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.