Thoreau and the Language of Trees 9780520967311

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THOREAU AND THE

LANGUAGE OF

TREES

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Marcy & Jeffrey Krinsk, Judith & Kim Maxwell, Mrs. James McClatchy, Sharon Simpson, Deborah & David Kirshman /Helzel Family Foundation, and Thomas J. White as members of the Literati Circle of the University of California Press Foundation.

THOREAU AND THE

LANGUAGE OF

TREES RICHARD HIGGINS WITH A FOREWORD BY ROBERT D. RICHARDSON AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD HIGGINS

university of california press

To Jenny, my sequoia of support

Where was the sap, the fruit, the value of the forest for me, but in that line where it was relieved against the sky? That was my woodlot—that was my lot in the woods. The silvery needles of the pine straining the light.

henry david thoreau

Foreword by Robert D. Richardson

ix

A Note on Sources

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Introduction: Speaking the Language of Trees 1.

AN EYE FOR TREES

Against the Sky a Tree Has Parts 2.

A HEART FOR TREES

Heartwood 3.

A POET’S TREES

Woodplay 4.

A MIND FOR TREES

Forest Lessons 5.

A SOUL FOR TREES

As High a Heaven 6.

MY EMBLEM, THE PINE

Paeans to the Pine

1 9 16 35 40 51 57 75 82 95 102 113 119

CONTENTS

7.

KNIGHTING ELMS

Death of a Concord Kingpost 8.

9.

133 139

Boxborough’s Ancient Oaks

149 156

TRANSFORMED BY SNOW

165

A World Made New

170

A KINGDOM OF PRIMITIVE OAKS

Sailing a Sea of Green

189 195

Acknowledgments

203

Notes

205

Bibliography

217

List of Thoreau Excerpts

221

Illustration Credits

225

Index

227

10. IN A BARQUE OF BARK

F O R E WO R D

There is real magic in this book. Richard Higgins has traveled widely in Concord, Massachusetts. He has walked where Thoreau walked, seen what Thoreau saw, and seen it with something close to Thoreau’s own intensity. That intensity is the very rare, utterly crucial quality here. Higgins looks at trees one by one, and—like Thoreau or with Thoreau—looks at each twig, each leaf, each bud with “a separate intention of the eye.” Higgins’s avidity, his eagerness, his sharp focus, his descriptive brilliance excite the reader to see what he and Thoreau have seen and to feel what they felt. This is an electric, exhilarating book that lifts the reader’s spirit. There is something in every chapter here for the general reader, and there is a bone or two in every chapter for the specialist. The book centers on Concord, yes, but Higgins understands that every place is a potential Concord. What is special about any place is not its geographical location but the way it buries itself in your heart, as cultural anthropologist Richard K. Nelson has put it so well. Higgins is not doing a cold postmortem on Thoreau’s love of the trees around him. Those trees have worked their way into Higgins’s heart as well. As Thoreau and Higgins see the trees in Concord, so any reader in Pasadena or Peoria can look at the trees to be found there. The secret is Higgins’s lynx-eyed capture of Thoreau’s own enthusiasm, his hunger for fact and detail, for every sight and sound and smell. Higgins does an extraordinary job of matching Thoreau’s intensity.

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Higgins knows what Thoreau knew: that we readers will care more about a particular tree than about trees in general, more about the Davis Elm or the Pratt Elm than about the generic elm in the Audubon field guide. As Thoreau’s own writing appeals to all the reader’s senses, so does Higgins’s. We feel the wet leaves, the cold ground; we see the bare branches against the winter sky, taste the peeled bark, smell the pine sap, hear the wind soughing in the pines. Higgins’s photography stands up cleanly and honestly to the great Herbert Wendell Gleason photos that also appear in the book. The judicious use of Thoreau’s sketches of trees and tree bits brings the master closer, just as it brings the tree bits themselves closer. Higgins does justice to the keen sight of Thoreau, choosing sharp, tight images that convey the ardor and the focus of Thoreau’s vision, that hard Thoreauvian edge. Whether you have long loved Henry of Concord or have just come to discover him, you will find new things in this book, such as the beautiful couple of paragraphs on how Thoreau is “religious to the bone” if not very churchy; the powerful chapter that brings the story of the white pine down to the present; or the glorious final, unexpected chapter on trees as ships and the woods as oceans. “Between any two pine trees,” John Muir wrote in the margin of a volume of Emerson’s writings, “there is a door leading to a new way of life.” Richard Higgins and his friend Henry Thoreau are two of the doorkeepers. Come on in. The trees spoke to Thoreau, and he learned their language. Those same trees have spoken to Richard Higgins. They can speak to you. Robert D. Richardson

X

FOREWORD

A N OT E O N S O U R C E S

Most of the quotes and excerpts from Thoreau’s journal are from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, published by Houghton Mifflin in fourteen volumes in 1906. For Thoreau’s published books and essays, and for his journal entries up through about 1850, I use the Princeton University Press edition, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. Princeton has published seventeen volumes in the series since 1981, including the first eight volumes of the journal, with more planned. I use the 1906 version for most quotes because it remains the most widely available and readable edition. Selections from it have been checked against the Princeton journals, which are the definitive, annotated edition and are based on exacting transcriptions of the original manuscripts. The Princeton edition is especially useful for material from the earlier journal, written when Thoreau was still tearing pages out of it to use in other manuscripts. Thoreau wrote quickly in his journal to preserve first impressions and responses, and his spelling and punctuation were sometimes erratic. In some instances I have chosen standard usage over his, except for place names, such as Boxboro and Anursnack Hill. In my own writing, I refer to these by their current spelling (Boxborough, Annursnac).

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INTRODUCTION S P E A K I N G T H E LA N G U A G E O F T R E E S

Henry David Thoreau was captivated by trees, and they played a significant role in his creativity as a writer, his work as a naturalist, his philosophical thought, and even his inner life. He responded to trees emotionally, but he also understood their lives in the forest as well as anyone in his day or since. Indeed, it sometimes seems that he could see the sap flowing beneath their bark. When he wrote in The Maine Woods that the poet loves the pine tree like his own shadow in the air, he was speaking about himself. In short, he spoke their language. What drew him to trees? Their beauty and form delighted his eye. Their wildness struck a chord in him, and their patience reminded him that we will sooner overtake the dawn by remaining here, where we are, than by chasing the sun across the western hills. By spending his life rooted to Concord, he emulated trees’ tenacious hold on earth. Human nature appeared slightly bent to Thoreau, but he saw trees as upright and virtuous, the nobility of the vegetable kingdom. Their stance spoke of the “ancient rectitude and vigor of nature.” Nothing, he said, “stands up more free from blame in this world than a pine tree.” Old trees connected Thoreau to a realm of time not counted on the town clock, an endless moment of fable and possibility. They reminded him “that I, too, am at least a remote descendant of the heroic race of men of whom there is tradition.”

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And they were his teachers. Although he called the shedding of leaves each fall a tragedy, he knew that the leaves that fell to the ground would enrich the soil and, in time, “stoop to rise” in new trees. By falling so airily, so contentedly, he said, they teach us how to die. Thoreau wrote prolifically about trees for a quarter century, from 1836 to 1861. He observed them closely, knew them well, and described them in detail, but he did not presume to fully explain them. He respected a mysterious quality about trees, a way in which they point beyond themselves. For Thoreau, trees bore witness to the holy and emerged in his writings as special emblems and images of the divine. Thoreau’s depictions, sketches, and meditations on trees in his journal, essays, and books, both fanciful and exact, are as vivid today as they were in 1891, when the English naturalist P. Anderson Graham wrote that he was unusually able to “to preserve the flashing forest colors in unfading light.” This book of those writings shows how Thoreau saw trees and what they meant to him. It is about his personal and creative response to trees: his keen perception of them, the joy they gave him, the poetry he saw in them, and how trees fed his soul. Each of the chapters that follows contains a short essay and a selection of Thoreau’s writings about trees, the latter taken chiefly from his two-million-word journal. Although that sprawling, fourteen-volume work is increasingly seen as his true masterpiece, it is less well known to his readers. It is also Thoreau’s most direct and spontaneous writing and has rightly been called “a cache of love letters” to nature. The one hundred excerpts in the book are accompanied by seventy-two of my photographs of trees in Concord and elsewhere. They are also illustrated by photographs by Herbert Wendell Gleason, who created a visual archive of Thoreau’s world a century ago, and sixteen sketches by Thoreau himself illustrate others. The book begins by exploring five characteristic ways in which Thoreau responded to trees. The first is the range and depth of his disciplined eye for them. Thoreau delighted in observing the parts, form, color, and stance of trees. He saw these with a kind of double vision. As a naturalist, he looked 2

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for hard, empirical facts. As a poet and transcendentalist, he sought the significance of those facts. Each viewpoint reinforced the other. Thoreau’s detailed, minute observations of trees are thus infused with his insistent faith in nature. The second is the joy that trees stirred in his heart. Thoreau’s readiness to renounce, judge, and forgo is well known. But the beauty and resilience of trees brought out a boyish joy in him and excited exclamations about them in his prose. Trees allowed Thoreau to express his hopeful and affirmative side. He also personally identified with trees. He saw them as his friends and even as “distant relations.” Trees also awakened the muse in Thoreau, who made the forest a fount of figurative language in which to dip his pen. He created fresh, vivid images of them, depicting winter trees against the moon as “chandeliers of darkness” or seeing “a rich tracery to the forest windows” in scarlet oak leaves cut against the sky. At a deeper level, Thoreau also “browsed,” or fed, his poetic imagination on them the way a moose browses their branches, for he believed trees were themselves “living poetry”—poems writ in nature’s hand on the landscape. His wordplay not only lifted his own spirits but was also part of a consistent effort as a writer to jolt our customary perceptions of trees. Chapter 4 turns to Thoreau’s energetic study of trees as a naturalist in the 1850s, and to his philosophical thought about them. Through years of close observation, he learned how forests regenerate. He dated the ages of trees and estimated their rates of growth by counting their rings. Both were far ahead of the science of his day. Thoreau’s scientific study of trees increased, rather than diminished, his symbolic understanding of them. He came to see trees as universal templates of form, expressing universal laws and symbolizing nature’s deep impulse for renewal. Chapter 5 examines how trees nurtured Thoreau’s soul. They disclosed the divine to him and gave expression to his deeply religious nature. Trees symbolized a kind of immortality in which Thoreau could believe. A tall white pine in Maine, he wrote, was “as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” I NTR O D U CTI O N

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The book next considers Thoreau’s response to notable individual trees or specific groups of trees. Chapter 6 delves into Thoreau’s deep affinity for an iconic American tree, Pinus strobus, the Eastern white pine. He admired the tree’s tall, ramrod straight trunk and nearly horizontal branches, and he loved to see light reflected through its luminous, waxy needles. Thoreau identified strongly with the tree’s wild, indomitable spirit. The white pine, he wrote, was the emblem of his life. Chapters 7 and 8 present Thoreau’s romantic view of old trees as links to a nobler, more heroic past. As Concord began to shed its rural character in the 1850s, Thoreau wrote about trees as symbols of the simpler, preindustrial town of his youth and imbued them with noble qualities that he found lacking in society. In 1856, when the Davis Elm, a huge historic landmark in Concord, was felled, Thoreau was incensed. He cast it and all of the town’s elms as beacons of moral principle, writing that they discharged their civic duties more faithfully than did Concord’s residents. A similar romantic impulse drove Thoreau’s writing about Inches Woods, a forest of old-growth oaks that he was amazed to find, in 1860, only eight miles from his home. He took the ancient oaks to be vestiges of nature in precolonial New England and portrayed them as symbols of hidden riches that we do not value. The oaks elicited some of Thoreau’s most rousing calls to preserve trees, which he used to conclude his unfinished work “Wild Fruits.” Chapter 9 discusses Thoreau’s special fondness for trees transfigured by snow. After a winter storm, he was out in the woods to see them, excited as a child on Christmas morning. Trees draped in snow disclosed surreal forms to him. An added bonus was that winter made the familiar trees he saw all year suddenly look fresh and new. Glistening with ice or clad in a coat of white, trees in snow quickened Thoreau’s pulse and stirred his pen. Finally, Thoreau had a metaphorical vision of the forest as a maritime main and imagined individual trees to be schooners and barques. He sails this sea of green in chapter 10, calling on many ports in the woods. Thoreau’s extended nautical imagery of trees linked his love of the ocean and his love of the woods.

