Slender plumes of soldiers

Cardinal flowers are in bloom in the native-plants section of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Thoreau wrote about this flower a number of times in the Journal. Like the autumn leaves of the sumac, the fiery blossoms roused military associations in his mind. (The photo is from the US Forest Service, as my own turned out blurry.)

August 27, 1856
The cardinals in the ditch make a splendid show now, though they would have been much fresher and finer a week ago. They nearly fill the ditch for thirty-five rods perfectly straight, about three feet high. I count at random ten in one square foot, and as they are two feet wide by thirty-five rods, there are four or five thousand at least, and maybe more. They look like slender plumes of soldiers advancing in a dense troop, and a few white (or rather pale-pink) ones are mingled with the scarlet. That is the most splendid show of cardinal-flowers I ever saw.

In the late 1970s, the naturalists Ann Zwinger and Edwin Way Teale took a series of canoe trips down the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers, the two streams that join to create the Concord River at Egg Rock in Thoreau’s hometown. They noted that the polygala Thoreau once found in a local peat bog was now rare, and that the pretty but aggressive purple loosestrife, a European import, had largely displaced the bright reds of the cardinal flower.

Yet it may be that there are natural fluctuations in the numbers of the cardinal flower.

August 16, 1858
I am surprised to find that where of late years there have been so many cardinal-flowers, there are now very few. So much does a plant fluctuate from season to season. Here I found nearly white ones once. Channing tells me that he saw a white bobolink in a large flock of them to-day. Almost all flowers and animals may be found white. As in a large number of cardinal-flowers you may find a white one, so in a large flock of bobolinks, also, it seems, you may find a white one.

Thoreau and the basswood tree

In Edward Hoagland’s new collection Sex and the River Styx—in large part a lament for disappearing wilderness—he writes, “A throttled elegy wells in me when I notice a box turtle attempting to cross the road, or a venerable basswood tree (Thoreau’s favorite species) slated for the chainsaw.”

I can only agree with the sentiment, but I was puzzled by the idea that the basswood was Thoreau’s favorite tree. I might have thought it was the shrub oak, about which he wrote “I should not be ashamed to have a shrub oak for my coat-of-arms.” Or the pine, for which he courted controversy by suggesting it might have a kind of immortality. Or the wild apple, to which he devoted an entire essay, and for which he felt an obvious affinity as living on the border between wild and civilized life. Or the maple or scarlet oak, whose blaze of autumn color inspired pages of rhapsody in the Journal.

That he did have a special affection for the basswood, though, is attested by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his funeral address for his friend.

His senses were acute, and he remarked that by night every dwelling-house gives out bad air, like a slaughter-house. He liked the pure fragrance of melilot. He honored certain plants with special regard, and, over all, the pondlily, — then the gentian, and the Mikania scandens, and “life-everlasting,” and a bass-tree which he visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of July. He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight, — more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness.

Melilot, by the way, is sweet clover, and MIkania scandens is also known as climbing hempweed, climbing hempvine, or climbing boneset.

(Illustration from DePauw University website.)

Bobcats and suicides

Nature writers have the reputation of being solitary souls, alone in a cabin like Thoreau or in a desert like Edward Abbey. It’s an oversimplification—Thoreau, for instance, knew and described enough of his neighbors to fill up the intriguing volume Men of Concord -- but it’s an enduring one, and it’s one reason why many writers avoid the nature-writer pigeonhole (no pun intended).

Still, it’s rare and somewhat dazzling to encounter a writer like Edward Hoagland who is just as inquisitive and perceptive about people as he is about red-tailed hawks. Here’s a passage from Sex and the River Styx, about his home in Vermont, that few other people could have written.

