in Thoreau’s Journal:  

Here are many wild roses northeast of Trillium Woods. We are liable to underrate this flower, on account of its commonness.  Is it not the queen of our flowers? How ample and high colored its petals, glancing half concealed from its own green bowers. There is a certain noble and delicate civility about it, not wildness. It is properly the type of the rosaeae, or flowers, among others, of most wholesome fruits. It is at home in the garden as readily cultivated as apples. It is the pride of June.

In summing up its attractions I should mention its rich color, size, and form, the rare beautify of its bud, its fine fragrance and the beauty of the entire shrub, not to mention the almost innumerable varieties it runs into. I bring home the buds ready to expand, put them into a pitcher of water, and the next morning they open, and fill my chamber with fragrance. This found in the wilderness must have reminded the Pilgrim of home.

in Thoreau’s Journal:  

This seems to be the true hour to be abroad, sauntering far from home. Your thoughts being already turned toward home, your walk in one sense ended, you are in that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before.

Then the dews begin to descend in your mind, and its atmosphere is strained of all impurities. Home is farther away than ever; here is home. The beauty of the world impresses you. There is a coolness in your mind as in a well. Life is too grand for ripples.

in Thoreau’s Journal:  

How beautiful the solid cylinders of the lamb kill now just before sunset, small ten-sided rosy-crimson basins, about two inches above the recurved, dropping, dry capsules of last year, and sometimes those of the year before, two inches lower.

in Thoreau’s Journal:  

Visited the great orchis which I am waiting to have open completely. It is emphatically a flower (within gunshot of the hawk’s nest); its great spike six inches by two, of delicate pale purple flowers which begin to expand at bottom, rises above and contrasts with the green leaves of the hellebore, skunk-cabbage, and ferns (by which its own leaves are concealed, in the cool shade of an alder swamp.

It is the more interesting for its variety and the secluded situations in which it grows, owing to which it is seldom seen, not thrusting itself upon the observation of men. It is a pale purple, as if from growing in the shade. It is not remarkable in its stalk and leaves, which, indeed, are commonly concealed by other plants.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

No one to my knowledge, has observed the minute differences in the seasons. Hardly two nights are alike. The rocks do not feel warm to-night, for the air is warmest; nor does the sand particularly.

A book of the seasons, each page of which should be written out-of-doors, or in its own locality wherever it may be.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:  

Ripe strawberries, even in a meadow on sand thrown out of a ditch, hard at first to detect amid the red radical leaves.

For a week past we have had washing days– The grass waving and trees having leafed out their boughs wave and feel the effect of the breeze. Thus new life & motion is imparted to the trees– Theseason of waving boughs–and the lighter under sides of the new leaves are exposed. This is the first half of June. Already the grass is not so fresh & liquid velvety as green–having much of its blossom & some even gone to seed–& it is mixed with reddish ferns & other plants–but the general leafiness–shadiness & waving of grass & boughs in the breeze characterise the season.

The wind is not quite agreeable–because it prevents your hearing the birds sing. Meanwhile the crickets are strengthening their quire. The weather is very clear & the sky bright. The river shines like silver. Methinks this is a traveller’s month. The locust in bloom– The waving undulating rye. The deciduous trees have filled up the intervals between the (pines.) evergreens. & the woods are bosky now.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:  

This is truly June when you begin to see brakes (dark green) fully expanded in the wood paths.

in Thoreau’s Journal:  

To Walden. 

Clover begins to redden the fields generally. The quail is heard at a distance. Buttercups of various kinds mingled, yellow the meadows, the tall, the bulbous, the repens.

The cinquefoil, in its ascending state, keeping pace with the grass, is now abundant in the fields. Saw it one or two weeks ago. This is a feature of June. Still both high and low blueberry and huckleberry blossoms abound. The hemlock woods, their fanlike sprays edged or spotted with short, yellowish-green shoots, tier above tier, shelf above shelf, look like a cool bazaar of rich embroidered goods. How dense their shade, dark and cool, beneath them, as in a cellar. No plants glow there, but the ground is covered with fine red leaves. It is oftenest on a side hill they grow.

 in Thoreau’s Journal: 

This is June, the month of grass and leaves. Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late.

Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasonsas two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse, and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact, A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts, which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind.