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I N T RODUC T I ON

Thoreau became fond of trees in his boyhood as he roamed the woods and fields of Concord, the rural farm town where he was born, in 1817. On his first visit to Walden Pond, during an outing with his family at the age of five, he felt an instinctive affinity for the trees around the pond. “That sweet solitude my spirit seemed so early to require,” he said, “at once gave preference to this recess among the pines . . . as if it had found its proper nursery.” He wrote mainly about the changes in trees—“now the fruit begins to form on the trees”—when he composed a school essay on the four seasons at age eleven. And as a college student, he confessed to spending hours roaming the woods of Concord that could have been used to study. That bond was never broken. As a saunterer, poet, surveyor, and naturalist, Thoreau loved trees and wrote about them his whole adult life. In the 1850s, he began to study them in depth. By 1860, his life revolved around trees. His detailed observations about the growth and life span of trees, their methods of propagation and how they succeed each other in the forest, although mostly ignored in professional forestry, were decades ahead of his time. Two events in 1860 deepened Thoreau’s interest in trees. That September Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune published Thoreau’s lecture “The Succession of Forest Trees.” It became the most widely printed of Thoreau’s essays during his lifetime. Its success buoyed his spirits, and he redoubled his work on trees. In October he conducted a forest survey to determine which trees in Concord were the oldest. In November, having concluded that no old-growth trees remained in his vicinity, he was stunned to discover Inches Woods, the primitive oak forest in nearby Boxborough. For days on end that fall, Thoreau counted the rings in stumps or in the trunks of dead or blowndown trees. He clawed at roots to expose shoots and stubs of shoots, which hold clues to the history of a tree. While counting rings in hickory trees on a rainy and cold December 3, he caught a cold that quickly worsened. His left his journal blank for eighteen days—during which he nevertheless traveled through a snowstorm to Waterbury, Connecticut, to give his lecture “Autumnal Tints.” The cold turned into bronchitis and then the tuberculosis from which he never recovered. Thoreau died on May 6, 1862. He

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spent his last months editing “Autumnal Tints,” his brilliant meditation on the death of nature in autumn. Trees figured in other late works, including “Wild Apples,” his ode to the ancient apple tree, and “The Dispersion of Seeds,” which he left unfinished. Thoreau’s lifetime overlapped with the apex of deforestation in New England. By 1850, save for wetlands, inaccessible woods, or land not fit to farm, Concord was largely shorn of its trees. “Every larger tree which I knew and admired is being gradually culled out and carried to mill,” Thoreau wrote in his journal on December 3, 1855. “I miss them as surely and with the same feeling that I do the old inhabitants out of the village street.” The loss also made him angry. “Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds!” he wrote as the woods around Walden Pond were being heavily cut for firewood. Thoreau felt their loss all the more acutely for knowing the ecological and psychological value of trees. They were “rivers of sap” flowing “from the atmosphere and emptying into the earth,” and they were also essential to the human spirit. “What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?” he asked. From them come the “tonics and barks which brace mankind.” “A town is saved,” he wrote in “Walking,” “not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.” Thoreau’s wisdom about trees still speaks to us today. Indeed, it appears strikingly prescient. Every tree “sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild,” in which lies “the preservation of the world,” he also wrote in “Walking.” The contemporary understanding of trees as “carbon sinks” that help reduce global warming makes Thoreau’s words seem almost clairvoyant. A century before “nurse logs” became a popular term in forest ecology, Thoreau said pine trees were “nurses” to the oak saplings that take root around them. He described trees as fountains of water and purifiers of the air. He did not use the word “ecology,” but he saw forests as whole landscapes that transcended public and private boundaries and urged that they be preserved as such. The German forester and author Peter Wohlleben’s idea that trees exchange signals across fungal “social networks” was unthinkable to Thoreau, but he did intuit that they could perhaps communicate. On March 10, 1859, after

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sensing that sap had begun to flow in the woods, he wrote in his journal, “Such is the genialness of nature that the trees appear to have put out feelers by which our senses apprehend them more tenderly.” And despite the relentless cutting of woods around him, Thoreau foresaw that “one day they will be planted and nature reinstated to some extent.” In his own day, however, loggers still had the upper hand. In response, Thoreau used his gifts as a writer to challenge the petty calculus that reduced forests to so many board feet of lumber. He knew that without trees, nature would wither, and therefore human life would as well. Trees, he said with his customary frugal eloquence, “are good for other things than boards and shingles.” They should be allowed to “stand and decay for higher uses.” In “Walking,” Thoreau recounts climbing a tall white pine on a hill in late June. Near the top he found, at the ends of the highest branches, “a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward.” He took one down with him and showed it around town to whomever he met on the street—people at the courthouse, farmers, lumber dealers, and woodchoppers. “Not one had ever seen the like before,” he wrote, “but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts! . . . The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages . . . yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.” Two hundred years after his birth, Thoreau is still helping us see trees in new ways. How they change with the seasons or compose their arms; their solid, comforting presence and their fleeting beauties—such things take on deeper meanings when we look at them through Thoreau’s eyes. Trees were wordless poems to him, and the message he heard from them was one of life itself. His writing about trees illustrates the power they exert over us all.

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1 AN EYE FOR TREES

Henry Thoreau looked at trees every day. He observed their shape, color, texture, and stance on his daily walks in Concord’s woods and fields. He measured and sketched them, interpreted their expressions and appraised their character. His eye took in all—root, trunk, bark, and branch, crown, leaf, blossom, and cone. Thoreau’s lofty thoughts and poetic images of trees grew from these observations and from his intimate knowledge of them as a naturalist, surveyor, and poet. The particular trees he knew made the airy ones he imagined so solid on the page. Thoreau knew individual trees all over Concord—birches, basswoods, and hornbeams in pastures and on hills, a pine or hemlock that stood “like a pagoda in the woods.” In winter, he wrote in Walden, he would tramp through knee-high snow “to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.” Semicryptic references to notable trees (“the large white oak by the path north of Sleepy Hollow”) are scattered through his journal. Thoreau loved big, majestic ones—mighty pasture oaks astride Concord’s fields, the tall elms in the village whose overlapping crowns enfolded all below in a canopy of calm, and white pines that rose like spires in the forest. The straight, upward thrust of the pines signaled their noble character to Thoreau. “Look up at the tree-tops and see how finely Nature finishes off her work there,” he wrote. “See how the pines spire without end higher and higher, and make a graceful fringe to the earth.” The details that made one tree different from another never tired Thoreau’s eye. “A tree seen against other trees is a mere dark mass but against the sky it has parts, has symmetry and expression.” No tree was too small or common to admire or inspect. Rotting logs and dead leaves fascinated him. “Pitch pine cones very beautiful,” he wrote in his journal on November 9, 1851, “not only the fresh leather-colored ones but especially the dead gray ones.” The smallest of the oaks, the shrub oak, was a favorite. It was “rigid as iron, clean as the atmosphere, hardy as virtue, innocent and sweet as a maiden.” With its “scanty garment of leaves rising above the snow,” he could embrace one—and he may have been as good as his word. The shrub, or bear, oak has bristle-tipped leaves, and 10

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Thoreau tells of getting a few “honest scratches and rents” wading in thickets of it. He inspected lichens for hours on rainy days. The moist air aided him in two ways: the dampness expanded the lichens and brightened their colors, making them stand out against the bark of trees, while the reduced visibility compelled him to look at near objects. “My power of observation and contemplation is much increased. My attention does not wander.” Even a knot in an old barn board could catch his eye and remind him of the forest tree from which the board came. On his daily walks to look at trees, Thoreau was well equipped, his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson recalled. He “wore a straw hat, stout shoes, and strong gray trousers, to brave shrub oaks and smilax, and to a climb a tree for a hawk’s nest.” He also packed a pencil, diary, knife, and twine and carried an old music book to press plants. Thoreau examined the seeds of trees, finding the willow’s “exceedingly minute, as I measure, from one-twentieth to one-twelfth of an inch.” Opening a pine cone scale, he found a membrane as thin as an insect’s wing woven around the seed. This “beautiful thin sack” feeds the seed and then becomes a wing to waft it through the air when it is released. Thus the sack extends the range of the species, he wrote, “as effectually as when seeds are sent by mail in a different kind of sack from the Patent Office.” For Thoreau, examining such details was more than mere observation; it was an act of contemplation. The eye, he wrote, “has many qualities which belong to God more than man.” Telescopes and microscopes have their uses, but if one is intent on seeing, “the naked eye may easily see farther than the armed.” Thoreau was so meticulous in depicting trees that he can sound like a judge at a forest beauty pageant: “No tree has so fair a bole [trunk] and so handsome an instep as the beech.” The sugar maple “is remarkable for its clean ankle.” “I am struck and attracted,” he wrote, “by the parallelism of the twigs of the hornbeam.” Sometimes, he could tell if a tree was a yellow birch only if “a button was off ” in its “vest” of curling bark, revealing its yellow wood. A N E Y E F O R TR E E S

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Thoreau’s observation took all his senses. He snapped twigs to sniff their bark. In spring, the fragrance of black birch bark and hickory buds “intoxicated” him. He listened to the moan and creak of hardwoods in the winter and to the roar of wind in the woods. He nibbled lichens, opining on which tasted best—he liked rock tripe (Umbilicaria) and Iceland moss (Cetraria islandica)—and made sugar from maple sap and beer from the bark of four different birches. “I tasted some of the sweet froth which had issued from the sap of a walnut or hickory lately cut,” he wrote on February 9, 1852. “So innocent a sweet. It reminded me of the days when I used to scrape this juice off the logs in my father’s woodpile.” Thoreau’s eye was drawn to the play of light in trees, especially in pine needles. They were his forest sun-catchers. The sun “loves to nestle in the boughs of the pine and pass rays through them,” causing each branch to “bear its burden of silvery sunlight.” One November, as Thoreau walked through a field at day’s end, the slanting rays of the sun fell on a stand of white pine. “That kind of sunset which I witnessed on Saturday and Sunday is perhaps peculiar to the late autumn,” he wrote a few days later. “The sun is unseen behind a hill. Only this bright white light like a fire falls on the trembling needles of the pine.” Thoreau watched white pines sway in a March windstorm. A “fine, silvery light” flashed from their waxy needles as they moved in and out of the light. These pulses of light looked like the “play and flashing of electricity,” he wrote, as if the wind were magnetizing and electrifying the trees. “Is not this wind an awaking to life and light of the pines after their winter slumber?” he asked. “As if in this wind storm of March a certain electricity were passing from earth to heaven through the pines and calling them to life.” Thoreau was also endlessly intrigued by the form and stance of trees. In the forest are found “all the shapes and hues of the kaleidoscope,” and in the outlines of trees all the “designs and ciphers” in books of heraldry. As he paddled a narrow river in a Maine forest, he admired “the small, dark, and sharp tops of tall fir and spruce trees, and pagoda-like arborvitae, crowded together on each side,” he wrote in The Maine Woods. “I was struck by this universal spiring upward of the forest evergreens.” The spruce, fir, arborvitae, and

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Thoreau drew Cheney’s lopsided poplar and, right, a walnut tree conforming to a hill.

white pine “all spire upwards, lifting a dense spear-head of cones to the light and air.” In 1857, Thoreau saw a small ash along the Assabet River near Barrett’s sawmill. A severe storm had broken it off at two feet, yet seven new branches had shot up around the stump, “forming a perfectly regular oval head about 25 feet high and very beautiful.” If any of the branches were cut, he surmised, the remaining ones would eventually “form a head” similar to the one he saw. “With what harmony they work and carry out the idea of the tree, one twig not straying farther on this side than its fellow on that!” he wrote. The tree had “its idea to be lived up to” and thus filled “an invisible mould in the air.” And he deduced why trees were lopsided. If sunlight is diffused evenly around all sides, a tree tends to be balanced. If not, the branches grow toward light and over time pull the tree in that direction. “For there is Cheney’s abele,” or poplar, “which stands just south of a large elm. It grows wholly southward, and in form is just half a tree. . . . In short, trees appear to grow regularly because the sky and diffusion of light are commonly regular.” As the cycle of the year passed, Thoreau tracked the forest’s changing hues as if they were comets streaking across the sky. He was especially vigilant in mid-September, hoping to see the first red maple “bearing aloft its scarlet standard for the regiment of green-clad foresters around.” He kept watching as the trees advanced through deeper and deeper shades of brown. On October 3, 1858, he looked across Walden Pond at adjacent Pine Hill. The trees and shrubs glowed “green, yellow, and scarlet, like fires just kindled at

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the base of the trees, a general conflagration just fairly under way, soon to envelop every tree. The hillside forest is all aglow along its edge and in all its cracks and fissures, and soon the flames will leap upward to the tops of the tallest trees.” Thoreau had a painter’s love of color. He labored to depict the delicate tints in words and was frustrated by the paucity of terms available to him in English. “It is impossible to describe the infinite variety of tints and shades, for the language affords no names for them,” he complained. “I must apply the same term monotonously to 20 different things.” However, one detects no hint of this frustration in his writing about trees. At the height of their fall beauty in October, Concord’s elms were “great brownish-yellow masses, warm from their September oven.” The trees were “great yellow canopies or parasols held over our heads and houses by the mile together,” making the village “all one and compact—an ulmarium,” or elm nursery, “which is at the same time a nursery of men!” As fall deepened, the elms dropped their burden of leaves until at last “the village parasol is shut up and put away!” The brilliant red of scarlet oaks nearly induced chromatic arrest in Thoreau. A stand of brilliant scarlet oaks in the neighboring town of Lincoln mesmerized him as he stood on Fair Haven Hill in October 1858. They were like “huge roses with a myriad of fine petals.” As the light waned, each scarlet oak appeared to “borrow” red fire from the setting sun. They glowed so vivaciously, he wrote, “you see a redder tree than exists.” Not even scarlet oaks, however, match the hues broadcast by red maples in the fall. They begin to burn scarlet and crimson by the third week of September. Their first fires, “like those of genius,” are the brightest. At the height of its change, a red maple swamp “is the most obviously brilliant of all tangible things where I dwell.” At the same time, the trees are “not seen as a simple mass of color,” for their hues vary slightly from one red maple to another. Some leaves may still be green, or yellow, or just beginning to flash crimson at their tips, while others are scarlet, or “scarlet deepening into crimson, more red than common,” and still others “wholly brilliant scarlet,

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raying out regularly and finely every way.” The outline of each, where one color “laps on to another,” is distinct. Thoreau saw color in the woods right into winter. Shrub oak leaves, he wrote on December 1, 1856, were “well-tanned leather on one side, suntanned, color of colors, color of the cow and the deer” and “silver-downy beneath, turned toward the late bleached and russet fields.” Observing a tree was not a chance thing for Thoreau. He had to see it from several sides, or move toward or away from it; “You need to stand where the greatest number of leaves will transmit or reflect to you most favorably.” Especially in the fall, a tree that looked comparatively lifeless or drab, if “seen in a more favorable light . . . may affect you wonderfully as a warm, glowing drapery.” Ultimately, however, seeing the beauty of a tree was not about optics for Thoreau. Without the soul, the eye cannot see it. What does it matter, he said, “if the outer door,” the eye, “is open, if the inner door is shut.” Beauty must be on our minds when we go forth, he wrote in “Autumnal Tints”: “We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads.” The hunter enters the woods expecting, wanting, to see game, and he must take careful aim when he does. “He would stand a very small chance, if he fired at random into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. And so it is with him that shoots at beauty.” He may wait all day, but “he will not bag any, if he does not already know its seasons and haunts, and the color of its wing—if he has not dreamed of it.” When he has, “he flushes it at every step.” Most of us do not see the beauty of trees, even though they may be right in front of us. “A man shall perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his head, and cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have cut many tons of them, littered his stables and fed them to his cattle for years,” Thoreau wrote. “Yet if he ever favorably attends to them, he may be overcome by their beauty.”

