One of these drooping clusters of potato balls would be as good a symbol, emblem, of the year’s fertility as anything,—better surely than a bunch of grapes. Fruit of the strong soil, containing potash (?). The vintage is come; the olive is ripe.
“I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude;
And with forc’d fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year;”
Why not for my coat-of-arms, for device, a drooping cluster of potato balls,—in a potato field?[321]
What right has a New England poet to sing of wine, who never saw a vineyard, who obtains his liquor from the grocer, who would not dare, if he could, tell him what it is composed of. A Yankee singing in praise of wine! It is not sour grapes in this case, it is sweet grapes; the more inaccessible they are the sweeter they are. It seemed to me that the year had nothing so much to brag of as these potato balls. Do they not concern New-Englanders a thousand times more than all her grapes? In Moore’s new field they grow, cultivated with the bog hoe, manured with ashes and sphagnum. How they take to the virgin soil![322] Shannon tells me that he took a piece of bog land of Augustus Hayden, cleared, turned up the stumps and roots and burned it over, making a coat of ashes six inches deep, then planted potatoes. He never put a hoe to it till he went to dig them; then between 8 o’clock a. m. and 5 p. m. he and another man dug and housed seventy-five bushels apiece!!
Cohush now in fruit, ivory-white berries tipped now with black on stout red pedicels,—Actæa alba. Collinsonia Canadensis, horseweed. I had discovered this singular flower there new to me, and, having a botany by me, looked it out. What a surprise and disappointment, what an insult and impertinence to my curiosity and expectation, to have given me the name “horseweed!”
Cohush Swamp is about twenty rods by three or four. Among rarer plants it contains the basswood, the black (as well as white) ash, the fever-bush, the cohush, the collinsonia, not to mention sassafras, poison sumach, ivy, agrimony, Arum triphyllum, (sweet viburnum (?) in hedges near by), ground-nut, touch-me-not (as high as your head), and Eupatorium purpureum (eight feet, eight inches high, with a large convex corymb (hemispherical) of many stories, fourteen inches wide; width of plant from tip of leaf to tip of leaf two feet, diameter of stalk one inch at ground, leaves seven in a whorl). Rare plants seem to love certain localities. As if the original Conant had been a botanist and endeavored to form an arboretum. A natural arboretum?
The handsome sweet viburnum berries, now red on one cheek.
It was the filiform crowfoot (Ranunculus filiformis) that I saw by the riverside the other day and to-day. The season advances apace. The flowers of the nettle-leaved vervain are now near the ends of the spike, like the blue. Utricularia inflata, whorled bladderwort, floating on the water at same place. Gentiana Saponaria budded. Gerardia flava at Conant’s Grove.