in Thoreau’s Journal:

Northern wild red cherry ripe ap some days.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The red-lily with its torrid color & sun freckled spots––dispensing too with the outer garment of a calyx––its petals so open & wide apart that you can see through it in every direction tells of hot weather–– It is a handsome bell shape––so upright & the flower prevails over every other part. It belongs not to spring. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Under the Salix nigra var. falcata, [black willow] near that handsomest one, which now is full of scythe-shaped leaves, the larger six inches long by seven eighths wide, with remarkably broad lunar leafy appendages or stipules at their base, I found a remarkable moth lying flat on the still water as if asleep (they appear to sleep during the day), as large as the smaller birds. Five and a half inches in alar extent and about three inches long, something like the smaller figure in one position of the wings (with a remarkably narrow lunar-cut tail), of a sea-green color, with four conspicuous spots whitish within, then a red line, then yellowish border below or toward the tail, but brown, brown orange, and black above, toward head; a very robust body, covered with a kind of downy plumage, an inch and a quarter long by five eighths thick.

The sight affected me as tropical, and I suppose it is the northern verge of some species. It suggests into what productions Nature would run if all the year were a July. By night it is active, for, though I thought it dying at first, it made a great noise in its prison, a cigar-box, at night. When the day returns, it apparently drops wherever it may be, even into the water, and dozes till evening again. Is it called the emperor moth? [It’s a luna moth]

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The first really foggy morning yet before I rise I hear the song of birds from out it—like the bursting of its bubbles with music—the bead on liquids just uncorked. Their song gilds thus the frostwork of the morning— As if the fog were a great sweet froth on the surface of land and water—whose fixed air escaped—whose bubbles burst with music. The sound of its evaporation—the fixed air of the morning just brought from the cellars of the night escaping.— The morning twittering of birds in perfect harmony with it. I came near awaking this morning. I am older than last year   the mornings are further between— The days are fewer— Any excess—to have drunk too much water even, the day before is fatal to the morning’s clarity—but in health the sound of a cow bell is celestial music. O might I always wake to thought & poetry—regenerated! Can it be called a morning—if our senses are not clarified so that we perceive more clearly—if we do not rise with elastic vigor? How wholesome these fogs which some fear—they are cool medicated vapor baths—mingled by nature which bring to our senses all the medical properties of the meadows. The touchstones of health— Sleep with all your windows open and let the mist embrace you.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Keep on through North Tamworth, and breakfast by shore of one of the Ossipee Lakes. Chocorua north-northwest. Hear and see loons and see a peetweet’s egg washed up. A shallow-shored pond, too shallow for fishing, with a few breams seen near shore; some pontederia and targetweed in it.

Travelling thus toward the White Mountains, the mountains fairly begin with Red Hill and Ossipee Mountain, but the White Mountain scenery proper on the high hillside road in Madison before entering Conway, where you see Chocorua on the left, Mote Mountain ahead, Doublehead, and some of the White Mountains proper beyond, i. e. a sharp peak.

We fished in vain in a small clear pond by the roadside in Madison.

Chocorua is as interesting a peak as any to remember. You may be jogging along steadily for a day before you get round it and leave it behind, first seeing it on the north, then northwest, then west, and at last southwesterly, ever stern, rugged and inaccessible, and omnipresent. It was seen from Gilmanton to Conway, and from Moultonboro was the ruling feature.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The reddish blossoms of the umbelled wintergreen (Pyrola umbellata) are now in perfection and are exceedingly beautiful.  Also the white sweet-scented flowers of the P. rotundifolia

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The fresher breeze which accompanies the dawn rustles the oaks and birches, and the earth respires calmly with the creaking of crickets. Some hazel leaf stirs gently, as if anxious not to awake the day too abruptly, while the time is hastening to the distinct line between darkness and light.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The Mitchella repens, so abundant now in the north-west part of Hubbard’s Grove, emits a strong astringent cherry-like scent as I walk over it, now that it is so abundantly in bloom, which is agreeable to me, —spotting the ground with its downy-looking white flowers.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

An abundance of red lilies in an upland dry meadow….low from one to two feet high–up-right flowered––more or less dark shade of red-freckled & sometimes wrinkle edged––must have been some days. 

This has come with the intense summer heats– a torrid July heat like a red sunset threatening torrid heat. (Do we not always have a dry time just before the huckleberries turn?-) I think this meadow was burnt over about a year ago. Did that make the red lily grow? The spring now seems far behind–I do not remember the interval.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper, coincident with the production of this, which is stereotyped in the poet’s life, is what he has become through his work…Let not the artist expect that his true work will stand in any prince’s gallery.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

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 preeminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I observed some mulleins growing on the western slope of the sandy railroad embankment, in as warm a place as can easily be found, where the heat was reflected from the sand oppressively at 3 o’clock p. m. this hot day; yet the green and living leaves felt rather cool than otherwise to the hand, but the dead ones at the root were quite warm. The living plant thus preserves a cool temperature in the hottest exposure, as if it kept a cellar below, from which cooling liquors were drawn up.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The rubus odoratus purple flowering raspberry in gardens––

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I am living this 27th of June, 1840, a dull, cloudy day and no sun shining.