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A G A I N ST THE SKY A TREE H AS PA R T S

RELIEVED AGAINST THE SKY The sun is half an hour high, perhaps. Standing near the outlet of the pond, I look up and down the river with delight, it is so warm and the air is, notwithstanding, so clear. When I invert my head and look at the woods half a mile down the stream, they suddenly sink lower in the horizon and are removed full two miles off; yet the air is so clear that I seem to see every stem and twig with beautiful distinctness. The fine tops of the trees are so relieved against the sky that I never cease to admire the minute subdivisions. It is the same when I look up the stream. A bare hickory under Lee’s cliff, seen against the sky, becomes an interesting, even beautiful object to behold. I think where I have been staying all these days. I will surely come here again. Journal, january 25, 1852 AGA I NST TH E SK Y A TR E E H AS PA R TS

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A PLEASING ARRANGEMENT

Sketch by Thoreau

I frequently see three or four old white birches standing together on the edge of a pond or meadow, and am struck by the pleasing manner in which they will commonly be grouped, how they spread so as to make room for each other and make an agreeable impression on the eye. Methinks I have seen groups of three in different places arranged almost exactly alike. Journal, february 12, 1854

BIRCHES FRINGED IN GOLD On a bitter cold day in January 1853, Thoreau was excited to encounter the largest stand of yellow birch he had ever seen in Concord, in the woods he called Easterbrooks Country. The trees’ delicate, gold-colored bark affected him more, he said, than the precious metal then causing a frenzy in California. Like a Coronado of Concord, he planted a verbal flag to name his find. To what I will call Yellow Birch Swamp, E. Hubbard’s, in the north part of town. . . . How pleasing to stand beside a new or rare tree! And few are so handsome as this. Singularly allied to the black birch in its sweet checkerberry scent and its form, and to the canoe birch in its peeling or fringed & tasseled bark. The top Thoreau’s sketch of is brush-like as the black birch; the bark an exquisite a large yellow birch fine or delicate gold color, curled off partly from the trunk, with vertical clear or smooth spaces, as if a plane had been passed up the tree. The sight of these trees affects me more than California gold. I measured one 5 feet, 2 inches in circ. at 6 feet from the ground. We have the silver & the golden birch. The yellow birch is like a fair, flaxen-haired sister of the dark complexioned black birch, with golden ringlets. How lustily it takes hold of the swampy soil, and braces itself! And here flows

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a wine-colored brook over the ironred sands in the somber swamp. In an undress, this tree. Ah, time will come when these will be all gone. Among the primitive trees. What sort of dryads haunt these? Blond Nymphs. Journal, january 4, 1853

HURLING BOLTS AT HEAVEN Thoreau captured the essence of Concord’s famous Pratt Elm, which stood in front of the house of his friend Minot Pratt. One of two elms planted in 1700 as bridal gifts, it was well known in Thoreau’s day for its age and striking appearance. Pratt, a farmer, had lived at the Brook Farm experiment in the 1840s and often hosted fellow Transcendentalists at his farm. Louisa May Alcott recalled husking corn at one such gathering beneath the dramatic branches of the old elm, which was 85 feet tall and 16¼ feet in circumference at chest height. The arborist Lorin Dame wrote about the Pratt Elm in 1890. He noted that it did not have the vase shape and symmetry that was typical of New England village elms. Its massive limbs began lower down the trunk, were more angular and seemingly shot off in all directions. To Dame, it embodied strength as much as the even more famous Boston Elm, on Boston Common, and was “worthy to be reckoned among the historic celebrities even in historic Concord.” Thoreau saw the leafless tree on January 4, 1853, while visiting Pratt after discovering the yellow birches. Ignoring the elm’s fame, he zeroed in on the electric

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The Boston Elm, which toppled in 1876

quality of its massive black arms. These suggested thunderbolts to Thoreau. Rather than receiving them, however, the tree is hurling “dark vegetable bolts” back at heaven. Thoreau accompanied his brief entry with an impressionistic sketch. At Pratt’s, the stupendous, boughy, branching elm, like vast thunderbolts stereotyped upon the sky. Heaven defying, sending back dark vegetable bolts, as if flowing back in the channel of the lightning.

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In 1899, Herbert Wendell Gleason captured the tree’s monumental presence with his camera no less than Thoreau had done in words.

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EBBY HUBBARD ’ S OAKS The oak, grand and strong, was dear to Thoreau. It was the “king of trees.” Old oaks bestowed “an unusual dignity to the earth.” The oldest trees in Concord whose rings Thoreau counted himself were the oaks in Hubbard’s Grove, a half mile north of Walden. They were also among his favorite Thoreau’s sketch of a “picturesque” oaks, and he grew fonder of them as more and more of the black oak town’s woods were cut. “I love to look at Ebby Hubbard’s oaks and pines on the hillside from Brister’s Hill,” he wrote on January 22, 1852. “Am thankful that there is one old miser who will not sell nor cut his woods.” He described their trunks three months later, on April 16. What variety in the trunks of oaks! How expressive of strength are some! There is one behind Hubbard’s which expresses a sturdy strength, with a protuberant ridge and seam toward the north . . . The very emblem of sturdy resistance to tempests. Three days later, on April 19, Thoreau stopped to admire a powerful white oak near the Derby railroad bridge in West Concord. He said he feared that its impressive strength would be its undoing—and indeed it was. Two years after the entry below, Thoreau wrote, without comment, “The sturdy white oak near the Derby railroad bridge has been cut down.” That oak by Derby’s is a grand object, seen from any side. It stands like an athlete and defies the tempests in every direction. It has not a weak point. It is an agony of strength. Its branches look like stereotyped gray lightning on the sky. But I fear a price is set upon its sturdy trunk and roots for ship timber, for knees to make stiff the sides of ships against the Atlantic billows. Like an athlete, it shows its well developed muscles. He praised Hubbard’s oaks again on June 23. “We have few handsome open oak groves left, but how handsome and cool and bosky they look in this breezy weather!” After Thoreau died, his friend Bronson Alcott saw loggers getting near the oaks and

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despaired. Without Thoreau to protect them, he wrote, they were doomed. Some of them lasted long enough, however, for Herbert Wendell Gleason to make Hubbard’s Great Oak in 1918, a tribute to the oaks Thoreau loved.

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LIGHTSHOW IN A PINE GROVE Thoreau watched as a March gale created “fine effects of light” in the woods. The meadows are all in commotion. . . . The white pines in the horizon, either single trees or whole woods, a mile off in the southwest or west, are particularly interesting. You not only see the regular bilateral form of the tree, all the branches distinct like the frond of a fern or a feather, but that fine silvery light reflected from its needles incessantly in motion. (For the pine, even at this distance, has not merely beauty of outline and color . . . but shows a regular succession of flattish, leafy boughs or stages in flakes one above another like the veins of a leaf or the leaflets of a frond—it is this richness and symmetry of detail which more than its outline charms us.) As a tree bends and waves like a feather in the gale, I see it alternately dark and light, as the sides of the needles which reflect the cool sheen are alternately withdrawn from and restored to the proper angle. The light appears to flash

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upward from the base of the tree incessantly. In the intervals of the flash, it is often as if the tree were withdrawn altogether from sight. I see one large pine wood over whose whole top these cold electric flashes are incessantly passing off harmlessly into the air above. I thought at first of some fine spray dashed upward, but it is rather like broad flashes of pale cold light. Surely you can never, under other circumstances, see a pine wood so expressive, so speaking. This reflection of light from the waving crests of the earth is like the play and flashing of electricity. No deciduous tree exhibits these fine effects of light. . . . In short, you see a play of light over the whole pine, similar in its cause to that seen on a waving field of grain, but far grander in its effects. Journal, march 19, 1859

LEANING HEMLOCKS Thoreau loved a steep bank along the Assabet River where tall hemlocks leaned over the river as if drawn to the water.

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I believe that there is a harmony between the hemlock and the water which it overhangs that is not explainable. In the first place, its green is especially graceful to the eye the greater part of the year in any locality, and in the winter, by its verdure overhanging and shading the water, it concentrates in itself the beauty of all fluviatile trees. It loves to stand with its foot close to the water, its roots running over the rocks of the shore, and two or more hemlocks on opposite sides of a brook make the most beautiful frame to a waterscape, especially in deciduous woods, where the light is somber and not too glaring. Journal, april 1, 1852

AN EXHIBITION IN FOREST HALL Thoreau said a misty day enhanced his observation by limiting it to near objects. The wet air also made lichens, the colorful living patches on tree bark, stand out. There is a low mist in the woods. It is a good day to study lichens. The view is so confined it compels your attention to near objects, and the white background reveals the disks of the lichens distinctly. They appear more loose, flowing, expanded, flattened out, the colors brighter for the damp. The round greenish-yellow lichens on the white pines loom through the mist . . . like shields whose devices you would fain read. The trees appear all at once covered with their crop of lichens and mosses of all kinds— flat and tearful are some, distended by moisture. This is their solstice, and your eyes run swiftly through the mist to these things only. . . . They appear erect and now first to have attained their full expansion. Nature has a day for each of her creatures, her creations. Today it is an exhibition of lichens at Forest Hall, the livid green of some, the fruit of others. They eclipse the trees they cover. Journal, december 31, 1851

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RED FIRE IN THE WOODS As I sit on a cliff in the southwest part of our town, the sun is now getting low, and the woods in Lincoln, south and east of me, are lit up by its more level rays; and in the scarlet oaks, scattered so equally over the forest, there is brought out a more brilliant redness than I had believed was in them. Every tree of this species which is visible in those directions, even to the horizon, now stands out distinctly red. Some great ones lift their red backs high above the woods, in the next town, like huge roses with a myriad of fine petals; and some more slender ones, in a small grove of white pines on Pine Hill in the east . . . look like soldiers in red amid hunters in green. This time it is Lincoln green, too. Till the sun got low, I did not believe that there were so many redcoats in the forest army. Theirs is an intense burning red, which would lose some of its strength, methinks, with every step you might take toward them; for the shade that lurks amid their foliage does not report itself at this distance, and they are unanimously red. The focus of their reflected color is in the atmosphere far on this side. Every such tree becomes a nucleus of red, as it were, where, with the declining sun, that color grows and glows. It is partly borrowed fire, gathering strength from the sun on its way to your eye. It has only some comparatively dull red leaves for a rallying point, or kindling stuff, to start it, and it becomes an intense scarlet or red mist, or fire, which finds fuel for itself in the very atmosphere. So vivacious is redness. The very rails reflect a rosy light at this hour and season. You see a redder tree than exists. “Autumnal Tints”

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FED BY THE FORMS OF TREES A fine, still, warm moonlight evening. Moon not yet full. To the woods by the Deep Cut . . . I am fed by the variety, the forms of the trees above against the blue, with the stars seen through the pines like the lamps hung on them in an illumination, the somewhat indistinct and misty fineness of the pine tops, the finely divided spray of the oaks, etc., and the shadow of all these on the snow. . . . These myriad shadows checker the white ground and enhance the brightness of the enlightened portions. See the shadows of these young oaks which have lost half their leaves, more beautiful than themselves, like the shadow of a chandelier—and motionless as if they were fallen leaves on the snow. But shake the tree, and all is in motion. Journal, january 21, 1853

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A PERFECT FRAME A frame of trees made a body of water look more beautiful to Thoreau. He often saw Walden Pond, below, through the trees on its shores. How much handsomer a river or lake such as ours, seen thus through a foreground of scattered or else partially leafless trees, though at a considerable distance this side of it, especially if the water is open, without wood shores or isles. It is the most perfect and beautiful of all frames, which yet the sketcher is commonly careful to brush aside. I mean a pretty thick foreground, a view of the distant water through the near forest, through a thousand little vistas, as we are rushing toward the former—that intimate mingling of wood and water which excites an expectation which the near and open view rarely realizes. We prefer that some part be concealed, which our imagination may navigate. Journal, november 6, 1853

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SPOTTING A CANOE BIRCH Saw a canoe birch by road beyond the Abel Minot house; distinguished it thirty rods* off by the chalky whiteness of its limbs. It is of a more unspotted, transparent, and perhaps pinkish white than the common, has considerable branches—white ones—and its branches do not droop and curl downward like that. There will be some loose curls of bark about it. The common birch is finely branched and has frequently a snarly head; the former is a more open and free growing tree. If at a distance you see the birch forking near its top into two or more white limbs, you may know it for a canoe birch. You can tell where it has grown after the wood has turned to mould by a small fragment of its bark still left—it divides readily. The common birch is more covered with moss, has the aspect of having grown more slowly, and has many more branches. I have heard of a man in Maine who copied the whole Bible onto birch bark. Journal, november 1, 1851 * A rod is equal to 16 ½ feet.

