19 November 1860 – 25 November 1860

P. M.— To Mt. Misery. Saw off a hickory stump which is scarcely six and a half inches in diameter and has nearly a hundred rings. (It is the one of November 13th, and then called about 115 (??). Counting it now in the evening, I make 92.) It is surprising how quickly this wood decays. This tree was cut last winter, and then evidently was per- fectly sound, as appears from the surface, but on sawing it off three inches lower I find that it is rotted entirely through and is soft and no part sound, so that I cannot count it on the new face. In less than one year this stump is worthless, even for fuel! I look again at the old oak stumps on this hill. One evidently, 7. e. surely, a sprout (the older stump beside it), a white oak, grew nearly 12 inches in the first twelve years; another oak, a sprout (with older stump), 12 inches in the first eleven or twelve years; a white oak (without an older stump), 13 inches in the first twelve years; probably the last a sprout also, for, as seen on last page, a white oak seedling grows only 3 of an inch in twelve years. There was also a hickory sprout stump of the same age with the others, though of course the old stump was long since gone. It was plainly seen to be a sprout by the very rapid growth at first and the concave form of one side. My rule of small white pines under pitch pines is so true of E. Hoar’s land that he very easily got a hundred white pines there to set by his house. Mr. Bradshaw says that he got a little auk in Wayland last week, and heard of two more, one in Weston and the other in Natick. Thinks they came with the storm of the 10th and 11th. He tells me of a small oak wood of old trees called More’s, half a mile east of Wayland, behind the grave- yard.

P. M. — To R. W. E.’s hill. I see a pitch pine several years old on the west slope of the railroad embankment, sixty rods by pacing from the nearest pitch pine, which was in Trillium Wood. I have seen several such. This tree would soon sow it- self in our yards if they were neglected. | In the Moore and Hosmer lot which I surveyed in 49-50, beyond Heywood meadow, a white oak stump ten inches [in] diameter with seventy rings (cut in winter of °49-’50), evidently a sprout, though the old stump appears to have been entirely overgrown and so con- cealed. I see, on the southwest or railroad side, near top, of Emerson’s hill, a great many oak stumps (which were sprouts) with the older stump still very plain. One (probably black oak) with 35 rings cut some 2 years = 37. 2d, 66 66 ce 66 66 6é 66 6c CE «e¢ = 37. 3d, 66 6é 66 66 6é 66 6<¢ ée 6“ 6¢ — 37. (This last old stump being small and almost over- grown between the stumps of the sprouts and seen — a sliver of it—2in a hole between them.) Also lower down-hill, toward railroad, old chestnut stumps with the stumps of sprouts of R. W. E.’s cutting twenty-five to thirty and odd years old, cut some dozen years ago; stumps, then, some forty years old. Also, on the pond end of the hilltop, amid the piles of stones, where I suppose was a pasture once, I see oak stumps cut just thirty-eight years ago beside the stumps of their sprouts cut last winter, and here are many sprouts coming up the second time; but on the other end [of] the hill I notice no sprouts the second time. There were many oaks where these piles of stone are, some seventy or eighty years ago, then, at least, and I think that if this ever was a pasture they must have been preceded by pines. These oak stumps, cut about thirty-eight years ago, are quite fresh, especially the white oak on the top of this rocky hill. So at Mt. Misery. Such is evidently a favorable locality for their preservation. Indeed, it is very common to see oak stumps forty years old in such places. They are the rule here. Decidedly finger-cold to-night.

