The joy of meeting with a new plant, a sensation known to all searchers after flowers, is more than once mentioned in the Journal: the discovery of a single flower hitherto unknown to him makes him feel as if he were in a wealth of novelties. "By the discovery of one new plant all bounds seem to be infinitely removed." He notes, too, the not uncommon experience, that a flower, once recognized, is likely soon to be re-encountered. Seeing something blue, or glaucous, in a swamp, he approaches it, and finds it to be the Andromeda polifolia, which had been shown him, only a few days before, in Emerson's collection; now he sees it in abundance. At times he adopts the method of sitting quietly and looking around him, on the principle that "as it is best to sit in a grove and let the birds come to you, so, as it were, even the flowers will come."
Swamps were among Thoreau's favourite haunts: he thinks it would be a luxury to stand in one, up to his chin, for a whole summer's day, scenting the sweet-fern and bilberries. "That is a glorious swamp of Miles's," he remarks; "the more open parts, where the dwarf andromeda prevails. . . . These are the wildest and richest gardens that we have." The fields were less trustworthy, because of the annual vandalism of the mowing. "About these times," he writes in June, "some hundreds of men, with freshly sharpened scythes, make an irruption into my garden when in its rankest condition, and clip my herbs all as close as they can; and I am restricted to the rough hedges and worn-out fields which had little to attract them."
Among Thoreau's best-beloved flowers, if we may judge by certain passages of the Journal, was the large white bindweed (convolvulus sepium), or "morning-glory." "It always refreshes me to see it," he writes; "I associate it with holiest morning hours. It may preside over my morning walks and thoughts." Not less worthily celebrated by him, in another mood, are the wild rose and the water-lily.
We now have roses on the land and lilies on the water—both land and water have done their best—now, just after the longest day. Nature says, "You behold the utmost I can do." The red rose, with the intense colour of many suns concentrated, spreads its tender petals perfectly fair, its flower not to be overlooked, modest yet queenly, on the edges of shady copses and meadows.... And the water-lily floats on the smooth surface of slow waters, amid rounded shields of leaves, bucklers, red beneath, which simulate a green field, perfuming the air. The highest, intensest colour belongs to the land; the purest, perchance, to the water.
It was not Thoreau's practice to pluck many flowers; he preferred, as a rule, to leave them where they were; but he speaks of the fitness of having "in a vase of water on your table the wildflowers of the season which are just blossoming": thus in mid-June he brings home some rosebuds ready to expand, "and the next morning they open and fill my chamber with fragrance." At another time the grateful thought of the calamint's scent suffices him: "I need not smell it; it is a balm to my mind to remember its fragrance."
It was characteristic of Thoreau that he loved to renew his outdoor pleasures in remembrance, by pondering over the beautiful things he had witnessed, whether through sight or sound or scent. His mountain excursions were not fully apprehended by him, until he had afterwards meditated on them. "It is after we get home," he says, "that we really go over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do?" So it was with his flowers: even in the long winter evenings they were still his companions and friends.
I have remembered, when the winter came,
High in my chamber in the frosty nights,
How, in the shimmering noon of summer past,
Some unrecorded beam slanted across
The upland pastures where the johnswort grew.
On a January date we find him writing in his Journal: "Perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. How we leap by the side of the open brooks! What life, what society! The cold is merely superficial; it is summer still at the core." Thus, by memory, his winters were turned into summers, and his flower-seasons were continuous.