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AN EXPECTANT WOOD As fall deepened into winter, Thoreau mused on the hushed, expectant quality of the almost leafless woods. The stillness of the woods and fields is remarkable at this season of the year. There is not even the creak of a cricket to be heard. Of myriads of dry shrub oak leaves, not one rustles. Your own breath can rustle them, yet the breath of heaven does not suffice to. The trees have the aspect of waiting for winter. The autumnal leaves have lost their color; they are now truly sere, dead, and the woods wear a somber color. Summer and harvest are over. The hickories, birches, chestnuts, no less than the maples, have lost their leaves. The sprouts, which had shot up so vigorously to repair the damage which the choppers had done, have stopped short for the winter. Everything stands silent and expectant. Journal, november 8, 1850 AGA I NST TH E SK Y A TR E E H AS PA R TS

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READING A WOODLOT I observe at a distance an oak woodlot some twenty years old, with a dense narrow edging of pitch pines about a rod and a half wide and twenty-five or thirty years old along its whole southern side, which is straight and thirty or forty rods long, and, next to it, an open field or pasture. It presents a very singular appearance, because the oak wood is broad and has no pines within it, while the narrow edging is perfectly straight and dense, and pure pine. It is the more remarkable at this season because the oak is all red and yellow, and the pine all green. I understand it and read its history easily before I get to it. I find, as I expected, a fence separating the pines from the oaks, or that they belong to different owners. I also find, as I expected, that eighteen or twenty years ago, a pitch pine wood stood where the oaks are, and was then cut down, for there are their old stumps. But before they were cut, their seeds were blown into the neighbor’s field, and the little pines came up all along its edge, and they grew so thickly and fast that that neighbor refrained at last from plowing them up or cutting them off, for just this rod and a half in width, where they were thickest, and, moreover, though there are no sizable oaks mixed with these pines, the whole surface of this narrow strip is as usual completely stocked with little seedling oaks less than a foot high. But I ask, if the neighbor so often lets this narrow edging grow up, why not often, by the same rule, let them spread over the whole of his field? When at length he sees how they have grown, does he not often regret that he did not do so? . . . Why not control our own woods and destiny more? . . .There are many such problems in forest geometry to be solved. Journal, october 16, 1860

PINES IN AN OCEAN OF MIST Pines slipping in and out of a fog in Walden Woods reminded Thoreau that the state of the atmosphere, and our minds, can turn the solid world into dreams and shadows.

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The pines standing in the ocean of mist, seen from the Cliffs, are trees in every stage of transition from the actual to the imaginary. The near are more distinct, the distant more faint, till at last they are a mere shadowy cone in the distance. What, then, are these solid pines become? . . . As you advance, the trees gradually come out of the mist and take form before your eyes. You are reminded of your dreams. Life looks like a dream. You are prepared to see visions. And now, just before sundown, the night wind blows up more mist through the valley, thickening the veil which already hung over the trees, and the gloom of night gathers early and rapidly around. Birds lose their way. Journal, november 29, 1850

Walden Pond in winter

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2 A HEART FOR TREES

Thoreau could be prickly or dour. He was strong headed, and though he derided the Puritans for being stern and forbidding, he was more than a bit of a Puritan himself at times. “What a groveling appetite for profitless jest and amusement our countrymen have!” he scoffed in 1853. Provoked by an injustice or human foolishness, he could heap scorn like a Hebrew prophet. He was also given to bouts of melancholy. Trees brought out another side to Thoreau, one we rarely hear about. They stirred a boyish joy in him. He found “an inexpressible happiness” in the woods. “Their mirth is but just repressed.” Lichen lifted his spirits, and trees seen from a mountain delighted him: “Nothing is so beautiful as the tree tops. A pine or two with a dash of vapor in the sky—and our elysium is made.” In January 1850, he discovered a small stand of beeches, which were disappearing from local woods. With its handsome trunk and smooth bark, the tree was “so perfect in all its details,” wrote a mesmerized Thoreau, “I could stand an hour and look at one.” The trees of autumn especially exhilarated him. Their riotous colors suggested to him that life’s daily routine should be interrupted “by an analogous expression of joy and hilarity,” and that our “spirits should rise as high as Nature’s.” Trees stirred gratitude as well. “I feel blessed,” he wrote in his journal on November 1, 1851, a bright, clear, warm day. “I love my life. I warm toward all nature. The woods are now much more open than when I last observed them; the leaves have fallen, and they let in light, and I see the sky through them as through a crow’s wing in every direction.” Walking past Barrett’s sawmill in the western part of Concord in September 1857, he spied a bright scarlet red maple on a distant hill, visible against the green of other trees. It was the first tree to turn that fall. Basking in the late afternoon sun, it was “one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow,” he wrote. “What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be believed.” Thoreau practiced his craft as a writer with care. He admonished himself to write restrained, well-modulated prose and to not be overly emotive on 36

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the page. “Nature never indulges in exclamations, never says Ah! or Alas!” he wrote on January 26, 1852. “She is a plain writer, uses few gestures, does not add to her verbs, uses few adverbs, uses no expletives. I find that I use many words for the sake of emphasis which really add nothing to the force of my sentences, and they look relieved the moment I have cancelled these.” Thoreau used dashes between his thoughts rather than standard punctuation in his daily writing, which gives it a freshness and spontaneity. The editors of the 1906 edition of the journal often replaced these with exclamation points to standardize his prose. Yet even in the Princeton edition, which omits these faux marks, Thoreau disregarded his own advice in writing about trees. Exclamations flew from his hand. “But ah! The needles of the pine, how they shine, as I look down over the Holden wood and westward!” And, startled by the beauty of a hemlock in winter: “What singular regularity in the outlines of a tree!” Moved by sap that oozed like tears from freshly-cut pines: “These beautiful accidents that attend on man’s works!” Of a tiny pitch pine sapling, a half inch wide and an inch and a half tall: “What a feeble beginning for so long-lived a tree!” In his January 26, 1852, journal entry, Thoreau ignored his own admonition not to indulge in exclamations only five paragraphs later, when his thoughts turned to lichens, the mossy, colorful patches of fungi and algae that colonize the bark of trees. “I could study a single piece of bark for hours. How they flourish!” In the spring, his spirits soared as the trees leaved. “How bright, how full of freshness, tender promise and fragrance is the new world!” And he was dazzled by the speed with which they did it. “It is remarkable that many beech and chestnut oak leaves which recently expanded have already attained their full size!! How they launch themselves forth to the light. How suddenly Nature spreads her umbrellas!” By early summer, he was smitten by their smell. “Ah, those fugacious universal fragrances of the meadows and woods!” It wasn’t only leaves that did this; black spruce cones called forth his praise as well. “What a glorious crimson fire as you look up to the sunlight through the thin edges of the scales of its cones! So intensely glowing in their cool green beds!”

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Thoreau also felt personally connected to trees. He identified with them. “I feel a certain sympathy with the pine or oak fringed with lichens,” he wrote on a rainy day in 1852. “They remind me of the dewy and ambrosial vigor of nature and of man’s prime.” A month into his experiment at Walden Pond, Thoreau was beset by loneliness and doubted that he could survive without society. His mood shifted as he sensed the presence of “something kindred” all around him. “Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me.” He spoke of trees as family. “Old trees are our parents, and our parents’ parents, perchance.” And he asked, “What cousin of mine is the shrub oak?” When he recognized trees in the distance that were illuminated by the sun as white pines, he felt “somewhat like the young Astyanax at sight of his father’s flashing crest.” (In the ancient Greek classics, Astyanax is the young son of the Trojan king Hector who recognizes his warrior father by the flashing bronze crest on his helmet.) Being related to trees carried obligations. Just as Thoreau could no longer fish as he grew older, neither could he “inflict an unnecessary injury on the chestnut” by throwing rocks at it to shake down its nuts. It was a “distant relation,” “a sentient being” like himself. Trees were also Thoreau’s companions, the company he kept on his excursions in the woods. His praise of them as friends was not always without an ulterior purpose, however; he sometimes praised their companionability as a way to snub actual friends who disappointed him. Meditating lugubriously on Emerson’s coldness to him, he wrote that pine trees were more likely to cheer him than “those who come nearest to being my friends.” On the other hand, Thoreau does seem to have found trees more companionable than most people, especially those who went with him on walks in the woods. “I do not know if I am singular when I say that I believe there is not many who will not, comparatively speaking, spoil my afternoon.” Finally, trees were Thoreau’s stalwart, cheerful allies in his recurring struggles with depression, or “melancholy,” as it was called then, and confirmed his sense of hope. Pushing up from below, leaning toward the light,

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flourishing despite adverse circumstances—trees exemplified renewal and persistence. “In the winter, I stop short in the path to admire how the trees grow up without forethought, regardless of the time and circumstances. They do not wait as man does, but now is the golden age of the sapling. . . . They express a naked confidence.” The human spirit needs such “stimulants of bright and cheering prospects.” In a town lacking trees (or perhaps “with only a single tree or two for suicides”), there will be “the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers,” he wrote in “Autumnal Tints.” In January 1842, Thoreau’s beloved brother, John, developed lockjaw and died in his arms. Two weeks later, Emerson’s five-year-old son, Waldo, to whom Thoreau was close, died of scarlet fever. Deeply shocked, Thoreau withdrew into depression. When Emerson wisely asked him to review several books of natural history for The Dial, Thoreau immersed himself in nature. His struggle with grief would last years, but two months after John’s death, he could write, even if with more bravery than belief, in a letter to Emerson, “Every blade in the field—every leaf in the forest—lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up. It is the pastime of a full quarter of the year. Dead trees, sere leaves, dried grass and herbs—are not these a good part of our life?” In July 1842, The Dial published Thoreau’s review, the essay we now know as “The Natural History of Massachusetts.” “The spruce, the hemlock and the pine will not countenance despair,” Thoreau wrote. “The winter of their discontent never comes.” “Wood, earth, mould, etc., exist for joy,” Thoreau wrote in his journal, and trees were channels of it for him. With their “saws and laws,” loggers and woodlot owners did not know how glad a man could be in the woods, he wrote on January 3, 1853. Remarkably, given the Puritan streak in him, Thoreau said he could be thoroughly glad in nature—glad “with an entire gladness.” Trees continued to remind him of what he wrote in that 1842 Dial essay: “Surely joy is the condition of life.”

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H E A R T WO O D

DELIGHTED BY TREES The thousand fine points and tops of the trees delight me; they are the plumes and standards and bayonets of a host that marches to victory over the earth. The trees are handsome towards the heavens as well as up their boles; they are good for other things than boards and shingles. Journal, january 26, 1852

NEW LEAVES, SO HOPEFUL! Now the sun has come out after the May storm. How bright, how full of freshness, tender promise and fragrance is the new world! The woods putting forth new leaves; it is a memorable season. So hopeful. These young leaves have the beauty of flowers. The shrub oaks are just beginning to blossom. . . . Do I smell the young birch leaves at a distance? Most trees are

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beautiful when leafing out, but especially the birch. After a storm at this season, the sun comes out and lights up the tender expanding leaves, and all Nature is full of light and fragrance—the birds sing without ceasing—and the earth is a fairyland. The birch leaves are so small that you see the landscape through the tree, and they are like silvery and green spangles in the sun, fluttering about the tree. Journal, may 17, 1852

TOO FAIR TO BE BELIEVED The red maples generally are beginning to be ripe. . . . I notice a small one, half a mile off across a meadow, against the green wood-side there, a far brighter red than the blossoms of any tree in summer, and more conspicuous. . . . Some single trees, wholly bright scarlet, seen against others of their kind still freshly green, or against evergreens, are more memorable than whole groves will be by-and-by. How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last. The whole tree thus ripening in advance of its fellows attains a singular preeminence, and sometimes maintains it for a week or two. I am thrilled at the sight of it, bearing aloft its scarlet standard for the regiment of green-clad foresters around, and I go half a mile out of my way to examine it. A single tree becomes thus the crowning beauty of some meadowy vale,

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and the expression of the whole surrounding forest is at once more spirited for it. “Autumnal Tints”

HOW THE NEEDLES SHINE! Seeing the expanse of pines below Fairhaven cliff illuminated by the sun put Thoreau in a jubilant mood. But ah! The needles of the pine, how they shine, as I look down over the Holden wood and westward! Every third tree is lit with the most subdued but clear, ethereal light, as if it were the most delicate frostwork in a winter morning, reflecting no heat but only light. And as they rock and wave in the strong wind, even a mile off, the light courses up and down there as over a field of grain, i.e., they are alternately light and dark, like looms above the forest, when the shuttle is thrown between the light woof and the dark web, weaving a light article—spring goods for Nature to wear. At the sight of this my spirit is like a lit tree. Journal, march 18, 1858

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“ MY NEW ACQUAINTANCE,” A TALL ASPEN In October, Thoreau noticed a tall yellow aspen that stood out amid the red, green, and brown woods. By its shape and color he recognized it as a tree he had seen close up two days before. Here he recalls how he and his “acquaintance” met. After walking for a couple of hours the other day through the woods, I came to the base of a tall aspen, which I do not remember to have seen before, standing in the midst of the woods in the next town, still thickly leaved and turned to greenish yellow. It is perhaps the largest of its species that I know. It was by merest accident that I stumbled on it, and if I had been sent to find it, I should have thought it to be, as we say, like looking for a needle in a haymow. All summer, and it chances for so many years, it has been concealed to me, but now, walking in a different direction to the same hilltop from which I saw the scarlet oaks, and looking off just before sunset, when all other trees visible for miles around are reddish or green, I distinguish my new acquaintance by its yellow color. Such is its fame, at last, and reward for living in that solitude and obscurity. It is the most distinct tree in all the landscape, and would be the cynosure of all eyes here. Thus it plays its part in the choir. It is as if it recognized me too, and gladly, coming halfway to meet me, and now the acquaintance thus propitiously formed will, I trust, be permanent. Journal, october 31, 1858

THE SHRUB OAK! THE OAKEN SHRUB! The hardy shrub oak (better known as the scrub or bear oak) cheered Thoreau, especially in late fall, when its leaves remained plump and vibrant as other leaves withered. He took the humble tree as a symbol of his own hardiness.