If you cut a dense mixed wood of pine and oak in which no little pines have sown themselves, it is evident that a wood exclusively of oak sprouts may succeed, as I see is the case with part of R. W. E.’s hill- side toward the pond. I see a little pitch pine which bore a cone at twenty- two inches from the ground when it was only seven or eight years old. It is now a dozen years old and has borne two more since, and scattered the seed. P. M. — To Fair Haven Hill. On what was Stow’s lot, southwest the Boiling Spring, adjacent to Wheeler’s field, I count the rings of four oak stumps which are from eighteen to twenty- two inches in diameter. They are all about 120, and the oaks are evidently all from the seed. This was both a pine and oak wood, and I suspect that about one hundred and twenty years [ago] pines were cut or burned or blown down or decayed there and these oaks succeeded. ‘These stumps are now in the very best condition for counting, having been cut nine or ten years ago. But not so with the pitch pine stumps (one is twenty-three inches in diameter) cut about a year later on what was R. Brown’s, higher up. Their sap and more is covered with green and red cockspur lichens so thickly you cannot see the rings. On this lot (now open Wheeler lot) are not only these old pitch pine stumps (a few), but the stumps of oak sprouts forty-four years old, with the older stumps by their side, or half overgrown, yet quite plain, which last there were cut (44+9=) 53 years ago. No sprouts from them. In early times probably less wood was cut at once; commonly only the winter’s wood for the owners’ use. This Brown lot was variously treated apparently. See young beeches near the upper edge of Stow’s, about midway on Wheeler, near where some stones have been hauled into Stow’s from Wheeler’s land. Another finger-cold evening, which I improve in pulling my turnips —the usual amusement of such weather — before they shall be frozen in. It is worth the while to see how green and lusty they are yet, still adding to their stock of nutriment for another year; and between the green and also withering leaves it does me good to see their great crimson round or scalloped tops, sometimes quite above ground, they are so bold. They remind you of rosy cheeks in cool weather, and indeed there is a relationship. All kinds of har- vestry, even pulling turnips when the first cold weather numbs your fingers, are interesting, 1f you have been the sower, and have not sown too many. Got a section to-day of a white cedar railroad sleeper which I am told came from the eastward and was brought up from Charlestown. First count gives 254 rings; second, on opposite side, where the centre is less plain, 246 rings; average, 250. Its diameter is 164+ inches, or nearly 31 rings to an inch. ‘This is the oldest, as well as slowest-growing, tree that I have counted the rings of. I see other sleepers nearly as old. Some smaller, or say 10} inches in diameter, had 125 rings in the first three inches and then grew much faster; as if they were at first part of a very dense ; thicket and grew very slowly, but afterward, prevailing over the rest, grew faster. This sleeper had, of course, been cut a year at least. It may not have been the butt end of the log, or at any rate it must have been several years old before it reached the height at which it was cut, so that it must have begun to exist before the set- tlement of Jamestown. It was a flourishing young cedar of at least some fifteen summers when the Pil- grims came over. Thus the cars on our railroad, and all their passengers, roll over the trunks of trees sleep- ang beneath them which were planted years before the first white man settled in New England.

P. M. — To northwest part of Sudbury. The Linaria Canadensis is still freshly blooming. It is the freshest flower I notice now. Considerable ice, lasting all day, on the river meadows and cold pools. I measure the stump of that white pine which I used to see on the Marlborough road. It is thirty inches in diameter and has 85 rings. There are two small clumps of laurel close to the left side this road, by the woods, just this side the Sud- bury line, gomg to Maynard’s. Here is a dense oak wood. I see many little white pines sprung up along its edge in the road, but scarcely one within the wood. They, too, want light and air, though not so much as the pitch pine. All the sound white oak acorns that I see now have sprouted, and many have sent a root down into the earth. This is often four mches long. But I see no black nor scarlet nor red oak acorns sprouted, though I find sound ones. ‘The white are evidently very much more sensitive and tender than they. This is a very beautiful November day, — a cool but clear, crystallme air, through which even the white pines with their silvery sheen are an affecting sight. It is a day to behold and to ramble over the hard (stiffen- ing) and withered surface of the tawny earth. Every plant’s down glitters with a silvery light along the Marlborough road, —the sweet-fern, the lespedeza, and bare blueberry twigs, to say nothing of the weather- worn tufts of Andropogon scoparius. A thousand bare twigs gleam like cobwebs in the sun. I rejoice in the bare, bleak, hard, and barren-looking surface of the tawny pastures, the firm outline of the hills, so con- ' venient to walk over, and the air so bracing and wholesome. Though you are finger-cold toward night, and you cast a stone on to your first ice, and see the unmelted crystals under every bank, it is glorious November weather, and only November fruits are out. On some hickories you see a thousand black nuts against the sky. There is quite a white cedar swamp behind the old tavern south of Maynard’s. You walk fast and far, and every apple left out is — grateful to your mvigorated taste. You enjoy not only the bracing coolness, but all the heat and sunlight that there is, reflected back to you from the earth. The sandy road itself, lit by the November sun, is beauti- ful. Shrub oaks and young oaks generally, and hazel bushes and other hardy shrubs, now more or less bare, are your companions, as if 1t were an iron age, yet in simplicity, imnocence, and strength a golden one. (Day before yesterday the rustling of the withered