . . . I would rather sit at this table with the sweet-fern twigs between me and the sun than at the king’s. December 7, 1857
December 17. The snow being some three or four inches deep, I see rising above it, generally, at my old bean-field, only my little white pines set last spring in the midst of an immense field of Solidago nemoralis, with a little sweet-fern. December 17, 1859
December 23. You find in the cluster of the sweet-fern fruit now one or two rather large flattish conical hard-shelled seeds with a small meat. December 23, 1859
December 24. In Weston's field, in springy land on the edge of a swamp, I counted thirty-three or four of those large silvery-brown cocoons within a rod or two, and probably there are many more about a foot from the ground, commonly on the main stem — though sometimes on a branch close to the stem — of the alder, sweet-fern, brake, etc., etc. The largest are four inches long by two and a half, bag-shaped and wrinkled and partly concealed by dry leaves, — alder, ferns, etc., — attached as if sprinkled over them . . . Brake and sweet-fern and alder leaves are not only loosely sprinkled over it and dangling from it, but often, as it were, pasted close upon and almost incorporated into it. December 24, 1853
January 14. Those little groves of sweet-fern still thickly leaved, whose tops now rise above the snow, are an interesting warm brown-red now, like the reddest oak leaves. Even this is an agreeable sight to the walker over snowy fields and hillsides. It has a wild and jagged leaf, alternately serrated. A warm reddish color revealed by the snow. January 14, 1860
January 17. I see a large downy owl's feather adhering to a sweet-fern twig, looking like the down of a plant blowing in the wind. January 17, 1858
January 19. The sweet-fern retains its serrate terminal leaves. January 19, 1859
Sweet Fern, Comptonia peregrina, is not a fern but a low-growing shrub and member of the Bay (Laurel) family of plants. The fern-like leaves give off a pleasant fragrance when crushed. The genus Comptonia is named in honor of Rev. Henry Compton (1632-1713), bishop of Oxford. The species name peregrina literally means one that travels.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Sweet-Fern
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