“a match found for me at last” The dear wholesome color of shrub oak leaves, so clean and firm, not decaying, but which have put on a kind of immortality, not wrinkled and thin

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like the white oak leaves, but full-veined and plump, as nearer earth. Welltanned leather on the one side, sun-tanned, color of colors, color of the cow and the deer, silver-downy beneath, turned toward the late bleached and russet fields. . . . I love and could embrace the shrub oak with its scanty garment of leaves rising above the snow, lowly whispering to me, akin to winter thoughts and sunsets and to all virtue. Cover which the hare and the partridge seek, and I, too, seek. . . . Rigid as iron, clean as the atmosphere, hardy as virtue, innocent and sweet as a maiden is the shrub oak. In proportion as I know and love it, I am natural and sound as a partridge. I felt a positive yearning toward one bush this afternoon. There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak. Journal, december 1, 1856

no poet sings of the shrub oak Withered leaves! This is our frugal winter diet, instead of the juicy salads of spring and summer. I think I could write a lecture on “Dry Leaves,” carrying a specimen of each kind that hangs on in the winter into the lecture room as the heads of my discourse. They have long hung to some extent in vain, and have not found their poet yet. The pine has been sung, but not, to my knowledge, the shrub oak. Most think it is useless. How glad I am that it serves no vulgar use. It is never seen on the woodman’s cart. The citizen who has just bought a sproutland on which shrub oaks alone come up only curses it. But it serves a higher use than they know. Shrub oak! How true its name! Think first what a family it belongs to. The oak, the king of trees, is its own brother, only of ampler dimensions. The oak, so famous for grandeur and Quercus ilicifolia picturesqueness, so prized for strength

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by the builder, for knees or for beams; and this is the oak of smaller size, the Eskimo of oaks—the shrub oak! The oaken shrub! I value it first for the noble family it belongs to. It is not like brittle sumac or venomous dogwood, which you must beware how you touch, but wholesome to the touch, though rough; not producing any festering sores, only honest scratches and rents. Journal, december 19, 1856

BE KIND TO TREES, OUR DISTANT RELATIONS Now is the time for chestnuts. A stone cast against the trees shakes them down in showers upon one’s head and shoulders. But I cannot excuse myself for using the stone. It is not innocent, it is not just, so to maltreat the

A dish antenna in a front yard on Walden Street, Concord

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tree that feeds us. I am not disturbed by considering that if I thus shorten its life, I shall not enjoy its fruit so long, but am prompted to a more innocent course by motives purely of humanity. I sympathize with the tree, yet I heaved a big stone against the trunks like a robber, not too good to commit murder. I trust that I shall never do it again. These gifts should be accepted not merely with gentleness, but with a certain humble gratitude. . . . It is worse than boorish, it is criminal, to inflict an unnecessary injury on the tree that feeds or shades us. Old trees are our parents, and our parents’ parents, perchance. If you would learn the secrets of nature, you must practice more humanity than others. The thought that I was robbing myself by injuring the tree did not occur to me, but I was affected as if I had cast a rock at a sentient being—with a duller sense than my own, it is true, but yet a distant relative. Behold a man cutting down a tree to come at the fruit! What is the moral of such an act? Journal, october 23, 1855

STIMULANTS OF CHEERING PROSPECTS The “exhilaration” that the brilliant fall colors of the trees excite in us, Thoreau writes in “Autumnal Tints,” are nature’s suggestion that our routines “be interrupted by an analogous expression of joy and hilarity.” No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarves and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery—flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read—while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms. Leave it to Nature to appoint the days, whether the same as in neighboring States or not, and let the clergy read her proclamations, if they can understand them. Behold what a brilliant drapery is her woodbine flag! . . . A village is not complete, unless it have

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Town clock atop a Nantucket church built in 1809

these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town-clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting. . . . A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers. Every washtub and milk can and gravestone will be exposed. The inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind their barns and houses, like desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I shall look to see spears in their hands. They will be ready to accept the most barren and forlorn doctrine—as that the world is speedily coming to an end, or has already got to it, or that they themselves are turned wrong side outward. “Autumnal Tints”

IN THE WOODS, AN INVISIBLE COMPANION Thoreau felt a sense of companionship in the solitary woods, even on a bleak day. In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it—dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even on a black and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that the cold and solitude are friends of

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mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. . . . It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him. Journal, january 7, 1857

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3 A P O E T’S TREES

the trees around Walden pond were cut heavily for firewood during the unusually cold winter of 1851–52, further gouging the wooded shores Thoreau had known since childhood. “My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth,” he wrote in Walden. “How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?” Those were not the only trees that awoke the poet in Thoreau. He created fresh, vivid images of them in his prose. The pines and maples that encircle Walden Pond were “slender eyelashes” fringing earth’s “liquid eye,” and the leafy hills above it were “its overhanging brows.” At night, the shadows of trees checker the ground “like chandeliers of darkness.” The peaks of evergreens jutting up a hillside were “the plumes and standards and bayonets” of soldiers on the march. In November, “the wind roars among the shrouds of the wood.” Trees were “great harps on which the wind makes music.” As Thoreau paddled a narrow stream in Maine, tall evergreens towered on either bank “like the spires of a Venice in the forest.” The rich fall colors of the trees in the town center suggested the moveable scenery of the nineteenth-century stage. “As I look up the street,” he wrote, “the autumnal tints look like painted screens.” His essay “Autumnal Tints” glows with poetic images. In New England towns, Thoreau wrote, maple trees surpass the pallid ministers as preachers. They deliver blazing sermons each fall, and, at the height of their color, become “burning bushes” on the hillsides. Even the shyest maples announce themselves then. A small red maple scarcely visible in the other seasons of the year, “by the tint of its maturity, by its very blushes, is revealed at last to the careless and distant traveler, and leads his thoughts away from the dusty road into those brave solitudes which it inhabits. It flashes out conspicuous with all the virtue and beauty of a maple.” Thoreau from time to time traveled the loggers’ path, as he said a poet must. He went to the forest not as a source of timber, however, but as a font of figurative language—metaphors, similes, and puns drawn from trees. He would sail across the treetops if he had “the right kind of bark,” a variant of the nautical “barque.” Estranged friends, he said, were like “two boughs crossed in the wood, which play backwards and forwards upon one another in the 52

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wind, and only wear into each other, but never the sap of the one flows into the pores of the other.” Thoreau, who often meant Emerson when he wrote “a friend” or “my friend” in his journal, nevertheless hoped that the gap that was growing between them in the late 1840s would prove temporary. “Methinks our estrangement is only like the divergence of branches which unite in the stem.” He personified trees in prose. In one of his loveliest poetic images, he wrote that leafless oaks “stand browned and crisped” in the late October sun like valiant laborers whose work for the year is done. “That same sun which called forth their leaves in the spring has now, aided by the frost, sealed up their fountains for the year and withered them. The order has gone forth for them to rest. As each tree casts off its leaves, it stands careless and free, like a horse freed from its harness, or like one who has done his year’s work and now stands unnoticed, but with concentrated strength and contentment, ready to brave the blasts of winter without a murmur.” Thoreau sometimes used elaborate tree metaphors to develop a point or express a longer thought. In the 1850s, Concord farmers were abandoning their farms and selling off their woodlots for cash. The loss of trees saddened Thoreau. Soon, he feared, nothing of “old Concord” would be left, not even the old boundary trees that surveyors like himself used. These “bound trees,” as he called them, were sufficiently distinctive or well known that they could be used to mark off a lot. Anyone wanting to recall these great trees, he mused, would have to look at dusty old deeds in the drawer of the town appraiser—“mere paper evidence” in which the “old and revered bound trees are mentioned.” Thoreau then appeals to the farmers directly to save the town’s trees. “Pray, farmers, keep some old woods to match the old deeds. Keep them for history’s sake, as specimens of what the township was.” Thus, in addition to being used in land deeds, the boundary trees also recall the noble deeds of an earlier day. Such poetic prose was more than verbal wordplay to Thoreau. He believed that trees themselves were poems, verse writ large on the landscape by nature in the “raw material of tropes and symbols.” “The tree is full of poetry,” A P O E T ’ S TR E E S

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he wrote in July as bees buzzed around basswood blossoms that filled the air with sweetness. The earth is not dead matter, he wrote in Walden, “but living poetry like the leaves of a tree.” Thoreau also read trees as if they held symbols or letters. “I have collected and split up now quite a pile of driftwood—rails and riders and stems and stumps of trees,” he wrote in his journal on October 20, 1855. “Each stick I deal with has a history, and I read it as I am handling it.” He wrote of words and woodpiles three years earlier, too. “It is not in vain, perhaps, that

Thoreau cited a “bound,” or boundary, tree on a survey in 1853. “A large white pine 7 links [fifty-five inches] west of my straight line,” he wrote to the right of section 31.

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every winter the forest is brought to our doors, shaggy with lichens. Even in so humble a shape as a woodpile, it contains sermons for us.” Looking up at the sky through gaps in a canopy of leaves, Thoreau saw “the meaning and idea of the tree stamped in a thousand hieroglyphics on the heavens.” In “Autumnal Tints,” he urges his readers to bring home a scarlet oak leaf and study it by the fireside. “It is a type, not from any Oxford font, not in the Basque nor the arrow-headed character, not found on the Rosetta Stone, but destined to be copied in sculpture one day.” Leaves, he said, are “more various in form than the alphabets of languages.” When Harvard College appointed a new professor of natural history, Thoreau said it made no sense to hire someone to lecture on oaks while the best specimens of the tree were being cut around Massachusetts. “It is like teaching children Latin and Greek,” he wrote, “while we burn the books printed in those languages.” Thoreau was so captivated by trees as writing that he often imagined them as the physical media on which words are written. At different times, he depicted trees as books, letters, poems, prayers, mythological tablets, scrolls, sermons, and inscriptions. “Something like the woodland sounds will be heard to echo through the leaves of a good book,” he said. This was so true, he added, that hearing the “fresh emphatic note” of the ovenbird would cause him to hurriedly “turn many pages.” The logger in Maine who cuts down old trees “ignorantly erases mythological tablets.” On a visit to the Harvard College library, Thoreau was annoyed by the “methodical,” hidebound clerks who controlled access to the works of natural history he wished to read. It would be better, he thought, to keep such books in a library in the woods rather than in a dim, dusty marble edifice in the city. The fantasy was not without a kernel of fact. In the “yellow house” on Main Street in which he lived after 1850, Thoreau made shelves and bookcases out of driftwood from the rivers in town. According to Franklin Sanborn, a neighbor who knew him well, the bookcases were in Thoreau’s room on the third floor. They held his books, Indian arrowheads, natural history artifacts, and “the lengthening series of his journals.”

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Thoreau’s own words eventually appeared on part of a tree. In 1868, six years after his death, his sister Sophia painstakingly inscribed part of his poem “Fair Haven” on a shagbark hickory leaf. The compound leaf consists of five leaflets, and she wrote four stanzas on them in black ink. The poem was one of Thoreau’s earliest, a family favorite in praise of the shady hill above Fairhaven Bay. It ends: If e’er my bark be tempest-tossed, And every hope be wave in, And this frail hulk shall spring a leak, I’ll steer for thee, Fair Haven. And when I take my last long rest, And quiet sleep my grave in, What kindlier covering for my breast, Than thy warm turf Fair Haven. Like Shakespeare’s Orlando, who hung sonnets on trees, Thoreau took trees to be his books. His wordplay could be esoteric, but it was not without purpose. Thoreau wanted to remove the blinders that kept people from seeing trees as anything other than timber, fuel, or an obstacle to farming. He used his poetic gifts to jolt and remake his readers’ perception of trees, to make others see trees as he did, as miracles that encapsulate everything good in nature. “Trees are handsome towards the heavens as well as up their boles,” he said. “They are good for other things than boards and shingles.”

