in Thoreau’s Journal:

A week or two ago I brought home a handsome pitch pine cone, which had freshly fallen, and was closed perfectly tight. It was put into a table-drawer. To-day I am agreeably surprised that it has there dried and opened…. That hard, closed cone, which defied all violent attempts to open it, and could only be cut open, had thus yielded to the gentle persuasion of warmth and dryness.

The expanding of the pine cones, that, too, is a season.