The clink of the smith’s hammer sounds feebly over the roofs, and the wind is sighing gently, as if dreaming of cheerfuller days. The farmer is plowing in yonder field, craftsmen are busy in the shops, the trader stands behind the counter, and all works go steadily forward. But I will have nothing to do; I will tell fortune that I play no game with her, and she may reach me in my Asia of serenity and indolence if she can.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Just so much beauty and virtue as there is in the world, and just so much ugliness and vice, you see expressed in flowers.  Each human being has his flower which expresses his character.  In them nothing is concealed, but everything published. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

There is a flower for every mood of the mind.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Pontederia, just out.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The mountain laurel, with its milk-white flower, in cool and shady woods, reminds one of the vigor of nature. It is perhaps a first-rate flower, considering its size and ever-greenness. Its flower-buds, curiously folded in a ten- angled pyramidal form, are remarkable. A profusion of flowers, with an innocent fragrance. It reminds me of shady mountain-sides where it forms the underwood.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The strawberries may perhaps be considered a fruit of the spring, for they have depended chiefly on the freshness and moisture of spring, and on high lands are already dried up; a soft fruit, a sort of manna which falls in June, and in the meadows they lurk at the shady roots of the grass. Now the blueberry, a somewhat firmer fruit, is beginning. Nuts, the firmest, will be the last.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Having noticed the pine pollen washed up on the shore of three or four ponds in the woods lately and at Ripple Lake, a dozen rods from the nearest pine, also having seen the pollen carried off visibly half a dozen rods from a pitch pine which I had jarred, and rising all the while when there was very little wind, it suggested to me that the air must be full of this fine dust at this season, that it must be carried to great distances, when dry, and falling at night perhaps, or with a change in the atmosphere, its presence might be detected remote from pines by examining the edges of pretty large bodies of water, where it would be collected to one side by the wind and waves from a large area.

So I thought over all the small ponds in the township in order to select one or more most remote from the woods or pines, whose shores I might examine and so test my theory. I could think of none more favorable than this little pond only four rods in diameter, a watering-place in John Brown’s pasture, which has but few pads in it. It is a small round pond at the bottom of a hollow in the midst of a perfectly bare, dry pasture. The nearest wood of any kind is just thirty-nine rods distant northward, and across a road from the edge of the pond. Any other wood in other directions is five or six times as far. I knew it was a bad time to try my experiment, —just after such heavy rains and when the pines are effete, —a little too late.  The wind was now blowing quite strong from the northeast, whereas all the pollen that I had seen hitherto had been collected on the northeast sides of ponds by a southwest wind. I approached the pond from the northeast and, looking over it and carefully along the shore there, could detect no pollen. I then proceeded to walk round it, but still could detect none. I then said to myself, If there was any here before the rain and northeast wind, it must have been on the northeast side and then have been washed over and now up high quite at or on the shore. I looked there carefully, stooping down, and was gratified to find, after all, a distinct yellow line of pollen dust about half an inch in width —or washing off to two or three times that width —quite on the edge, and some dead twigs which I took up from the wet shore were completely coated with it, as with sulphur. This yellow line reached half a rod along the southwest side, and I then detected a little of the dust slightly graying the surface for two or three feet out there. (Many little snow (?) -fleas on it.)

When I thought I had failed, I was much pleased to detect, after all, this distinct yellow line, revealing unmistakably the presence of pines in the neighborhood and thus confirming my theory. As chemists detect the presence of ozone in the atmosphere by exposing to it a delicately prepared paper, so the lakes detect for us thus the presence of the pine pollen in the atmosphere. They are our pollinometers. How much of this invisible dust must be floating in the atmosphere, and be inhaled and drunk by us at this season! Who knows but the pollen of some plants may be unwholesome to inhale, and produce the diseases of the season?

Of course a large pond will collect the most, and you will find most at the bottom of long deep bays into which the wind blows.

I do not believe that there is any part of this town on which the pollen of the pine may not fall. The time to examine the ponds this year was, I should say, from the 15th to the 20th of this month. Looking at the trees today, I find that the pines are now effete, especially the pitch pine, the sterile flowers now turned reddish. The white pine is lighter-colored, and all but a very little indeed is effete. In the white pine it is a dense cluster of twenty or thirty little flowers about the base of this year’s shoot.

I did not expect to find any pollen, the pond was so small and distant from any wood, but I thought that I would examine. Who knows but the pollen of various kinds floating through the air at this season may be the source of some of the peculiar perfumes which are not traceable to their sources?