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WO O D P LAY

Herbert Wendell Gleason

MIRRORED TREES, ATLANTIC DEPTHS It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself. The shallowest still water is unfathomable. Wherever the trees and skies are reflected, there is more than Atlantic depth, and no danger of fancy running aground. We notice that it required a separate intention of the eye, a more free and abstracted vision, to see the reflected trees and the sky, than to see the river bottom merely; and so are there manifold visions in the direction of every object, and even the most opaque reflect the heavens from their surface. Some men have their eyes naturally intended to the one and some to the other object. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

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A WOODLOT, ETCHED AGAINST THE SKY For years my appetite was so strong that I fed—I browsed—on the pine forest’s edge seen against the winter horizon. How cheap my diet still! . . . I ranged about like a gray moose, looking at the spiring tops of the trees, and fed my imagination on them—far away, ideal trees not disturbed by the axe of the woodcutter, nearer and nearer fringes and eyelashes of my eye. Where was the sap, the fruit, the value of the forest for me, but in that line where it was relieved against the sky? That was my woodlot; that was my lot in the woods. The silvery needles of the pine straining the light. Journal, december 3, 1856

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DANCING WITH THE LIGHT Just before they fall, the leaves of the scarlet oak become thinner and more ethereal, acquire more color and reflect more light, Thoreau said. They solve the problem of corporal existence by appearing to dematerialize in the light. They are far more ethereal than the less deeply scalloped oak leaves. They have so little leafy terra firma that they appear melting away in the light, and scarcely obstruct our view. The leaves of [other oaks] are more . . . simple, and lumpish in their outlines; but these, raised high on old trees, have solved the leafy problem. Lifted higher and higher, and sublimated more and more, putting off some earthiness and cultivating more intimacy with the light each year, they have at length the least possible amount of earthy matter, and the greatest spread and grasp of skyey influences. There they dance, arm in arm with the light—tripping it on fantastic points, fit partners in those aerial halls. So intimately mingled are they with it that what with their slenderness and their glossy surfaces, you can hardly tell at last what in the dance is leaf and what is light. “Autumnal Tints”

TREES BREATHING THEIR LAST As I was fighting the fire today, in the midst of the roaring and crackling— for the fire seems to snort like a wild horse—I heard from time to time the dying strain, the last sigh, the fine, clear, shrill scream of agony, as it were, of the trees breathing their last, probably the heated air or the steam escaping from some chink. At first I thought it was some bird, or a dying squirrel’s note of anguish, or steam escaping from the tree. Journal, june 4, 1850

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. . . AND BEING RIPPED BY SAWS Sam Barrett sometimes ran his sawmill at night in spring. As Thoreau walked by one night and heard logs being milled, he imagined the scene inside. It is a hollow, galloping sound; makes tearing work, taming timber in a new Orphean fashion, preparing it for rude dwellings of men and musical instruments perchance. I can imagine the sawyer with his lantern and his bar in hand, standing by amid the shadows cast by his light. There is a sonorous vibration and ring to it, as if from the nerves of the tortured log, its entrails tearing. Journal, may 5, 1852

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TRACED IN SHADOW The moon is now more than half full. When I come through the village at ten o’clock this cold night—cold as in May—the heavy shadows of the elms, covering the ground with their rich tracery, impress me as if men had got so much more than they bargained for—not only trees to stand in the air, but to checker the ground with their shadows. At night they lie along the earth. They tower, they arch, they droop over the streets like chandeliers of darkness. Journal, july 7, 1851 62

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CIPHERS PRINTED ON THE SKY The bass, Tilia Americana, also called the lime or linden, overhung the water with its broad and rounded leaf, interspersed with clusters of small hard berries, now nearly ripe, and made an agreeable shade for us sailors. . . . As we sailed under this canopy of leaves we saw the sky through its chinks, and, as it were, the meaning and idea of the tree stamped in a thousand hieroglyphics on the heavens. The universe is so aptly fitted to our organization, that the eye wanders and reposes at the same time. On every side there is something to soothe and refresh this sense. Look up at the tree tops and see how finely Nature finishes off her work there. See how the pines spire without end higher and higher, and make a graceful fringe to the earth. And who shall count the finer cobwebs that soar and float away from their utmost tops, and the myriad insects that dodge between them. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Hieroglyphics of another kind: grooves in wood made by worms

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MYTHIC TABLETS TURNED INTO FOOTSTOOLS Thoreau was hard on loggers in The Maine Woods. Angered by their destruction, he called them “vermin” who gnaw at Maine’s noblest trees and “admire the carcass more than the tree.” His humor, wordplay, and love of trees soften his scorn, however.

Logging with oxen in Washington state, circa 1900

When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump; as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen. I can see these unwieldy tame deer, with a yoke binding them together, and brazentipped horns betraying their servitude, taking their stand on the stump of each giant pine in succession throughout this whole forest, until it is nothing but an ox pasture, and run out at that. . . . Why, my dear sir, the tree might have stood on its own stump, and a great deal more comfortably and firmly than a yoke of oxen can, if you had not cut it down.

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Alluding to the great poets who have sung of them, Thoreau then calls trees mythic tablets the ignorant logger cannot read. He mocks the minting, in 1652, of a coin with a pine tree on it while people were simultaneously chopping down the real thing. Finally, he laments that the logger makes way for a district school, in which words are cut, dried, and squared off into regular forms like so much lumber. The Anglo-American can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town meeting warrants on them. Before he has learned his a b c in the beautiful but mystic lore of the wilderness which Spenser and Dante had just begun to read, he cuts it down, coins a pine-tree shilling (as if to signify the pine’s value to him), puts up a deestrict schoolhouse, and introduces Webster’s spelling-book. The Maine Woods A 1652 pine-tree shilling

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JOINED BELOW GROUND In 1837, Thoreau formed what would become his most important friendship, with Emerson. The following year, he wrote a poem about friendship. Its last stanzas suggest that even then, a decade before they drifted apart, Thoreau sensed that Emerson would not to be the intimate, soul-sharing friend he so desired.

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Two sturdy oaks I mean, which side by side, Withstand the winter’s storm, And spite of wind and tide, Grow up the meadow’s pride, For both are strong Above they barely touch, but undermined Down to their deepest source, Admiring you shall find Their roots are intertwined Insep’rably. Journal, april 8, 1838

A FOREST READING ROOM Visiting a library in the dusty city to read books about nature left Thoreau dispirited. The officious clerks guarded the books like Cerberus, the mythical three-headed beast that kept the dead within Hades. His solution: a library in the woods. How happens it that I find not in the country, in the fields and woods, the works even of like-minded naturalists and poets? Those who have expressed the purest and deepest love of nature have not recorded it on the bank of the trees with the lichens; but if I would read their books I must go to the city, so strange and repulsive both to them and to me, and deal with men and institutions with whom I have no sympathy. When I have just been there on this errand, it seems too great a price to pay for access even to the works of Hercules capturing Cerebus, the three-headed hound of Hades

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Homer, or Chaucer, or Linnæus. . . . I have sometimes imagined a library, a collection of the works of true poets, philosophers, naturalists, etc., deposited not in a brick or marble edifice in a crowded and dusty city, guarded by cold-blooded and methodical officials and preyed on by bookworms, and in which you have no share, but rather far away in the depths of a primitive forest, like the ruins of Central America, where you can trace a series of crumbling alcoves—the older books protecting the most modern from the elements—partially buried by the luxuriance of nature, which the heroic student could reach only after adventures in the wilderness amid wild beasts and wild men. That, to my imagination, seems a fitter place for these interesting relics . . . whose occasion is nature, than the well-preserved edifice, with its well-preserved officials on the side of a city’s square. More terrible than lions and tigers these Cerberuses. Journal, february 3, 1852

SOARING ON INVISIBLE CURRENTS Opening a milkweed pod, Thoreau realized that the gossamer-like threads holding the seeds in place nourish them as they grow, then in September act like wings and guide the seeds through the air. He decided to test the seeds’ aerodynamic qualities by tossing some skyward. Returning one afternoon by way of Mount Misery from a walk through Conantum and over Lee’s Bridge into Lincoln, I perceive in the little open meadow on Clematis Brook that the follicles of the Asclepias cornuti [milkweed] now point upward and are already bursting. When I release some seeds, the fine silky threads fly apart at once, opening with a spring—and then ray their relics out into a hemispherical form, each thread freeing itself from its neighbor, and all reflecting prismatic tints. These seeds are besides furnished with broad, thin margins or wings, which plainly keep them steady and prevent their whirling round. I let one go, and it rises slowly and uncertainly at first, now driven this way, then that, by invisible currents, and I fear it will make shipwreck against the neighboring wood. But no; as it

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approaches it, it surely rises above it, and then feeling the strong north wind, it is borne off rapidly in the opposite direction, over Deacon Farrar’s woods, ever rising higher and higher, and tossing and heaved about with every fluctuation of the air, till at fifty rods off and one hundred feet above the earth, steering south—I lose sight of it. . . . Think of the great variety of balloons which at this season are buoyed up by similar means! How many myriads go sailing away thus, high over hill and meadow and river, on various tacks until the wind lulls, to plant their race in new localities—who can tell how many miles away? I do not see but the seeds which are ripened in New England may plant themselves in Pennsylvania. At any rate, I am interested in the fate or success of every such venture which the autumn sends forth. And for this end these silken streamers have been perfecting themselves all summer, snugly packed in this light chest, a perfect adaptation to this end—a prophecy not only of the fall, but of future springs. Who could believe in prophecies of Daniel or of Miller* that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds? Faith in a Seed

BY THE WATERS OF THE CONCORD, TEARS OF JOY Willow twigs are sinewy and tough, but they are brittle where they attach to the trunk. Since willows grow by water, strong currents or ice often snap them off and carry them downstream. In this minor masterpiece of poetic prose from “The Dispersion of Seeds,” Thoreau tells of his joy at discovering that some broken twigs root in the riverbank and sprout into new trees. Inspired by this, he seeks to uproot the willow’s symbolic link with despair and death. That reputation began with Psalm 137, in which the Israelites, unable to sing while in exile, hung their harps on willows “by the waters of Babylon.” Thoreau calls the willow a symbol of hope

* The Book of Daniel’s prophetic hero. In the 1840s, William Miller, an Adventist preacher, prophesized the world would end in 1844.

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and sings a song of praise to it “by the shore of the Concord.” His zestful tribute somehow manages to weave floating willow seed scum with allusions to Homer, Alexander, Babylon, Herodotus, Pliny, and Saskatchewan. One June I noticed, in a mass of damp shavings, leaves, and sand left bare on the shore of the Assabet River, a little prostrate black willow just coming into flower; and pulling it up I found it to be a twig sixteen inches long, two-thirds buried in the damp mass. This was probably broken off by the ice, brought down, washed up, and buried there like a layer, and now for

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two-thirds of its length it had put out rootlets an inch or two long abundantly, and leaves and catkins from the part above ground; and thus you had a tree which might at length wave high over the shore—so vivacious is this willow, availing itself of every accident to spread itself along the river’s bank. The ice that strips it and breaks it down only disperses it the more widely. . . . I had ignorantly pitied the hard fate of the tree that was made so brittle and not yielding like a reed. But now I admired its invulnerability. I would gladly hang my harp on such a willow, if so I might derive inspiration from it. Sitting down by the shore of the Concord, I could almost have wept for joy at the discovery of it. Thoreau tells why the willow should not be known for forlorn love or sorrow. The Babylonian willow does not actually bend and droop in despair. Its branches are merely showing how, as legend has it, they foretold Alexander the Great’s death by knocking the crown from his head as he crossed the Euphrates in a boat. I do not know what they mean who call the willow the emblem of despairing love—who tell of ‘the willow worn by forlorn paramour!’ It is rather the emblem of triumphant love and sympathy with all Nature. It may droop, it is so lithe, but it never weeps. The willow of Babylon blooms not the less hopefully here, though its other half is not in the New World at all and never has been. It droops not to commemorate David’s tears, but rather to remind us how on the Euphrates once it snatched the crown from Alexander’s head. It is a tree whose ordinary fate it is to be cut down every two or three years, and yet it neither dies nor weeps but puts forth shoots which are all the more vigorous and brighter for it, and it lives as long as most. When I pass by a twig of willow, though of the slenderest kind, rising above the sedge in some dry hollow early in December, or above the snow in midwinter, my spirits rise as if it were an oasis in the desert. Aye, the willow is no tree for suicides. It is the emblem of youth, joy, and everlasting life. Faith in a Seed (abridged)

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Thoreau acquired a new way to see trees when he immersed himself in the science of the forest in the 1850s. Next to his lyrical accounts of trees, he made notes about the order in which they leaf out in the spring— “The yellow birch first, then the black or the paper birch, then the white”— and turn color in the fall. He counted the number of stamens in the buds of trees and calculated their growth rates from the size of the gaps between their annual growth rings. He studied the propagation and growth of trees and even what he called “forest geometry”—the crescent patterns of seedlings that spring up in abandoned fields or cut-over woodlands. The emerging science of botany had begun to draw Thoreau’s attention at Walden. By 1847, he was sending specimens to the naturalist Louis Agassiz at Harvard. In 1849, he turned his impromptu daily walks into botanical field excursions. He was elected a junior member of the Boston Society of Natural History the following year. Thoreau undertook a study of trees in 1851 and 1852 and started identifying those he saw on his walks. He read Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees, John Evelyn’s 1664 book on English forests; George Barrell Emerson’s 1846 survey of the forests of Massachusetts; and François André Michaux’s magisterial North American Sylva, the first major survey of the trees in the New World, published in 1819. Botany gave Thoreau a way to see the invisible energies inside trees and, especially to his liking, copious and precise new words with which to describe them. His interest in trees increasingly dominated his work as a naturalist in the 1850s. By 1860, trees were his primary focus. Thoreau used his new knowledge to explore a topic that he had puzzled over: how trees propagate. Specifically, he had noticed that oaks often grew where pines had been cut, and that pines rose in place of oaks. What he didn’t know was how either species could take root when no similar trees were nearby. If trees came from seeds, as he believed, how did the seeds get there? Thoreau began a minute study of the methods by which trees disperse their seeds. He dug up pine cones buried by squirrels and took apart their scales. He examined the tiny seeds inside and sometimes tested their aerodynamic qualities. After years of painstaking observation, he was 76

