28 June 1852 – 4 July 1852

Cnothera biennis, evening-primrose, with its conspicuous flowers but rather unsightly stem and leaves. The Rubus odorata, purple flowering raspberry, in gardens. Potatoes for some time. Evening. 7 ep. M.— Moon more than half.

P. M.—On North River. Leonurus Cardiaca, motherwort, a nettle-like plant by the street-side.

Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one’s native place, for instance. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is preéminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant. 7.30 p.mM.— To stone bridge over Assabet. Moon nearly full; rose a little before sunset. Cat-mint (Nepeta cataria) in bloom. The lower shoots of the Andromeda calyculata are now six inches long, the upper from two to four.’ The fruit is on the extremities of last year’s shoots in the midst of the per- sistent small leaves. The shrub oak acorns are as big as peas; principally cup. The moon appears full. At first a mere white cloud. As soon as the sun sets, begins to grow brassy or ob- scure golden in the gross atmosphere. It is starlight about half an hour after sunset to-night; 7. e. the first stars appear. The moon is now brighter, but not so yellowish. ‘Ten or fifteen minutes after, the fireflies are observed, at first about the willows on the Causeway, where the evening is further advanced. Sparrows quite generally, and occasionally a robin sings. (I heard a bobolink this afternoon.) The creak of the crickets is more universal and loud, and becomes a distinct sound. The oily surface of the river in which the moon is reflected looks most attractive at this hour. I see the bright curves made by the water-bugs in the moonlight, and a muskrat crossing the river, now at 9 o’clock. Finally the last traces of day disappear, about 9.30 o’clock, and the night fairly sets in. The color of the moon is more silvery than golden, or sil- very with a slight admixture of golden, a sort of bur- nished cloud. The bass tree is budded. Haying has commenced. Some think the foliage of the trees is not so thick as last year, that the leaves have suffered from the wind. Is not this period more than any distinguished for flowers, when roses, swamp-pinks, morning-glories, are- thusas, pogonias, orchises, blue flags, epilobiums, moun- tain laurel, and white lilies are all in blossom at once?

Thursday. 9.80 a. M.— To Sherman’s Bridge by land and water.

Bigelow tells me that saddlers sometimes use the excrescence, the whitish fungus, on the birch to stick their awls in. Men find a use for everything at last. I saw one nailed up in his shop with an aw] in it. Last night, as I lay awake, I dreamed of the muddy and weedy river on which I had been paddling, and I seemed to derive some vigor from my day’s experience, like the lilies which have their roots at the bottom. I have plucked a white lily bud just ready to expand, and, after keeping it in water for two days,’ have turned back its sepals with my hand and touched the lapped points of the petals, when they sprang open and rapidly expanded in my hand into a perfect blossom, with the petals as perfectly disposed at equal intervals as on their native lakes, and in this case, of course, un- touched by an insect. I cut its stem short and placed it in a broad dish of water, where it sailed about under the breath of the beholder with a slight undulatory mo- tion. The breeze of his half-suppressed admiration it was that filled its sail. It was a rare-tinted one. A kind of popular aura that may be trusted, methinks. Men will travel to the Nile to see the lotus flower, who have never seen in their glory the lotuses of their native streams. The Mollugo verticillata, carpet-weed, is just begin- ning in the garden, and the Polygonum convolvulus, black bindweed. The spikes of the pale lobelia, some blue, some white, passing insensibly from one to the other, and especially hard to distinguish in the twilight, are quite handsome now in moist ground, rising above the grass. The prunella has various tints in various lights, now blue, now hilac. As the twilight deepens into night, its color changes. It always suggests fresh- ness and coolness, from the places where it grows. I see the downy heads of the senecio gone to seed, this- tle-like but small. The gnaphaliums and this are among the earliest to present this appearance. On my way to the Hubbard Bathing-Place, at sun- down. The blue-eyed grass shuts up before night, and me- thinks it does not open very early the next morning. The Cornus stolontfera, red osier, oster rouge, well out, and probably has been a day or two. I have got the order of the cornels, I think, pretty well. I see plenty of the Peltandra Virginica coming forward in Hub- bard’s meadow, and its lobes are more blunt than the sagittaria. Pogonias are very common in the meadows now. ‘The seed-vessels of the Iris Virginica are formed.