Southwest and uphill from me only half a mile is a ledgy outlook above where the local mother bobcat has her kittens every spring—a few hundred yards from the cleft in a pile of rocks in which, every other February, a mama bear gives birth to cubs. It is also where, on account of the spacious view over a pond and, further, undulating mountains, our Congregational clergyman chose to subject himself to an eighty-hour annual fast and “vision quest.” But his hunger pinched him too badly to meditate properly, he said, so the next year he cut the fast to sixty hours, and in the third year to forty: whereupon he sought a transfer. Another man, a Roman Catholic unconnected to the minister, then picked the area of the scenic site to shoot himself, after being accused of sexually molesting a mute, paralytic nursing-home patient dying of Hodgkin’s disease whom he was supposed to be caring for. He left both a death certificate already filled out and an apology for his girlfriend to find when she came back to their apartment from her own work, specifying his location; and she tied his belt around a tree at the spot, to mark her forgiveness. It’s worth noting too, perhaps, that land is at such a premium, not just the bear, the bobcat, the clergyman, and the suicide have recently shared the vicinity of this ledge for important events. Catty-corner across a marshy brook and notch, yet remarkably close, as the ravens fly, is the ridge slope where the pair of coyotes raise their April pups—above but not far from a cow moose’s June nursery bed, and ten flaps from the cliff face on which our ravens nest.

Groundhog Day 2011

Happy Groundhog Day! It’s America’s quirkiest and least commercial holiday, and therefore one of my favorites. (Buy your Groundhog Day cards and presents yet? I didn’t think so.)

The Christian Science Monitor, where my review of Haiti Noir has just appeared, offers five little-known facts about Groundhog Day and Punxsutawney Phil (pictured here).

Groundhogs are also known as woodchucks (from the Algonquian word wuchak, not because they pitch firewood into ponds). Thoreau was fond of them, and often wrote about them in his Journal.

April 17, 1855. Saw a woodchuck. His deep reddish-brown rear, somewhat grizzled about, looked like a ripe fruit mellowed by winter. C. saw one some time ago. They have several holes under Lee’s Cliff, where they have worn bare and smooth sandy paths under the eaves of the rock, and I suspect that they nibble the early leaves there. (The arabis is half exterminated by some creature.) They, or the partridges or rabbits, there and at Middle Conantum Cliff, make sad havoc with the earliest radical leaves and flowers which I am watching, and in the village I have to contend with the hens, who also love an early salad.

C., in this passage, is Thoreau’s friend and walking companion Ellery Channing. Arabis is a plant also known as rockcress. See my friend Lucy’s page Woodchucks Redux for more on woodchucks and Thoreau.

Thoreau on scarlet oaks

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden has shifted to its winter hours, and closes now at 4:30. On Saturday I spent the last hour of daylight there, leaving as a few small bats began fluttering and somersaulting overhead.

After the September 11 attacks, the Botanic Garden planted a row of scarlet oaks in memory of the victims, and they provide a warm note of color late in the year.

Thoreau took special note of the scarlet oak in the fall of 1858. The passage below is just one of several, and contributed to his late essay ”Autumnal Tints.”

October 24, 1858

The brilliant autumnal colors are red and yellow and the various tints, hues, and shades of these. Blue is reserved to be the color of the sky, but yellow and red are the colors of the earth flower. Every fruit, on ripening, and just before its fall, acquires a bright tint. So do the leaves; so the sky before the end before the end of the day, and the year near its setting. October is the red sunset sky, November the later twilight. Color stands for all ripeness and success. We have dreamed that the hero should carry his color aloft, as a symbol of the ripeness of his virtue. The noblest feature, the eye, is the fairest-colored, the jewel of the body. The warrior’s flag is the flower which precedes his fruit. He unfurls his flag to the breeze with such confidence and brag as the flower its petals. Now we shall see what kind of fruit will succeed....

The scarlet oak, which was quite green the 12th, is now completely scarlet and apparently has been so a few days. This alone of our indigenous deciduous trees (the pitch pine is with it) is now in its glory…. Look at one, completely changed from green to bright dark-scarlet, every leaf, as if it had been dipped into a scarlet dye, between you and the sun. Was not this worth waiting for? Little did you think ten days ago that that cold green tree could assume such color as this.