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certain that the wind transmitted pine and other lighter seeds, and birds and small animals spread the heavier ones in their paws or bellies or on their fur. Thus trees secure the survival of their species “by the balloon, or parachute, or hook, or barbed spear.” This discovery solved the riddle of pines and oaks. A critical moment occurred in September 1857, when Thoreau entered a dense white pine grove in which there did not appear to be a single hardwood. But on looking closely over its floor, he found “as often as every five feet, a little oak, three to twelve inches high.” The barely visible oak saplings had sprung from acorns left by squirrels. A pine grove is an ideal spot for oaks initially, but after a few years they die for lack of light and nutrients. However, if the pines are removed, oaks spring up. Conversely, oaks shelter pine saplings, which germinate from wind-borne seeds. The pines, too, are blocked from growing beyond a certain stage—unless the oaks are cut down. The two species, he concluded, are nursemaids to each other. “I was surprised,” he wrote, “to find my own theory so perfectly proved.” Thoreau was not the first naturalist to recognize that forests regenerate, but he understood the process in detail, documented it, and coined the term “succession.” He gave a lecture on it at the Middlesex Cattle Show in September 1860. Rejecting the view of George Barrell Emerson and many others that forests generate spontaneously, he asserted unequivocally that all trees grow from seeds. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune printed Thoreau’s lecture “The Succession of Forest Trees,” and it became widely disseminated. It was a major advance in the study of forest dynamics—or should have been. Professional foresters, who could not accept the work of a Transcendentalist, even a scientific one, ignored it. Thoreau also contributed to the understanding of the ages of trees and how to manage woodlands. For example, loggers at the time considered trees mature as soon as their trunks ceased to grow in diameter. Thoreau observed that trees pack on wood high overhead in their crowns for many years after that, and he advocated letting trees grow as long as possible. The essay’s success came as Thoreau’s recognition as a naturalist was on the rise. For a writer embittered by the feeble sales of his two books (A A M I ND F O R TR E E S

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Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden) his new mission was a huge boost. In the fall of 1860, he busily embarked on collecting data on the life cycle of trees. His journal entries became longer and full of confidence and zest. In just October and November, he composed an astonishing 53,000 words. On December 3, however, he contracted the cold from which he never truly recovered. His death two years later would have been premature in any case, but the excitement he brought to the study of trees makes it all the more tragic. Earlier in 1860 he had begun a broader work, “The Dispersion of Seeds,” an exactly observed but also lyrical chronicle of nature’s fecundity, of which his lecture on succession was a part. Inspired by Darwin, it was an ambitious effort to apply the principle of natural selection to Concord’s fields and woodlots. Thoreau left it incomplete at his death. Not until 1993 was his manuscript assembled and published as Faith in a Seed. Thoreau’s scientific work did not come at the expense of his idealism, which remained the final lens through which he saw nature. He did not believe that nature could not be known reductively, as an object under a microscope. That method was too narrow, too circumscribed to deliver the whole, or even “the shadow of the whole.” Thoreau wanted to know not only what trees were but also what they meant, what they signified. He saw them as expressions of universal laws and spiritual truths, and he wrote about them both as natural fact and as parable. On this point he was consistent. “A perception of her true meaning is indispensable to a correct study of Nature,” he wrote January 2, 1837, while a Harvard senior. Fourteen years later, he believed the same. “Facts should only be as the frame; they should be material to the mythology which I am writing. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic.” If trees were supreme expressions of the principle of vegetation to Thoreau the naturalist, they also provided indispensable metaphors to his philosophical thought. He regarded the elemental structures of trees—trunk, root, branch, and leaf—as forms found everywhere in nature, as the original templates of creation. He saw the leaf, especially, as a universal form. The earth

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“expresses itself outwardly in leaves” because “it so labors with the idea inwardly.” The whole tree itself is but one leaf. The feathers and wings of birds, the branching horns of the moose, and even the human hand observe the template. Nor was the form confined to physical matter. “There are flowers of thought, and there are leaves of thought. Most of our thoughts are merely leaves, to which the thread of thought is the stem.” As Thoreau famously put it in Walden, “the Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.” Reading Asa Gray’s Manual of Botany in 1852 prompted another metaphor. In Thoreau’s copious notes on the book, he quoted Gray’s remark that a plant’s root in the soil and its topmost leaf in the air are but opposite ends of one central axis or stem—one going down, the other up. The implication excited Thoreau. A new idea, he wrote, is like a bud on a branch, which reaches up to the sun and at the same time down into the soil, through the root, for nourishment. “The most clear and ethereal ideas readily ally themselves to the earth, the primal womb of things. They put forth roots as soon as branches; they are eager to be soiled.” Thus the airiest thoughts are “wombed and rooted in darkness.” Thoreau saw analogies, or “correspondences,” between trees and people. The more slowly a tree grows at first, he wrote after inspecting oaks, the sounder it is at the core, “and I think the same is true of human beings.” “Man is like a tree which is limited to no age, but grows as long as it has roots in the ground.” And a man’s experience ripens in the October of his life; he “glows with maturity” and “bears his fruit” then. The analogies continued in the cemetery. “It is with the graves of trees as with those of men,” he observed, “at first an upright stump (for a monument), in course of time a mere mound, and finally, when the corpse has decayed and shrunk, a depression in the soil.” Two days after turning thirty-five, Thoreau noted that trees commonly grow in the spring and again in the fall. “So it is with man,” although most have a spring growth only. They never recover from the first check to their hopes. Trees, being hardier, “speedily recover,” and “though they bear the scar or knot in remembrance of their disappointment, they push forward again and have a vigorous fall growth.”

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Thoreau found a personal correspondence in the ancient, aboriginal wild apple tree, which is lavishly praised in his late essay “Wild Apples.” Like himself, and the prose he produced, the wild apple is tangy, sharp, piquant, puckish, and spirited. It cannot be brought to market like its pallid grafted cousin. In his writing, the hardy tree rivals the white pine as a symbol of Thoreau’s own wildness. Even after being mauled by browsing cows or cut down by axes, it does not forget its “high calling” and grows back to “drop its perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth.” Not a surprising metaphor from a man who crafted exquisite prose for years after he felt publishers had turned away from him. Thoreau combined the lens of the naturalist and eye of the poet to even greater effect in his unsurpassed ode to trees, “Autumnal Tints.” On one level, it is a kaleidoscope of the hues in autumn, a tree-by-tree guide to the shifting fall palette of colors in New England. It is written in a lively, whimsical style, punctuated with wry humor. Yet running never far below the surface is a meditation on death in nature. The cascade of leaves nature unleashes in the fall shows not her wastefulness but her economy, he says. The annual shedding is indeed “the great harvest of the year.” By enriching the soil with their leaves, the trees “are now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from it. We are all the richer for their decay.” As Thoreau sees it, leaves fall only to rise again in new trees. “They still live in the soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from it. They stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years, by subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees.” When a fallen tree rises again in new form, the leaves it shed as a sapling, “transmuted” in the soil, “may again adorn its crown.” “I cannot easily dismiss the subject of fallen leaves,” Thoreau wrote on October 22, 1853, in a great understatement. “Autumnal Tints” touches on several of his central themes—the richness and multiplicity of color in nature, the perception of beauty, landscape aesthetics and, above all, nature’s regenerative powers. To see autumn’s colors, he writes, the leaf must be ready to fall and the eye ready to see it.

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Thoreau gave “Autumnal Tints” as a lecture in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1859. A local newspaper reported that he passed around a scarlet oak leaf and gave a “running commentary on its delicate outline of curves and angles, and its gorgeous coloring of scarlet and crimson.” That passage in the essay is among Thoreau’s most soaring. As the leaf dies in autumn, he writes, it becomes thinner. As more light passes through it, it becomes brighter and more colorful, until it seems to occupy a stage between physical matter and pure light. Contemplating that line between the corporeal and the ethereal—between bodily existence and pure energy—he writes that as the fall advances, scarlet oak leaves “appear to be melting away in the light.” “Autumnal Tints” was the last lecture Thoreau gave. He turned it into an essay for the Atlantic Monthly in the late winter and early spring of 1862. The leaf as process—its ripening, fall, and subsequent biochemical transformation—took on an additional layer of meaning for him as he lay dying. He clearly identified with the autumn leaf. Its higher color showed that it had “arrived at a late and perfect maturity,” like a ripened piece of fruit, which, just before it falls, acquires a brighter tint and “commences a more independent and individual existence.” It requires less from any external source, and what nourishment it does need it takes “not so much from the earth through its stem as from the sun and air.” In writing of the lightness and gaiety with which leaves fall, Thoreau seems to suggest that death is not to be feared. “How beautifully they go to their graves! How gently lay themselves down and turn to mould! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.”

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IMBRICATE BUDS IN BLOSSOM Botany appealed to the wordsmith as well as the naturalist in Thoreau. “How copious and precise the botanical language!” he enthused in his journal in 1851. He used its precise lexicon to describe trees.

Flowering buds of Ulmus americana, American elm

The broad flat brown buds on Mr. Cheney’s elm, containing twenty or thirty yellowish-green threads, surmounted with little brownish mulberry cups, which contain the stamens and the two styles—these are just expanding or blossoming now. The flat imbricated buds, which open their scales both ways, have had a rich look for some weeks past. Why so few elms so advanced, so rich now? Are the staminiferous and pistilliferous flowers ever on different trees? Journal, april 15, 1852

A CASCADE OF COLOR In 1852, Thoreau began to record the changes in the trees, flowers, and other plants in Concord during the cycle of the year. In the fall, as a part of that effort, he recorded the succession of colors in the woods, day by day and species by species. A high wind south of westerly. Set sail with W. E.C.* down the river. The red maples are now red and also yellow and reddening. The white maples are green and silvery, also yellowing and blushing. The birch is yellow; the black willow brown; the elms sere, brown, and thin; the bass bare. The button bush, which was so late, is already mostly bare except the lower part, protected. The swamp white oak is green with a brownish tinge; the white ash turned mulberry. The white maples toward Ball’s Hill have a burnt white appearance; the white oak a salmon color and also red. Is that scarlet oak

*W. E.C. is William Ellery Channing.

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rosed? Huckleberries and blackberries are red. Leaves are falling; apples more distinctly seen on the trees; muskrat houses not quite done. Journal, october 9, 1853

THE LEAFING OF THE BIRCHES In the spring, Thoreau continued his observations of trees, now noting the order in which their leaves emerged. The birches (white) are now rapidly and conspicuously greening. They make the first conspicuous mass of green amid the evergreens, not grayish or hoary like the oaks. A closer-woven light green vest. The black birch is now a beautiful sight, its long, slender, bushy branches waving in the wind (the leafbuds but just beginning to unfold), with countless little tassel-like bunches of five or six golden catkins, spotted with brown and three inches

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long, one bunch at the end of each drooping twig, hanging straight down, or dangling like heads of rye, or blown off at various angles with the horizon. All these seen against the sky on the otherwise bare trees make an exceedingly graceful outline, the catkin is so large and conspicuous. (On the white birch the catkins are more slender, and are concealed by the more forward leaves.) The reddish long female flowers are detected in the axils lower down. I notice that the staminate ones are apparently torn by birds, pecking at insects. Not a bunch is perfect. The yellow birch is considerably the most forward, its flowers, not, perhaps, its leaves, which last are only expanded on young trees, though here is one large one leaved out. The yellow birch first, then the black or the paper birch, then the white. Journal, may 12, 1853

OF MEN AND TREES

Trunks of fallen trees in the Concord transfer station across from Walden Pond

Trees have commonly two growths in the year, a spring and a fall growth. . . . So is it with man; most have a spring growth only, and never get over this first check to their youthful hopes; but plants of hardier constitution—or perchance planted in a more genial soil—speedily recover themselves, and though they bear the scar or knot in remembrance of their disappointment, they push forward again and have a vigorous fall growth, which is equivalent to a new spring. Journal, july 16, 1852

October answers to that period in the life of man when he is no longer dependent on his transient moods, when all his experience ripens into wisdom, but every root, branch, leaf of him glows with maturity. What he has been and done in his spring and summer appears. He bears his fruit. Journal, november 14, 1853 F O R E ST L E SSO NS

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I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to an extreme old age. Journal, november 5, 1860 The different characters of the trees appear better now, when their leaves, so to speak, are ripe, than at any other season; than in the winter, for instance, when they are little remarkable, and almost uniformly gray or brown, or in the spring and summer, when they are indistinguishably green. Now, a red maple, an ash, a white birch, a Populus grandidentata, is distinguished almost as far as it is visible. It is with leaves as with fruits and woods, animals and men: when they are mature, their different characters appear. Journal, september 30, 1851 86

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OAKS UNDER PINES IN LORING ’ S LOT I can throw a little light on the fact that when a dense pine wood is cut down oaks, etc., may take its place. There were only pines, no other tree. They are cut off, and, after two years have elapsed, you see oaks, or perhaps a few other hard woods, springing up with scarcely a pine amid them, and you wonder how the acorns could have lain in the ground so long without decaying. There is a good example at Loring’s lot. But if you look through a thick pine wood, even the exclusively pitch pine ones, you will detect many little oaks, birches, etc., sprung probably from seeds carried into the thicket by squirrels, etc., and blown thither, but which are overshadowed and choked by the pines. This planting under the shelter of the pines may be carried on annually, and the plants annually die, but when the pines are cleared off, the oaks, etc., having got just the start they want, and now secured favorable conditions, immediately spring up to trees. Journal, may 13, 1856 F O R E ST L E SSO NS

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THE ROOTS OF IDEAS Thoreau was struck by reading, in Asa Gray’s Manual of Botany, that a plant grows in opposite directions at once—down into the soil, to develop its root, and up, to extend its stem into the air, metaphorically piercing the empyrean, or highest heaven. So the mind develops from the first in two opposite directions: upwards to expand in the light and air; and downwards avoiding the light to form the root. One half is aerial, the other subterranean. . . . One half of the mind’s development must still be root—in the embryonic state, in the womb of nature, more unborn than at first. For each successive new idea or bud, a new rootlet in the earth. The growing man penetrates yet deeper by his roots into the womb of things. The infant is comparatively near the surface,

Junipers on the front lawn of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home in Concord appear to gesture.

