in Thoreau’s Journal:

Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation. We hear of cow-commons and ministerial lots, but we want men-commons and lay lots, inalienable forever. Let us keep the New World new, preserve all the advantages of living in the country. There is meadow and pasture and wood-lot for the town’s poor. Why not a forest and huckleberry-field for the town’s rich? All Walden Wood might have been preserved for our park forever, with Walden in its midst, and the Easterbrooks Country, an unoccupied area of some four square miles, might have been our huckleberry-field. If any owners of these tracts are about to leave the world without natural heirs who need or deserve to be specially remembered, they will do wisely to abandon their possession to all, and not will them to some individual who perhaps has enough already. As some give to Harvard College or another institution, why might not another give a forest or huckleberry-field to Concord? A town is an institution which deserves to be remembered.

We boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses? We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe. To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our fine schoolhouse standing in a cow-yard at last.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This year, on account of the very severe frosts, the trees change and fall early, or fall before fairly changing. The willows have the bleached look of November. Consider how many leaves there are to fall each year and how much they must add to the soil.

Coultas (in What may be Learned from a Tree) finds that a single beech twig twenty-seven inches and three lines long and six years old was ” the leaf-labor of one hundred and fifty-five leaves,” and quotes from Asa Gray’s ” First Lessons in Botany ” that ” the Washington Elm at Cambridge —a tree of no extraordinary size—was some years ago estimated to produce a crop of seven millions of leaves, exposing a surface of 200,000 square feet, or about five acres, of foliage.” Supposing this to be true, and that the horizontal spread of this (like other the largest elms) is one hundred feet, then, if all its leaves should be spread evenly on the ground directly under it, there would be about twenty-five thicknesses. An ordinary forest would probably cover the ground as thickly as this tree would. Supposing a leaf to be of the same thickness with an ordinary sheet of letter-paper, and that the mass is compressed as much as paper packed in a ream, the twenty-five would be about one sixteenth of an inch thick. This is a rude calculation.

We have had a remarkably fertile year.  Let us see now if we have a cold winter after it.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The red of oaks, etc., is far more general now than three or four days ago, but it is also much duller, so that some maples that were a bright scarlet can now hardly be distinguished by their color from oaks, which have just turned red….

PM  To Poplar Hill.  Maple fires are burnt out generally, and they have fairly begun to fall and look smoky in the swamps. When my eyes were resting on those smoke-like bare trees, it did not at first occur to me why the landscape was not as brilliant as a few days ago. The outside trees in the swamps loose their leaves first.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I am struck by the superfluity of light in the atmosphere in the autumn––as if the earth absorbed none––& out of this profusion of dazzling light came the autumnal tints.  Can it because there is less vapor?

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Most leaves are already somewhat faded and withered. Their tints are not so bright. The chestnut leaves already rustle with a great noise as you walk through the woods, as they lie light, firm, and crisp. Now the chestnuts are rattling out. The burs are gaping and showing the plump nuts. They fill the ruts in the road, and are abundant amid the fallen leaves in the midst of the wood. The jays scream, and the red squirrels scold, while you are clubbing and shaking the trees.  Now it is true autumn—all things are crisp & ripe.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Generally speaking, the autumnal tints affect the color of the landscape for only two or three miles, but I distinguish maples by their color half a mile north of Brooks Clark’s, or some three miles distant, from this hill, —one further east very bright.

Also I see them in the northeast, or on or near, apparently, a road between Bedford and Billerica, at least four or five miles distant ! ! This is the furthest I can see them.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The leaves are falling…

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It has come to this, — that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature. 

It is monstrous when one cares but little about trees but much about Corinthian columns, and yet this is exceedingly common.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Many people have a foolish way of talking about small things––& apologize for themselves or another having attended to a small thing––having neglected their ordinary business & amused or interested themselves by attending to a small thing––  When if the truth were known their ordinary business was the small thing––& almost their whole lives misspent––but they were such fools as not to know it.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Think what a change, unperceived by many, has within a month come over the landscape!

Then the general, the universal, hue was green. Now see those brilliant scarlet and glowing yellow trees in the lowlands a mile off…See those crimson patches far away on the hillsides, like dense flocks of crimson sheep..See those patches of rich brown in the low grounds, where the ferns stand shriveled. See the greenish-yellow phalanxes of birches, and the crisped yellowish elm-tops here and there. We are not prepared to believe that the earth is now so parti-colored, and would present to a bird’s eye such distinct masses of bright yellow. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Sunday. I noticed on Friday, October 3d,

that the willows generally were green and unchanged.