1852 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The lupine is now in its glory.

1860 in Thoreau’s Journal:  

The first of June, when the lady’s slipper and the wild pink have come out in sunny places on the hill-sides, then the summer is begun according to the clock of the seasons.

I stand with Thoreau in relation to western and eastern philosophy—in the way that he wrote on June 4, 1857: “It is time now to bring our philosophy out of doors.” This is  philosophy “unroofed” which is (in my opinion) much closer to the “original position” of human thought. Any thought or observation that aspires to this inspires in me a kind of kinship with that deeper history. By nature then it’s a bit indescribable, but more known by things like when the grass waves. That is something I know.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

One thing that chiefly distinguishes this season from three weeks ago is that fine serene undertone or earth-song as we go by sunny banks and hillsides, the creak of crickets, which affects our thoughts so favorably, imparting its own serenity. It is time now to bring our philosophy out of doors.

Our thoughts pillow themselves unconsciously in the trough of this serene rippling sea of sound. Now first we begin to be peripatetics. No longer our ears can be content with the bald echoing earth, but everywhere recline on the spring-cushion of a cricket’s chirp. These rills that ripple from every hillside become at length a universal sea of sound, nourishing our ears when we are most unconscious.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

These are the clear breezy days of early June, when the leaves are young and few, and the sorrel not yet in its prime.  Perceive the meadow fragrance.

Am surprised to [see] some twenty or more crows in a flock still, cawing about us.

The roads are strewn with red maple seed. The pine shoots have grown generally from three to six inches, and begin to make a distinct impression, even at some distance of white and brown above their dark green. The foliage of deciduous trees is still rather yellow-green than green.

There are in the Boulder Field several of the creeping juniper which grow quite flat on the ground, somewhat like the empetrum, most elevated in the middle….

Tree-toads heard…. There are various sweet scents in the air now. Especially, as I go along an arbor-vitae hedge, I perceive a very distinct fragrance like strawberries from it.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Now I have reached the hill-top above the fog at a quarter to five, about sunrise, and all around me is a sea of fog, level and white, reaching nearly to the top of this hill, only the tops of a few high hills appearing as distant islands in the main.

You can get the impression which the ocean makes, without ever going to the shore… It is tossed up toward the sun and by it into the the most boisterous of seas, which no craft, no ocean steamer, is vast enough to sail on.

And now long, dark ridges of wood appear through it, and now the sun reflected from the river makes a bright glow in the fog….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Within little more than a fortnight the woods, from bare twigs, have become a sea of verdure, and young shoots have contended with one another in the race. The leaves have unfurled all over the country like a parasol.

Shade is produced, and the birds are concealed and their economies go forward uninterruptedly, thousands of worms and insects are preying on the leaves while they are young and tender. Myriads of little parasols are suddenly spread all the country over, to shield the earth and roots of the trees from parching heat, and they begin to flutter and rustle in the breeze.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Some incidents in my life have seemed far more allegorical than actual; they were so significant that they plainly served no other use.  That is, I have been more impressed by their allegorical significance and fitness; they have been like myths or passages in a myth, rather than mere incidents or history which have to wait to become significant.  Quite in harmony with my subjective philosophy. This, for instance: that, when I thought I knew the flowers so well, the beautiful purple azalea or pinxter-flower should be shown me by the hunter who found it. Such facts are lifted quite above the level of the actual. They are all just such events as my imagination prepares me for, no matter how incredible. Perfectly in keeping with my life and characteristic.

Even and anon something will occur which my philosophy has not dreamed of. The limits of the actual are set some thoughts further off. That which has seemed a rigid wall of vast thickness unexpectedly proves a thin and undulating drapery. The boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations.  The fact that a rare and beautiful flower which we never saw, perhaps never heard [of], for which therefore there was no place in our thoughts, may sat length be found in our immediate neighborhood, is very suggestive.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The apple trees are about out of blossom— It is but a week they last

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

That exceedingly neat and interesting little flower blue-eyed grass now claims our attention.

________________________

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The buttercups spot the churchyard.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

At Corner Spring. A wet day. The veery sings nevertheless.

The road is white with the apple blossoms fallen off as with snowflakes. The dog wood is coming out. Ladies slippers out