oak leaves in the wind reminded me of the similar sound produced by snow falling on them.) It is glorious to consider how independent man is of all enervatmg luxuries; and the poorer he Is in re- spect to them, the richer he is. Summer is gone with all its infinite wealth, and still nature is genial to man. Though he no longer bathes in the stream, or reclines on the bank, or plucks berries on the hills, still he beholds the same inaccessible beauty around him. What though he has no juice of the grape stored up for him in cellars; the air itself is wme of an older vintage, and far more sanely exhilarating, than any cellar affords. It is ever some gouty senior and not a blithe child that drinks, or cares for, that so famous wine. Though so many phenomena which we lately admired have now vanished, others are more remarkable and in- teresting than before. ‘The smokes from distant chim- neys, not only greater because more fire is required, but more distinct in the cooler atmosphere, are a very pleasing sight, and conduct our thoughts quickly to the roof and hearth and family beneath, revealing the homes of men. Maynard’s yard and frontage, and all his barns and fences, are singularly neat and substantial, and the highroad is in effect converted into a private way through his grounds. It suggests unspeakable peace and happiness. Yet, strange to tell, I noticed that he had a tiger instead of a cock for a vane on his barn, and he himself looked overworked. He had allowed the sur- viving forest trees to grow into ancestral trees about his premises, and so attach themselves to him as if he had planted them. ‘The dusty highway was so sub- dued that it seemed as if it were lost there. He had all but stretched a bar across it. Each traveller must have felt some misgivings, as if he were trespassing. However, the farmer’s life expresses only such con- tent as an ox in his yard chewing the cud. . What though your hands are numb with cold, your sense of enjoyment is not benumbed. You cannot now find an apple but it is sweet to taste. Simply to see to a distant horizon through a clear air, — the fine outline of a distant hill or a blue moun- tain-top through some new vista, —this is wealth enough for one afternoon. We journeyed into the foreign land of Sudbury to see how the Sudbury men —the Hayneses, and the Puffers, and the Brighams — live. We traversed their pastures and their wood-lots, and were home again at night.

George Minott tells me that sixty years ago wood was only two or three dollars a cord here — and some of that hickory. Remembers when Peter Wheeler, sixty or more years ago, cut off all at once over a hun- dred acres of wood stretching from Flint’s Pond to Goose Pond, — since cut again in part by Britton, and owned now partly by the Stows. Most of us are still related to our native fields as the navigator to undiscovered islands in the sea. We can any autumn discover a new fruit there which will sur- prise us by its beauty or sweetness. So long as I saw one or two kinds of berries in my walks whose names I did not know, the proportion of the unknown seemed indefinitely if not infinitely great. Famous fruits imported from the tropics and sold in our markets — as oranges, lemons, pineapples, and bananas — do not concern me so much as many an unnoticed wild berry whose beauty annually lends a new charm to some wild walk, or which I have found to be palatable to an outdoor taste. The tropical fruits are for those who dwell within the tropics; their fairest and sweetest parts cannot be ex- ported nor imported. Brought here, they chiefly concern those whose walks are through the market-place. It is not the orange of Cuba, but the checkerberry of the neighboring pasture, that most delights the eye and the palate of the New England child. What if the Concord Social Club, instead of eating oranges from Havana, should spend an hour in admiring the beauty of some wild berry from their own fields which they never attended to before? It is not the foreignness or size or nutritive qualities of a fruit that determine its absolute value. It is not those far-fetched fruits which the speculator imports that concerns us chiefly, but rather those which you have fetched yourself in your basket from some far hill or swamp, journeying all the long after- noon in the hold of a basket, consigned to your friends at home, the first of the season. We cultivate imported shrubs in our front yards for the beauty of their berries, when yet more beautiful berries grow unregarded by us in the surrounding fields. As some beautiful or palatable fruit is perhaps the noblest gift of nature to man, so is a fruit with which a man has in some measure identified himself by culti- vating or collecting it one of the most suitable presents to a friend. It was some compensation for Commodore Porter, who may have introduced some cannon-balls and bombshells into ports where they were not wanted, to have introduced the Valparaiso squash into the United States. I think that this eclipses his military glory. As I sail the unexplored sea of Concord, many a dell and swamp and wooded hill is my Ceram and Amboyna. At first, perchance, there would be an abundant crop of rank garden weeds and grasses in the cultivated land, —and rankest of all in the cellar-holes, — and of pin- weed, hardhack, sumach, blackberry, thimble-berry, raspberry, etc., in the fields and pastures. Elm, ash, maples, etc., would grow vigorously along old garden limits and main streets. Garden weeds and grasses would soon disappear. Huckleberry and blueberry bushes, lambkill, hazel, sweet-fern, barberry, elder, also shad-bush, choke-berry, andromeda, and thorns, etc., would rapidly prevail in the deserted pastures. At the same time the wild cherries, birch, poplar, willows, checkerberry would reéstablish themselves. Finally the pines, hemlock, spruce, larch, shrub oak, oaks, chestnut, beech, and walnuts would occupy the site of Concord once more. The apple and perhaps all exotic trees and shrubs and a great part of the indigenous ones named above would have disappeared, and the laurel and yew would to some extent be an underwood here, and per- chance the red man once more thread his way through the mossy, swamp-like, primitive wood.

