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June 12th (1852) Massachusetts
Its buds are a dark indigo-blue tip beyond the green calyx. It is rich but hardly delicate and sim-ple enough; a very handsome sword-shaped leaf. The blue-eyed grass is one of the most beautiful of flowers. It might have been famous from Proserpine down. It will bear to be praised by poets. The blue flag, not-withstanding its rich furniture, its fringed recurved par-asols over its anthers, and its variously streaked and colored petals, is loose and coarse in its habit. How completely all character is expressed by flowers! This is a little too showy and gaudy, like some women's bonnets. Yet it belongs to the meadow and ornaments it much. The critchicrotches are going to seed. I love the sweet-flag as well as the muskrat (?). Its tender inmost leaf is very palatable below. Enothera pumila, dwarf tree-primrose. Ever it will be some obscure small and modest flower that will most please us. Some of the ferns have branches wholly covered with fruit.
How difficult, if not impossible, to do the things we have done! as fishing and camping out. They seem to me a little fabulous now.
Boys are bathing at Hubbard's Bend, playing with a Boat (I at the willows). The color of their bodies in the sun at a distance is pleasing, the not often seen flesh-color. I hear the sound of their sport borne over the water. As yet we have not man in nature. What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties! A pale pink, which the sun would soon tan. White men!
Small white-bellied, swallows in a row on the telegraph-wire over the water by the bridge. This perch is little enough departure from unobstructed air to suit them. Pluming themselves. If you could furnish a perch aerial enough, even birds of paradise would alight. Swallows have forked tails, and wings and tails are about the same length. They do not alight on trees, methinks, unless on dead and bare boughs, but stretch a wire over water and they perch on it. This is among the phenomena that cluster about the telegraph.
Hedge-mustard. (Turned into the lane beyond Den-nis's.) Some fields are almost wholly covered with sheep's-sorrel, now turned red, - its valves. It helps thus agreeably to paint the earth, contrasting even at a distance with the greener fields, blue sky, and dark or downy clouds. It is red, marbled, watered, mottled, or waved with greenish, like waving grain, three or four acres of it. To the farmer or grazier it is a trouble-some weed, but to the landscape-viewer an agreeable red tinge laid on by the painter. I feel well into sum-mer when I see this redness. It appears to be avoided by the cows.
The petals of the sidesaddle-flower, fully expanded, hang down. How complex it is, what with flowers and leaves! It is a wholesome and interesting plant to me, the leaf especially. Rye that has sown itself and come.
June 12th (1852) Massachusetts
Up scatteringly in bunches is now nearly ripe. They are beginning to cut rank grass on the village street. I should say the summer began with the leafiness, umbrageous summer! The glory of Dennis's lupines is departed, and the white now shows in abundance be-neath them. So I cannot walk longer in those fields of Enna in which Proserpine amused herself gathering flowers.
The steam whistle at a distance sounds even like the hum of a bee in a flower. So man's works fall into nature.
The flies hum at mid-afternoon, as if peevish and weary of the length of the days. The river is shrunk to summer width; on the sides smooth whitish water, -or rather it is the light from the pads; - in the middle, dark blue or slate, rippled.
The color of the earth at a distance where a wood has been cut off is a reddish brown. Nature has put no large object on the face of New England so glaringly white as a white house.
The Ranunculus filiformis on the muddy shore of the river. The locusts' blossoms in the graveyard fill the street with their sweet fragrance.
It is day, and we have more of that same light that the moon sent us, but not reflected now, but shining directly. The sun is a fuller moon. Who knows how much lighter day there may be?
June 13. Sunday. 3 P. M. - To Conantum.
A warm day. It has been cold, and we have had fires the past week sometimes. Clover begins to show
red in the fields, and the wild cherry is not out of blos-som. The river has a summer midday look, smooth to a cobweb, with green shores, and shade from the trees on its banks. The Viburnum nudum. The oblong-leaved sundew, but not its flower. Do the bulbous arethusas last long?
What a sweetness fills the air now in low grounds or meadows, reminding me of times when I went straw-berrying years ago! It is as if all meadows were filled with some sweet mint. The Dracena borealis (Bigelow) (Clintonia borealis (Gray)) amid the Solomon's-seals in Hubbard's Grove Swamp, a very neat and handsome liliaceous flower with three large, regular, spotless, green convallaria leaves, making a triangle from the root, and sometimes a fourth from the scape, linear, with four drooping, greenish-yellow, bell-shaped (?) flowers. Not in sun. In low shady woods. It is a handsome and perfect flower, though not high-colored. I prefer it to some more famous. But Gray should not name it from the Governor of New York. What is he to the lovers of flowers in Massachusetts? If named after a man, it must be a man of flowers. Rhode Island botanists may as well name the flowers after their governors as New York. Name your canals and railroads after Clinton, if you please, but his name is not associated with flowers. Mosquitoes now trouble the walker in low shady woods. No doubt woodchucks in their burrows hear the steps of walkers through the earth and come not forth. Yel-low wood sorrel (Oxalis stricta), which, according to Gray, closes its leaves and droops at nightfall.