From Deep Cut over Fair Haven; back by Potter’s path; 5 p. M. The yellow lily (Lilium Canadense) is out, rising above the meadow-grass, sometimes one, sometimes two. Young woodchucks, sitting in their holes, allow me to come quite near. Clover is mostly dried up. The Chimaphila umbellata, wintergreen, must have been in blossom some time. The back side of its petals, ‘“‘cream colored tinged with purple,” which is turned toward the beholder, while the face is toward the earth, is the handsomest. It is a very pretty little chandelier of a flower, fit to adorn the forest floor. Its buds are nearly as handsome. (They appear long in unfolding.) Polygonum Persicaria just beginning. The pickers have quite thinned the crop of early blueberries where Stow cut off winter before last. When the woods on some hillside are cut off, the Vac- cintum Pennsylvanicum springs up, or grows more luxu- riantly, being exposed to light and air, and by the second year its stems are weighed to the ground with clusters of blue berries covered with bloom, and much larger than they commonly grow, also with a livelier taste than usual, as if remembering some primitive mountain-side given up to them anciently. Such places supply the villagers with the earliest berries for two or three years, or until the rising wood overgrows them and they withdraw into the bosom of Nature again. They flourish during the few years between one forest’s fall and another’s rise. Before you had prepared your mind or made up your mouth for berries, thinking only of crude green ones, earlier by ten days than you had expected, some child of the woods is at your door with ripe blueberries; for didn’t you know that Mr. Stow cut off his wood-lot winter before last? It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and thus it happens that when the owner lays bare and deforms a hillside, and alone appears to reap any advantage from it by a crop of wood, all the villagers and the inhabitants of distant cities obtain some compensation in the crop of berries that it yields. They glean after the woodchopper, not fagots, but full baskets of blueberries. I am surprised to see how suddenly, when the sun and air and rain are let in, these bushes, which, in the shade of the for- est, scarcely yielded the walker a berry, will suddenly be weighed down with fruit. Let alone your garden, cease your cultivation, and in how short a time will blueberries and huckleberries grow there! I have not noticed a violet for some time. Bathed beneath Fair Haven. How much food the muskrats have at hand! They may well be numerous. At this place the bottom in shallow water at a little distance from the shore is thickly covered with clams, half buried and on their ends, generally a little aslant. Sometimes there are a dozen or more side by side within a square foot, and I [sic] that, over a space twenty rods long and one wide (I know not how much farther they reach into the river), they would average three to a square foot, which would give 16,335 clams to twenty rods of shore (on one side of the river), and I suspect that there are many more. Nowonder that muskrats multiply, and that the shores are covered with their shells left by the musk- rats. In bathing here I can hardly step without tread- ing on them, sometimes half a dozen at once, and often I cut my feet pretty severely on their shells. They are partly covered with mud and the short weeds at the bottom, and they are of the same color themselves; but, stooping down over them, when the roil has sub- sided, I can see them now (at 5.30 Pp. M.) with their mouths (?) open, —an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide, with a waving fringe about it, and another smaller opening close to it without any fringe, through both of which I see distinctly into the white interior of the fish. When I touch one, he instantly closes his shell and, if taken out, quickly spurts water like a salt- water clam. Evidently taking in their food and strain- ing it with that waving motion of the ciliz. ‘There they lie, both under the pads and in the sun. Ceanothus Americanus, New Jersey tea. The last month has been very breezy and on the whole a cold one, I remember; rippling leaves, showing their light under sides. Rubus strigosus, wild red raspberry. I can hardly find a geranium now. The common carrot by the roadside (Daucus Carota) is in some respects an interesting plant, for its umbel, as Bigelow says, is shaped like a bird’s nest, and its large pinnatifid in- volucre, interlacing by its fine segments, resembles a fanciful ladies’ work-basket. <Asclepias purpurascens. I find a potamogeton to-day over the clams, which ap- pears to correspond to the P. pulcher. Iam not sure that it is what I have called the natans, but this cannot be the natans, for the leaves are not all long-petioled, but the lower ones waved and quite pellucid.

Sunday. 3 a. Mm. —To Conantum, to see the lilies open.