P. M. — To Easterbrooks’s. Under the two white oaks by the second wall south- east of my house, on the east side the wall, I am sur- prised to find a great many sound acorns still, though every one is sprouted, — frequently more than a dozen on the short sward within a square foot, each with its radicle two inches long penetrated into the earth. But many have had their radicle broken or eaten off, and many have it now dead and withered. So far as my observation goes there, by far the greatest number of white oak acorns were destroyed by decaying (whether in consequence of frost or wet), both before and soon after falling. Not nearly so many have been carried off by squirrels and birds or consumed by grubs, though the number of acorns of all kinds lying under the trees is now comparatively small to what it was early in October. It is true these two trees are exceptions and I do not find sound ones nearly as numerous under others. Nevertheless, the sound white oak acorns are not so generally and entirely picked upas I supposed. However, there are a great many more shells or cups than acorns under the trees; even under these two trees, I think, there are not more than a third as many of any kind — - sound or hollow —as there were, and generally those - that remain are a very small fraction of what there were. It will be worth the while to see how many of these sprouted acorns are left and are sound in the spring. It is remarkable that all sound white oak acorns (and many which are not now sound) are sprouted, and that I have noticed no other kind sprouted, — though I have not seen the chestnut oak and little chinquapin at all. It remains to be seen how many of the above will be picked up by squirrels, etc., or destroyed by frost and grubs in the winter. The first spitting of snow —a flurry or squall — from out a gray or slate-colored cloud that came up from the west. This consisted almost entirely of pellets an eighth of an inch or less in diameter. These drove along almost horizontally, or curving upward like the outline of a breaker, before the strong and chilling wind. The plowed fields were for a short time whitened with them. The green moss about the bases of trees was - very prettily spotted white with them, and also the large beds of cladonia in the pastures. They come to contrast with the red cockspur lichens on the stumps, which you had not noticed before. Striking against the trunks of the trees on the west side they fell and accumu- lated in a white line at the base. Though a slight touch, this was the first wintry scene of the season. The air was so filled with these snow pellets that we could not see a hill half a mile off for an hour. The hands seek the warmth of the pockets, and fingers are so benumbed that you cannot open your jJack-knife. The rabbits in the swamps enjoy it, as well as you. Methinks the winter gives them more liberty, like a night. I see where a boy has set a box trap and baited it with half an apple, and, a mile off, come across a snare set for a rabbit or par- tridge in a cow-path in a pitch pine wood near where the rabbits have nibbled the apples which strew the wet ground. How pitiable that the most that many see of a rabbit should be the snare that some boy has set for one! The bitter-sweet of a white oak acorn which you nibble in a bleak November walk over the tawny earth is more to me than a slice of imported pineapple. We do not think much of table-fruits. They are especially for aldermen and epicures. They do not feed the imagi- nation. That would starve on them. These wild fruits, whether eaten or not, are a dessert for the imagination. The south may keep her pineapples, and we will be content with our strawberries.