June 13th (1852) Massachusetts
Woolly aphides on alders whiten one's clothes now. What is that palmate(?)-leaved water-plant by the Corner causeway? The buck-bean grows in Conant's meadow. Lambkill is out. I remember with what de-light I used to discover this flower in dewy mornings. All things in this world must be seen with the morning dew on them, must be seen with youthful, early-opened, hopeful eyes. Saw four cunning little woodchucks nib-bling the short grass, about one third grown, that live under Conant's old house. Mistook one for a piece of rusty iron. The Viburnum Lentago is about out of bloom; shows young berries. The Smilax herbacea, carrion-flower, a rank green vine with long-peduncled umbels, with small greenish or yellowish flowers just opening, and tendrils, at the Miles swamp. It smells exactly like a dead rat in the wall, and apparently attracts flies (I find small gnats on it) like carrion. A very remarkable odor; a single minute flower in an umbel open will scent a whole room. Nature imitates all things in flowers. They are at once the most beauti-ful and the ugliest objects, the most fragrant and the most offensive to the nostrils, etc., etc. The compound-racemed convallaria, being fully out, is white. I put it down too early, perhaps by a week. The great leaves of the bass attract you now, six inches in diameter. The delicate maidenhair fern forms a cup or dish, very delicate and graceful. Beautiful, too, its glossy black stem and its wave-edged fruited leafets. I hear the feeble plaintive note of young bluebirds, just trying their wings or getting used to them. Young robins peep.
I think I know four kinds of cornel beside the dogwood and bunchberry: one now in bloom, with rather small leaves with a smooth, silky feeling beneath, a green-ish-gray spotted stem, in older stocks all gray (Cornus alternifolia? or sericea?); the broad-leaved cornel in Laurel Glen, yet green in the bud (C. circinata?); the small-leaved cornel with a small cyme or corymb, as late to be [sic] as the last, in Potter's hedge and on high hills (C. paniculata); and the red osier by the river (C. stolonifera), which I have not seen this year.
Mosquitoes are first troublesome in the house with sultry nights.
Orobanche uniflora, single-flowered broom-rape (Bige-low), [or] Aphyllon uniflorum, one-flowered cancer-root (Gray). C. found it June 12 at Clematis Brook. Also the common fumitory (?), methinks; it is a fine-leaved small plant.
Captain Jonathan Carver commences his Travels with these words: "In June, 1766, I set out from Bos-ton, and proceeded by way of Albany and Niagara, to Michillimackinac; a Fort situated between the Lakes Huron and Michigan, and distant from Boston 1300 miles. This being the uttermost of our factories towards the northwest, I considered it as the most convenient place from whence I could begin my intended pro-gress, and enter at once into the Regions I designed to explore." So he gives us no information respecting the intermediate country, nor much, I fear, about the country beyond.
Holbrook says the Emys picta is the first to be seen in the spring.
June 14th (1852) Massachusetts
There are various new reflections now of the light, viz. from the under sides of leaves (fresh and white) turned up by the wind, and also from the bent blades (horizontal tops) of rank grass in the meadows, a sort of bluish sheeny light, this last. Saw a wild rose from the cars in Weston. The early red roses are out in gardens at home.
June 15th. Tuesday
Silene Antirrhina, sleepy catch-fly,
or snapdragon catch-fly, the ordinarily curled-up petals scarcely noticeable at the end of the large oval calyx. Gray says opening only by night or cloudy weather. Bigelow says probably nocturnal, for he never found it expanded by day. (I found it June 16th at 6 л. м. ех-panded, two of its flowers, and they remained so for some hours, in my chamber.) By railroad near Badger's.
Yesterday we smelt the sea strongly; the sea breeze alone made the day tolerable. This morning, a shower! The robin only sings the louder for it. He is inclined to sing in foul weather.
To Clematis Brook, 1.30 P. M.
Very warm. Now for a thin coat. This melting weather makes a stage in the year. The crickets creak louder and more steadily; the bullfrogs croak in ear-nest. The drouth begins. The dry z-ing of the locust is heard. The potatoes are of that height to stand up at night. Bathing cannot be omitted. The conversation of all boys in the streets is whether they will or not or who will go in a-swimming, and how they will not tell their parents. You lie with open windows and hear the sounds in the streets.
The seringo sings now at noon on a post; has a light streak over eye.
The autumnal dandelion (Leontodon, or Apargia). Erigeron integrifolius of Bigelow (strigosus, i. e. narrow-leaved daisy fleabane, of Gray) very common, like a white aster.
I will note such birds as I observe in this walk, begin-ning on the railroad causeway in middle of this hot day. The chuckling warble of martins heard over the meadow, from a village box. The lark. The fields are blued with blue-eyed grass, a slaty blue. The epilo-bium shows some color in its spikes.
How rapidly new flowers unfold! as if Nature would get through her work too soon. One has as much as he can do to observe how flowers successively unfold. It is a flowery revolution, to which but few attend. Hardly too much attention can be bestowed on flowers. We follow, we march after, the highest color; that is our flag, our standard, our " color." Flowers were made to be seen, not overlooked. Their bright colors imply eyes, spectators. There have been many flower men who have rambled the world over to see them. The flowers robbed from an Egyptian traveller were at length carefully boxed up and forwarded to Linnæus, the man of flowers. The common, early cultivated red roses are certainly very handsome, so rich a color and so full of blossoms; you see why even blunderers have introduced them into their gardens.
Ascending to pigeon-place plain, the reflection of the heat from the dead pine-needles and the boughs strewn about, combined with the dry, suffocating scent.