17 August 1857 – 23 August 1857

Thursday. P. M.—To Hubbard’s Close. The hillside at Clintonia Swamp is in some parts quite shingled with the rattlesnake-plantain (Good- yera pubescens) leaves overlapping one another. The flower is now apparently in its prime. As I stand there, I hear a peculiar sound which I mistake for a wood- pecker’s tapping, but I soon see a cuckoo hopping near suspiciously or inquisitively, at length within twelve feet, from time to time uttering a hard, dry note, very much like a woodpecker tapping a dead dry tree rapidly, its full clear white throat and breast toward me, and slowly lifting its tail from time to time. Though some- what allied to that throttled note it makes by night, it was quite different from that. I go along by the hillside footpath in the woods about Hubbard’s Close. The Goodyera repens grows behind the spring where I used to sit, amid the dead pine leaves. Its leaves: partly concealed in the grass. It is just done commonly. Helianthus, strumosus-like, at the south end of Stow’s cold pool; how long?

Saturday. Channing has brought me from Plymouth and Watson Drosera filiformis, just out of bloom, from Great South Pond, Solidago tenui- folia in bloom, Sabbatia chloroides, and Coreopsis rosea. Edward Hoar shows me Lobelia Kalmiu, which he gathered in flower in Hopkinton about the 18th of July. (I found the same on the East Branch and the Penob- scot); staphylea (in fruit) from Northampton, plucked within a week or so (Bigelow says it grows in Weston); also the leaves of a tree growing in Windsor, Vt., which they call the pepperidge, quite unlike our tupelo. Is it not the Celtis crassifolia? He says he found the Uvularia perfoliata on the Stow road, he thinks within Concord bounds.

P. M. — To Conantum. Hear the mole cricket nowadays. Collinsonia (very little left) not out.