The red maples varied from green through yellow to

bright red. The black cherry was green inclining to

yellow. (I speak of such trees as I chanced to see.) The

apple trees, green but shedding their leaves like most of

the trees. Elm, a dingy yellow. White ash, from green

to dark purple or mulberry. White oak, green inclining

to yellow. Tupelo, reddish yellow and red; tree bushed

about the head, limbs small and slanting downward.

Some maples when ripe are yellow or whitish yellow,

others reddish yellow, others bright red, by the accident

of the season or position, — the more or less light and

sun, being on the edge or in the midst of the wood; just

as the fruits are more or less deeply colored. Birches,

green and yellow. Swamp white oak, a yellowish green.

Black ash, greenish yellow and now sered by frost.

Bass, sered yellowish.

Color in the maturity of foliage is as variable and

little characteristic as naturalists have found it to be

for distinguishing fishes and quadrupeds, etc.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Now the year itself begins to be ripe….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The maples about Walden are quite handsome now. Standing on the railroad, I look across the pond to Pine Hill, where the outside trees and the shrubs scattered generally through the wood glow through the green, yellow, and scarlet, like fires just kindled at the base of the trees, – a general conflagration just fairly under way, soon to envelop every tree. The hillside forest is all aglow along its edge and in all its cracks and fissures, and soon the flames will leap upward to the tops of the tallest trees. About the pond I see maples of all their tints, and black birches (on the southwest side) clear pale yellow; and on the peak young chestnut clumps and walnuts are considerably yellowed.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The leaves of some trees merely wither, turn brown, and drop off at this season, without any conspicuous flush of beauty, while others now first attain to the climax of their beauty.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Surveying in Lincoln.  A severer frost last night. The young & tender trees begin to assume the autumnal tints more generally—plainly in consequence of the frost the last 2 mornings.

The sides of the bushy hills present a rich variety of colors like rug work—but the forest generally is not yet changed.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is with leaves as with fruits and woods, animals and men; when they are mature their different characters appear.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The intense brilliancy of the red-ripe maples scattered here and there in the midst of the green oaks & hickories on its hilly shore is quite charming. They are unexpectedly & incredibly brilliant –especially on the western shore & close to the waters edge, where alternating with yellow birches & poplars & green oaks—they remind me of a line of soldiers red coats & riflemen in green mixed together. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

P. M. – To old mill-site behind Ponkawtasset. Poke berries in the sprout-land east of the red huckleberry still fresh and abundant, perhaps a little past prime. I never saw so many. The plants stand close together, and their drooping racemes three to five inches long, of black or purplish-black berries (ending in red and less [an indecipherable word]), almost crowd one another, hanging around the bright-purple, now for the most part bare, stems. I hear some birds about, but see none feeding on the berries. I could soon gather bushels there. The arum berries are still fresh and abundant, perhaps in their prime. A large cluster is two and a half inches long by two wide and rather flattish. One, which has ripened prematurely, the stalk being withered and drooping, resembles a very short thick ear of scarlet corn. This might well enough be called snake-corn. These singular vermilion-colored berries, about a hundred of them, surmount a purple bag on a peduncle six or eight inches long. It is one of the most remarkable and dazzling, if not the handsomest, fruits we have. These were by violet wood-sorrel wall. How many fruits are scarlet now!

— barberries, prinos, etc. A flock of vireo-like, somewhat yellowish birds, very neat, white beneath and olive above, in garden.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is a very fine afternoon to be on the water, somewhat Indian-summer-like. I do not know what constitutes the peculiarity and charm of this weather; the broad water so smooth, notwithstanding the slight wind, as if, owing to some oiliness, the wind slid over without ruffling it. There is a slight coolness in the air, yet the sun is occasionally very warm. I am tempted to say that the air is singularly clear, yet I see it is quite hazy. Perhaps it is that transparency it is said to possess when full of moisture and before or after rain.

Through this I see the colors of trees and shrubs beginning to put on their October dress, and the creak of the mole cricket sounds late along the shore.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The increasing scarlet & yellow tints around the meadows & river remind me of the opening of a vast flower bud—they are the petals of its corolla—which is of the width of the valleys—

It is the flower of autumn whose expanding bud just begins to blush.  As yet however in the forest there are very few changes of foliage.