in Thoreau’s Journal:

The air is full of the odor of apple blossoms—

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Lupines, apparently yesterday.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The fringed polygala P. Pauciflora (flowering winter green.) 

What bird was that whose wild note I heard at Goose pond tonight?—a loon or a bittern?  1st Night hawks squeak & boom. Grasshoppers appear.

In Thoreau’s Journal:

May 23, 1852:  The buttercup season has arrived here.

May 23, 1853:  At first we had the lighter, paler spring yellows of willows (cowslips even, for do they not grow a little darker afterward?), dandelion, cinquefoil, then the darker (methinks it is a little darker than the cowslip) and deeper yellow of the buttercup; and then this broad distinction between the buttercup and the krigia and senecio, as the seasons revolve toward July.  Every new flower that opens, no doubt, expresses a new mood of the human mind.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The fresh foliage of the woods in May, when the leaves are about as big as a mouse’s ear, putting out like taller grasses and herbs. 

In all my rambles I have seen no landscape which can make me forget Fair Haven. I still sit on its Cliff in a new spring day, and look over the awakening woods and the river, and hear the new birds sing, with the same delight as ever.  It is as sweet a mystery to me as ever, what this world is.  Fair Haven Lake in the south, with its pine-covered island and its meadows, the hickories putting out fresh young yellowish leaves, and the oaks light-grayish ones, while the oven-bird thrums his sawyer-like strain, and the chewink rustles through the dry leaves or repeats his jingle on the tree-top, and the wood thrush, the genius of the wood, whistles for the first time his clear and thrilling strain, ––it sounds as it did the first I heard it. The sight of these budding woods intoxicates me….

The strong-colored pine, the grass of trees, in the midst of which other trees are but as weeds or flowers,  —a little exotic.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I think that the existence of man in nature is the divinest and most startling of all facts.

 in Thoreau’s Journal: 

Now is the season of the leafing of the trees and of planting. The fields are white with houstonias, as they will soon be yellow with buttercups.  Perchance the beginning of summer may be dated from the fully formed leaves, when dense shade begins…Some apple trees in blossom—

Most are just ready to burst forth—the leaves being half-formed.

in Thoreau’s Journal:  

This is the season when the meadow grass is seen waving in the wind at the same time that the shadows of clouds are passing over it.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The Rhodora in blossom—a delicate colored flower.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Do I smell the young birch leaves at a distance? Most trees are beautiful when leafing out but especially the birch. After a storm at this season the sun comes out & lights up the tender expanding leaves & all Nature is full of light & fragrance—& the birds sing without ceasing—and the earth is a fairy-land.

The birch leaves are so small that you see the landscape through the tree—& they are like silvery & green spangles in the sun fluttering about the tree.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The woods putting forth new leaves; it is a memorable season. So hopeful! 

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The golden willow catkins begin to fall–their prime is past–

& buttercups and silvery cinquefoil,

and the first apple blossoms,

and waving grass beginning to be tinged with sorrel,

introduce us to a different season. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The sounds & sights—as birds & flowers heard & seen at those seasons when there are fewest—are most memorable & suggestive of poetic associations.  

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The shad blossom days in the woods.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Sugar maples on the common are in blossom.

1852 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The birches at a distance appear as a thin green veil—in their expanding leaves.

1856 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Either nature may be changed or man. Some animals, as frogs or musquash are fitted to live in the marsh.

Only a portion of the earth is habitable by man. Is the earth improving or deteriorating in this respect? Does it require to be improved by the hands of man or is man to live more naturally and so more safely?

in Thoreau’s Journal:

For some reason I now remember the autumn….We remember the autumn to best advantage in the spring—the finest aroma of it reaches us then.

1852 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The gray-misty looking deciduous woods now appear to inbosom the evergreens which before stood out distinct—

____________________________________________________________________

in Thoreau’s Journal:

 A fresh scent blows up from the meadows, the river rapidly going down….I am most impressed by the rapidity of the changes within a week…Methinks the scent is a more primitive inquisition than the eye.— more oracular and trust-worthy.  When I criticize my own writing I go by the scent, as it were. The scent reveals of course what is concealed from the other senses— By it I detect earthiness.