The fruit of the sweet-gale by Nut Meadow Brook is of a yellowish green now and has not yet its greasy feel.
The little red-streaked and dotted excrescences on the shrub oaks I find as yet no name for.
Now for the pretty red capsules or pods of the Hypericum Canadense.
White goldenrod is budded along the Marlborough road.
Chickadees and jays never fail. The cricket’s is a note which does not attract you to itself. It is not easy to find one.
I fear that the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming more distinct and scientific; that, in exchange for views as wide as heaven’s cope, I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope. I see details, not wholes nor the shadow of the whole. I count some parts, and say, “I know.” The cricket’s chirp now fills the air in dry fields near pine woods.
Gathered our first watermelon to-day. By the Marlborough road I notice the richly veined leaves of the Neottia pubescens, or veined neottia, rattlesnake-plantain. I like this last name very well, though it might not be easy to convince a quibbler or proser of its fitness. We want some name to express the mystic wildness of its rich leaves. Such work as men imitate in their embroidery, unaccountably agreeable to the eye, as if it answered its end only when it met the eye of man; a reticulated leaf, visible only on one side; little things which make one pause in the woods, take captive the eye.
Here is a bees’ or wasps’ nest in the sandy, mouldering bank by the roadside, four inches in diameter, as if made of scales of striped brown paper. It is singular if indeed man first made paper and then discovered its resemblance to the work of the wasps, and did not derive the hint from them.
Canoe birches by road to Dakin’s. Cuticle stripped off; inner bark dead and scaling off; new (inner) bark formed.
The Solomon’s-seals are fruited now, with finely red-dotted berries.