27 August 1860 – 2 September 1860

P. M.— To Ministerial Swamp. Clear weather within a day or two after the thick dog- days. The nights have been cooler of late, but the heat of the sun by day has been more local and palpable, as it were. It is as if the sun touched your shoulder with a hot hand while there are cool veins in the air. That is, I am from time to time surprised and oppressed by a melting heat on my back in the sun, though I am sure of a greater general coolness. ‘The heat is less like that of an apartment equably warmed, and more like that [of] a red-hot iron carried about and which you occasionally come near. See one of the shrilling green alder locusts on the under side of a grape leaf. Its body is about three quar- ters of an inch or less in length; antenne and all, two inches. Its wings are at first perpendicular above its shoulders, it apparently having just ceased shrilling. Transparent, with lines crossing them. Notice now that sour-tasting white (creamy, for con- sistence) incrustation between and on the berries of the smooth sumach, like frostwork. Is it not an exudation ? or produced by the bite of an insect? Calamagrostis coarctata grass by Harrington’s Pool, Ministerial Swamp, say one week (not in prime). Muhlenbergia glomerata, same place, say ten days, or past prime. Gather some of those large and late low blackberries (as at Thrush Alley) which run over the thin herbage, green moss, etc., in open pitch pine woods.

About 6.20 p. m. paddled on Walden. Near the shore I see at least one little skater to a foot, further off one to a yard, and in middle not more than one to a rod; but I see no gyrinus at all here to-night.

Surveying Minott’s land. Am surprised to find on his hard land, where he once raised potatoes, the hairy huckleberry, which before I had seen in swamps only. Here, too, they are more edible, not so insipid, yet not quite edible generally. They are improved, you would say, by the firmer ground. The berries are in longer racemes or clusters than any of our huckleberries. They are the prevailing berry all over this field. They are oblong and black, and the thick, shaggy-feeling coats left in the mouth are far from agreeable to the palate. Are now in prime. Also find, in one of his ditches where peat was dug (or mud), the Lemna polyrhiza ; not found in Concord be- fore, and said not to blossom in this country. I found it at Pushaw. Also the Muhlenbergia glomerata near the lemna, or southeast of it. The hairy huckleberry and muhlenbergia, I think, grow here still because Minott is an old-fashioned man and has not scrubbed up and improved his land as many, or most, have. It is in a wilder and more primitive con- dition. The very huckleberries are shaggy there. There was only one straight side to his land, and that I cut through a dense swamp. The fences are all meandering, just as they were at least in 1746, when it was described.

P.M. — To Walden. Saw a fish hawk yesterday up the Assabet. In one position it flew just like a swallow; of the same form as it flew. We could not judge correctly of distances on the mountain, but greatly exaggerated them. That surface was so novel, — suggested so many thoughts, — and also so uneven, a few steps sufficing to conceal the least ground, as if it were half a mile away, that we would have an impression as if we had travelled a mile when we had come only forty rods. We no longer thought and reasoned as in the plain. Now see many birds about E. Hubbard’s elder hedge, — bobolinks, kingbirds, pigeon woodpeckers, — and not elsewhere. Many pine stipules fallen yesterday. Also see them on Walden to-day. Hear that F. Hayden saw and heard geese a fortnight ago! T see within an oak stump on the shore of Walden tomato plants six or eight inches high, as I found them formerly about this pond in a different place. Since they do not bear fruit the seed must be annually brought here by birds, yet I do not see them pecking the toma- toes in our gardens, and this is a mile and a half from the village and half a mile from the nearest house in Lin- coln. River about eight inches above summer level yester- day. We are so accustomed to see another forest spring up immediately as a matter of course, whether from the stump or from the seed, when a forest is cut down, never troubling about the succession, that we hardly associate the seed with the tree, and do not anticipate the time when this regular succession will cease and we shall be obliged to plant, as they do in all old countries. The planters of Europe must have a very different, a much correcter, notion of the value of the seed of forest trees than we. ‘To speak generally, they know that the for- est trees spring from seeds, as we do of apples and pears, but we know only that they come out of the earth. See how artfully the seed of a cherry is placed in order that a bird may be compelled to transport it. It is placed in the very midst of a tempting pericarp, so that the creature that would devour a cherry must take a stone into its mouth. The bird is bribed with the peri- carp to take the stone with it and do this little service for Nature. Cherries are especially birds’ food, and many kinds are called birds’ cherry, and unless we plant the seeds occasionally, I shall think the birds have the best right to them. Thus a bird’s wing is added to the cherry-stone which was wingless, and it does not wait for winds to transport it. If you ever ate a cherry, and did not make two bites of it, you must have perceived it. There it is, right in the midst of the luscious morsel, an earthy residuum left on the tongue. And some wild men and children instinctively swallow it, like the birds, as the shortest way to get rid of it. And the conse- quence is that cherries not only grow here but there, and I know of some handsome young English cherries growing naturally in our woods, which I think of trans- planting back again to my garden. If the seed had been placed in a leaf, or at the root, it would not have got transported thus. Consider how many seeds of plants we take into our mouths. Even stones as big as peas, a dozen at once. The treatment of forests is a very different question to us and to the English. There is a great difference between replanting the cleared land from the super- abundance of seed which is produced in the forest around it, which will soon be done by nature alone if we do not interfere, and the planting of land the greater part of which has been cleared for more than a thousand years.

P. M. — To Annursnack. Solidago nemoralis apparently in prime, and S. stricta. The former covers A. Hosmer’s secluded turtle field near the bridge, together with johnswort, now merely lingering.