I count the rings in a spruce plank from the railroad bridge, which extend five and a half inches from the centre of the tree, and make them 146, — 5), + to a ring. This is slower growth than I find in a black spruce to-day at — Ministerial Swamp, P. M.—It is 104 feet high, 2} inches [in] diameter just above ground, and has 21 rings, =, inch to a ring. A larch near by is 21 feet high, 243 inches [in] diameter, and has 20 rings, which makes =; + to a ring. The larch has made nearly twice as much wood as the spruce in the same time. The cones of the spruce which I see are still closed. A few sugar maple seeds still hang on. Last night and to-day are very cold and blustering. Winter weather has come suddenly this year. ‘The house was shaken by wind last night, and there was a general deficiency of bedclothes. This morning some windows were as handsomely covered with frost as ever in winter. I wear mittens or gloves and my greatcoat. There is much ice on the meadows now, the broken edges shining in the sun. Now for the phenomena of winter, — the red buds of the high blueberry and the purple berries of the smilax. As I go up the meadow-side toward Clamshell, I see a very great collection of crows far and wide on the meadows, evidently gathered by this cold and bluster- ing weather. Probably the moist meadows where they feed are frozen up against them. They flit before me in countless numbers, flying very low on account of the strong northwest wind that comes over the hill, and a cold gleam is reflected from the back and wings of each, as from a weather-stained shingle. Some perch within three or four rods of me, and seem weary. I see where they have been pecking the apples by the meadow-side. An immense cohort of cawing crows which sudden winter has driven near to the habitations of man. When I return after sunset I see them collecting and hovering over and settling in the dense pine woods west of E. Wood’s, as if about to roost there. Yesterday I saw one flying over the house, its wings so curved by the wind that I thought it a black hawk. How is any scientific discovery made? Why, the dis- coverer takes it into his head first. He must all but see it. I see several little white pines in Hosmer’s meadow just beyond Lupine Hill, which must have sprung from seed which came some fifty rods, — probably blown so far in the fall. There are also a few in the road beyond Dennis’s, which probably were blown from his swamp wood. So that there is nothing to prevent their spring- ing up all over the village in a very few years — but our own plows and spades. ‘They have also come up quite numerously in the young woodland north of J. P. B.’s Cold Pool (probably blown from the wood south of the pond), though they are evidently half a dozen years younger than the oaks there. I look at this large white pine wood by the pool to see if little ones come up under it. What was recently pasture comes up within a rod of this high wood on the north side, and, though the fence is gone, the different condition and history of the ground is very apparent by the different aspect of the little pines. There the old white pines are dense, and there are no little ones under them, but only a rod north they are very abundant, forming a dense: thicket only two or three feet high bounded by a straight line on the south (or east and west), where the edge of the open land was within a rod of the great pines. Here they sprang up abundantly in the open land close by, but not at all under the pines. Yet within the great wood, wherever it is more open from any cause, I see a great many little pines springing up. Though they are thin and feeble comparatively, yet most of them will evidently come to be trees. White pines will spring up in the more open parts of a white pine wood, even under pines, though they are thin and feeble just in proportion to the density of the larger pines, and, where the large trees are quite dense, they will not spring up at all. How commonly you see pitch pines, white pines, and birches filling up a pasture, and, when they are a dozen or fifteen years old, shrub and other oaks beginning to show themselves, inclosing apple trees and walls and fences gradually and so changing the whole aspect of the region. These trees do not cover the whole surface equally at present, but are grouped very agreeably after natural laws which they obey. You remember, perhaps, that fifteen years ago there was not a single tree in this pasture, — not a germinating seed of one, — and now it is a pretty dense forest ten feet high. I con- fess that I love to be convinced of this inextinguishable vitality in Nature. I would rather that my body should be buried in a soil thus wide-awake than in a mere inert and dead earth. The cow-paths, the hollows where I slid in the winter, the rocks, are fast being enveloped and becoming rabbit-walks and hollows and rocks in the woods. How often you make a man richer in spirit in pro- portion as you rob him of earthly luxuries and com- forts! I see much oak wood cut at thirty years of age, — sprout wood. Many stumps which have only twenty-five or thirty rings send up no shoots, because they are the sprouts from old stumps, which you may still see by their sides, and so are really old trees and exhausted. The chopper should foresee this when he cuts down a wood. The bass by Dugan’s cut a year ago. It is hard to count, so indistinct its rings, but I make 46 to 50 in a diameter of some twenty inches. The sprouts are quite peculiar, so light an ash-color with red tips and large blunt red buds. The old pitch pines (vide back two or three weeks) one hundred and sixty years old, that stood on the south side of the Tommy Wheeler hollow, were twenty-three in number on a space about twelve rods by three (or thirty-six rods), with half a dozen white pines and as many oaks, the last two say twenty to fifty years younger than the pitch pines. Probably some of the pitch pines have died and left no trees, so that it may originally have been a pretty dense grove of pitch pines. There were as many more pitch pines (not to mention the oaks and white pines) on the other side of the hollow. These were on a slope toward the north. Now, four years after they were cut, this hillside is covered with hazel bushes, huckleberries, young oaks, red maples, Viburnum nudum, and a few little white pines, but the hollow be- low them has little beside grass (fine sedge) in it. It will be long before anything catches there. It is remarkable that no pitch pines grew there before, nor oaks, and very few white pines, which were the only trees there. Some pitch pines have shed their seeds.