in Thoreau’s Journal:

The milk weed (Syriaca) now rapidly discounting. The lanceolate pods having opened the seeds spring out on the least jar or when dried by the sun—& form a little fluctuating white silky mass or tuft each held by the extremities of the fine threads, until a stronger puff of wind sets them free. It is a pleasant sight to see it dispersing its seeds…

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I cannot easily dismiss the subject of the fallen leaves. How densely they conceal the water, for several feet in length, amid the alders and button bushes and maples along the shore of the river still light, tight, and dry boats, dense cities of boats…Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed upon the earth. This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year.

This annual decay and death, this dying by inches, before the whole tree at last lies down and turns to soil. As tees shed their leaves, so deer their horns, and men their hair or nails. The year’s great crop. I am more interested in it than in the English grass alone or in the corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future cornfields on which the earth fattens. They teach us how to die.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Now again as in the spring we begin to look for sheltered and sunny places where we may sit.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

How pleasant to walk over beds of these fresh crisp & rustling fallen leaves…

How beautiful they go to their graves—how gently lay themselves down—& turn to mould! Painted of a thousand hues and fit to make the beds of us living.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

At this season of the year, when each leaf acquires its peculiar color, Nature prints this history distinctly, as it were an illuminated edition. Every oak and hickory and birch and aspen sprinkled amid the pines tells its tale a mile off, and you have not to go laboriously through the wood examining the bark and leaves. These facts would be best illustrated by colors, ––green, yellow, red, etc.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

In Lee’s Wood, white pine leaves are now fairly fallen (not pitch pine yet), —a pleasant, soft, but slippery carpet to walk on. They sometimes spread leafy twigs on floors. Would not these be better? Where the pines stand far apart on grassy pasture hillsides, these tawny patches under each tree contrast singularly with the green around. I see them under one such tree completely and evenly covering and concealing the grass, and more than an inch deep, as they lie lightly.

These leaves, like other, broader ones, pass through various hues (or shades) from green to brown, —first yellow, giving the tree that parti-colored look, then pale brown when they fall, then reddish brown after lying on the ground, and then darker and darker brown when decaying.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Methinks the reflections are never purer and more distinct than now at the season of the fall of the leaf, just before the cool twilight has come, when the air has a finer grain. Just as our mental reflections are more distinct at this season of the year, when the evenings grow cool and lengthen and our winter evenings with their brighter fires may be said to begin. And painted ducks, too, often come and sail or float amid the painted leaves. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Each ball of the button-bush reflected in the silvery water by the riverside appears to me as distinct and important as a star in the heavens viewed through “optic glass.” This, too, deserves its Kepler and Galileo.

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 Pond is now most beautifully framed with the autumn tinted woods & hills….

How peaceful great nature—there is no disturbing sound…

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I love very well this cloudy afternoon, so sober and favorable to reflection after so many bright ones.

What if the clouds shut out the heavens, provided they concentrate my thoughts and make a more celestial heaven below! I hear crickets plainer; I wander less in my thoughts, am less dissipated; am aware how shallow was the current of my thoughts before. Deep streams are dark, as if there were a cloud in the sky; shallow ones are bright and sparkling, reflecting the sun from their bottoms. The very wind on my cheek seems more fraught with meaning.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is remarkable how many trees —maple and swamp white [oak], etc.—which stand on the bank of the river, being undermined by the water or broken off by the ice or other cause, fall into the stream and finally sink to the bottom and are half buried there for many years. A great deal of wood, especially of the kinds named, is thus lost. They last longer there probably than in favorable localities out of water. I see still the timber foundation of an old dam just above Spencer Brook, extending across the river on the bottom, though there has been nothing above water within my recollection. The large black oaks in front of Prescott Barrett’s are one by one falling into the river, and there are none to succeed them. They were probably left to skirt the stream when the other wood was cut, and now, when they are undermined, there are none behind to supply their places.

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.

October 9, 1860 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Though the red maples have not their common brilliancy on account of the very severe frost about the end of September, some are very interesting. You cannot judge a tree by seeing it from one side only. As you go round or away from it, it may overcome you with its mass of glowing scarlet or yellow light. You need to stand where the greatest number of leaves will transmit or reflect to you most favorably.

The tree which looked comparatively lifeless, cold, and merely parti-colored, seen in a more favorable light as you are floating away from it, may affect you wonderfully as a warm, glowing drapery. I now see one small red maple which is all a pure yellow within and a bright red scarlet on its outer surface and prominences. It is a remarkably distinct painting of scarlet on a yellow ground. It is an indescribably beautiful contrast of scarlet and yellow. Another is yellow and green where this was scarlet and yellow, and in this case the bright and liquid green, now getting to be rare, is by contrast as charming a color as the scarlet.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This warm day is a godsend to the wasps. I see them buzzing about the broken windows of deserted buildings, as Jenny Dugan’s, —the yellow-knotted. I smell the dry leaves like hay from the woods. Some elms are already bare. The basswood here is quite sere. The pines are still shedding their leaves. This brook by Jenny’s is always a pleasant sight and sound to me. In the spring I saw the sucker here. It is remarkable through what narrow and shallow brooks a sucker will be seen to dart, and a trout. I perceive that some white oaks are quitered. The black oaks are yellowish. I know not surely whether the brighter red and more divided leaf is that of the red or the scarlet oak. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Perhaps the autumnal tints are as bright & interesting now as they will be—now is the time to behold the maple swamps—one mass of red & yellow—all on fire as it were.   These and the blood red huckleberries are the most conspicuous—and then in the village the warm brownish yellow elms—& there and elsewhere the dark red ashes.  The green pines springing out of huckleberries on the hillsides look as if surrounded by red or vermillion paint….

I sit on Poplar Hill.  It is a warm Indian summerish afternoon. The sun comes out of clouds & lights up & warms the whole scene— It is perfect autumn….It is the mellowing year.  The sunshine harmonizes with the imbrowned & fiery foliage.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The mulberry was perhaps the first tree that was conspicuously turned after the maples. Many maples are still quite green; so that their gala-day will be prolonged.

I see some hickories now a crisped mass of imbrowned yellow, green in the recesses, sere brown on the prominences, though the eye does not commonly thus discriminate. The smooth sumach is very important for its mass of clear red or crimson. Some of it is now a very dark crimson.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The maples are reddening, and birches yellowing. The mouse-ear in the shade in the middle of the day, so hoary, looks as if the frost still lay on it. Well it wears the frost. Bumblebees are on the Aster undulatus, and gnats are dancing in the air.