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just covered from the light; but the man sends down a taproot to the centre of things. . . . The most clear and ethereal ideas (Antaeus-like) readily ally themselves to the earth, to the primal womb of things. They put forth roots as soon as branches; they are eager to be soiled. No thought soars so high that it sunders these apron strings of its mother. The thought that comes to light, that pierces the Empyrean on the other side, is wombed and rooted in darkness—a moist and fertile darkness—its roots in Hades like the tree of life. Journal, may 20, 1851

IDEAL TREES, REFLECTED I At age twenty-four, Thoreau was clearly influenced by the idealism of Emerson’s Nature. I stood by the river today considering the forms of the elms reflected in the water. For every oak and birch, too, growing on the hilltop, as well as for elms and willows, there is a graceful ethereal tree making down from the roots, as it were the original idea of the tree, and sometimes Nature in high tides brings her mirror to its foot and makes it visible. Anxious Nature sometimes reflects from pools and puddles the objects which our groveling senses may fail to see relieved against the sky with the pure ether for background. It would be well if we saw ourselves as in perspective always, impressed with distinct outline on the sky, side by side with the shrubs on the river’s brim. So let our life stand to heaven as some fair, sunlit tree against the western horizon, and by sunrise be planted on some eastern hill to glisten in the first rays of the dawn. Journal, june 15, 1840

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IDEAL TREES, REFLECTED II Eleven years later, Thoreau was still an idealist. But his writing was crisper, more descriptive and less romantic, and he offset his philosophical musings with a dose of humor. Here he visits James P. Brown’s remote pond in Concord. [The pond] is encircled by an amphitheatre of low hills, on two opposite sides covered with high pine woods, the other sides with young white oaks and white pines respectively. I am affected by beholding there reflected this gray day, so unpretendingly, the gray stems of the pine wood on the hillside and the sky—that mirror, as it were a permanent picture to be seen there, a permanent piece of idealism. What were these reflections to the cows alone! Were these things made for cows’ eyes mainly? You shall go over behind the hills, where you would suppose that otherwise there was no eye

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to behold, and find this piece of magic a constant phenomenon there. It is not merely a few favored lakes or pools that reflect the trees and skies, but the obscurest pond hole in the most unfrequented dell does the same. These reflections suggest that the sky underlies the hills as well as overlies them, and in another sense than in appearance. I am a little surprised on beholding this reflection, which I did not perceive for some minutes after looking into the pond, as if I had not regarded this as a constant phenomenon. What has become of Nature’s common sense and love of facts, when in the very mud puddles she reflects the skies and trees? Does that procedure recommend itself entirely to the common sense of men? Is that the way the New England Farmer would have arranged it? Journal, november 9, 1851

LOSING THEIR SAP, NOT THEIR SPIRIT When Thoreau wrote “Autumnal Tints” in 1858, he drew on his years of writing about the season, including this 1856 passage on the resilience of shrub oak leaves. Go through the shrub oaks. . . . These leaves still have a kind of life in them. They are exceedingly beautiful in their withered state. If they hang on, it is like the perseverance of the saints. Their colors are as wholesome, their forms as perfect, as ever. Now that the crowd and bustle of summer is passed, I have leisure to admire them. Their figures never weary my eye. . . . What pleasing and harmonious colors within and without, above and below. The smooth, delicately brown-tanned upper surface, acorn color, the very pale (some silvery or ashy) ribbed underside. How poetically, how like saints or innocent and beneficent beings, they give up the ghost! How spiritual! Though they have lost their sap, they have not given up the ghost. Rarely touched by worm or insect, they are as fair as ever. These are the forms of some: Journal, december 17, 1856

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THEY FALL TO RISE AGAIN Thoreau also used this 1857 entry about the leaves falling only to “rise again.” A great part of the pine needles have just fallen. See the carpet of palebrown needles under this pine. How light it lies up on the grass, and that great rock, and the wall, resting thick on its top and its shelves, and on the bushes and underwood, hanging lightly. They are not yet flat and reddish, but a more delicate pale brown, and lie up light as joggle sticks just dropped. The ground is nearly concealed by them. How beautifully they die, making cheerfully their annual contribution to the soil. They fall to rise again. As if they knew that it was not one annual deposit alone that made this rich mould in which pine trees grow. They live in the soil whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from it. Journal, october 16, 1857

THEY TEACH US HOW TO DIE In this passage from “Autumnal Tints,” Thoreau weaves into what is ostensibly a catalog of the colors of a New England fall a profound meditation on death in nature. For beautiful variety no crop can be compared with this. Here is not merely the plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the colors that we know, the brightest blue not excepted: the early blushing maple, the poison sumac blazing its sins as scarlet, the mulberry ash, the rich chrome-yellow of the poplars, the brilliant red huckleberry, with which the hills’ backs are painted, like those of sheep. The frost touches them, and, with the slightest breath of returning day or jarring of earth’s axle, see in what showers they come floating down! The ground is all party-colored with them. But they still live in the soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from it. They stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years, by subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees, and the sapling’s first fruits

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thus shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its crown, when, in after years, it has become the monarch of the forest. It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould!—painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last resting place, light and frisky. They put on no weeds, but merrily they go scampering over the earth, selecting the spot, choosing a lot, ordering no iron fence, whispering all through the woods about it—some choosing the spot where the bodies of men are mouldering beneath, and meeting them halfway. How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe—with such an Indian summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails. “Autumnal Tints”

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Trees were also guides and companions to Thoreau’s soul. They were spires, he said, that lifted his vision to “heaven.” Exactly what that word meant to him is unclear, but he used it often. In all forms it appears forty-eight times in Walden and in his journal is frequently linked to trees. By fall an industrious red maple has grown “nearer heaven than it was in the spring.” Elms “take a firmer hold on the earth that they may rise higher into the heavens.” Loggers felled a majestic pine near Walden that had been rising slowly for two centuries “into the heavens.” He writes a prayer on a leaf and “the bough springs up the scrawl to heaven.” An oak sapling is “driven back to earth again twenty times—as often as it aspires to the heavens.” When he used such religious metaphors, Thoreau revealed a part of him that is easily misunderstood. It’s true that he criticized churches mercilessly. He railed at the “bigotry and ignorance” of organized religion, especially his own Calvinist tradition. He found its doctrines despairing, its clergy torpid, and its rituals superstitious. “Men run after the husk” of Christianity and forget about the seed. The Protestant God bears “perhaps too many of the attributes of a Scandinavian deity.” Despite these views, Thoreau was, in fact, religious to the bone. A palpable sense of the holy suffuses much of his writing about nature. He rejected the meetinghouse not because it stood for religion, but because it did not, as he saw it. It killed a true religious impulse. “We check and repress the divinity that stirs within us to fall down and worship the divinity that is dead without us.” After noting that men seek but the husk of Christianity, he continues, “the kernel is still the very least and rarest of all things. There is not a single church founded on it.” Formal religion with its creeds was peripheral to the truer, “purer” religion he sought in nature. If Thoreau did not explain this purer form, it was because the experience of it was all he cared about. Trees often led him to it. They were his “shrines” and “burning bushes.” The forest was his cathedral. Its spires inspired him more than the village steeple. He called the woods his “sanctum sanctorum,” a place where he got “what others get from churchgoing.” “A forest is in all mythologies a sacred place,” Thoreau wrote, and that would include his own.

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Trees renewed Thoreau’s spirit. “When I would recreate myself,” he wrote, “I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable” swamp and enter it as a sacred place. His sensory experience of the forest was a spiritual elixir. The penetrating, aromatic smell of the pine restored him. At the sound of the wind in the woods “my heart leaps into my mouth,” he wrote on an otherwise sultry August day in 1851. “I suddenly recover my spirits, my spirituality, through my hearing.” Upon seeing a pine grove lit up by the sun, “my spirit is like a lit tree.” The winter woods, especially, were a spirit land to Thoreau, a place for contemplation. He walked in them alert to the mystical, more as supplicant than naturalist. He wrote of trailing an elusive fox in the snow “as if I were on the trail of the spirit itself which resides in these woods.” There was more for man to pursue in the winter woods, he said, than the trail of game. “Is there no trace of intelligence there, whether in the snow or the earth, or in ourselves? No other trail but such as a dog can smell? Is there none which an angel can detect and follow? None to guide a man on his pilgrimage?” Thoreau also detected the divine in the woods. “Nature is full of genius, full of divinity.” All its motions—“the flowing sail, the running stream, the waving tree, the roving wind”—must be the “circulations of God.” “If by watching all day and all night I may detect some trace of the Ineffable, then will it not be worth the while to watch?” he asked, alluding to the recurring motif in the Psalms of the watchman who calls out the morning. “To watch for, describe, all the divine features which I detect in Nature. My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature.” One clear, sunny January morning in 1853, the day after a huge snow and ice storm, Thoreau set out for Fairhaven Hill and marveled at what he saw. Ice-encrusted trees gleamed like silver candlesticks. Indeed, “all objects, even the apple trees and [fence] rails, are to the eye polished silver.” It was a Sunday, and he heard the bells of First Parish. “How much more religion in their sound, than they ever call men together to. Men obey their call and go to the stove-warmed church, though God exhibits himself to the walker in a frosted bush today, as much as in a burning one to Moses of old.”

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The divine presence that Thoreau wrote about sensing in the woods was not the mighty God of the Bible, swooping down from on high, but a God woven into every twig, trunk, and blade. It is a benign, loving, and, above all, familiar presence to Thoreau. He praised Chaucer’s “familiar but innocent way of speaking of God” without false reverence. “God should come into our thoughts with no more parade than the zephyr into our ears,” he wrote in his journal. “Only strangers approach him with ceremony. How rarely in our English tongue do we find expressed any affection for God!” At the same time, Thoreau did not claim to know or understand the exact nature or source of these spiritual experiences. The divine remained unfathomable. The trees, he wrote, knew things that he did not and would never know. “You are never so far in them as they are far before you,” he wrote on January 30, 1841. “Their secret is where you are not and where your feet can never carry you.” Like William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Emerson, and other romantics of the period, Thoreau used religious imagery in his writing to depict the sanctity of trees. “A certain dim religious light” fills the space enclosed by a snow-covered pitch pine, he wrote, playing off a line by Milton. Erecting a church building does not justify the “desecration and destruction” of “far grander temples not made with hands.” In a snowy wood, the trees admit a soft light “as if through windows of ground glass.” Its paths embowered with bent trees looked like “the side aisles of a cathedral,” leading Thoreau to “expect to hear a choir chanting.” He hallowed trees in religious cadences. “I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows,” he wrote, a three-part credo that echoes the Apostles’ Creed. In “Autumnal Tints,” maple trees are “cheap preachers, permanently settled,” whose “century-and-a-half sermons” minister to generations. In autumn, leaves contentedly “return to dust again and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree.” The line echoes the famous verse “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt return” (Genesis 3:19) and also subtly alludes to “the tree,” a traditional Christian cipher for the Cross. In Christian

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typology, “the fall” stands for man’s enslavement to sin and to death. It heralds rebirth, however, in “Autumnal Tints,” just as spring did in Walden. As a schoolboy, Thoreau had to learn, from The New England Primer, that “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” He would turn that lesson on its head as an adult, writing, “In the new Adam’s rise, we shall all reach the skies.” Out in his boat one October collecting wood for winter, Thoreau could not “go by a large dead swamp white oak log” without hauling it aboard. Green moss covered one side. The moss unexpectedly stayed on when he split the log, reminding him of the life that remained in it. “These old stumps stand like anchorites and yogees,” he wrote, referring to religious recluses and yoga practitioners, “putting off their earthly garments, more and more sublimed from year to year, ready to be translated, and then they are ripe for my fire. I administer the last sacrament and purification.” Thoreau wrote this way mainly to proselytize for nature, but as a writer he also took wicked delight in it. When he observes in “Autumnal Tints” that Concord’s Puritan fathers “could not have worshipped in groves” in the fall, when the trees turned exuberant colors, he wonders if that is “what they built meeting-houses and fenced them round with horse-sheds for.” In “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” he calls the seed-bearing catkins of the willow or the alder “our little vegetable redeemers” and asks, “Who was the benignant goddess that bestowed them on mankind?” Nature spreads both table and altar before us in the fall, he said. “We pluck and eat in remembrance of her. It is a sort of sacrament—a Communion—the not forbidden fruits, which no serpent tempts us to eat.” One metaphor he used consistently for trees was that of a “spire.” A lofty tree linked heaven and earth for him more than a whitewashed village steeple did. Its roots penetrate the earth while its crown of leaves “pierces the Empyrean,” or highest heaven, “on the other side.” “The pines spire without end higher and higher,” he writes in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Tall trees steepled Maine’s forests. “I was struck by this universal spiring upward of the forest evergreens. . . . All spire upwards, lifting a dense spear-head of cones to the light and air.”

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Finally, trees symbolized immortality to Thoreau. His masterpiece, which was initially titled Walden; or Life in the Woods, ends with a parable of life in the wood—the story of the bug entombed in a kitchen table. The larvae was laid in an apple tree from which the table had been made sixty years earlier. The bug lay dormant in the dry leaf all those years. Then, “hatched perchance by the heat of an urn,” it gnawed its way out, to the astonishment of the farmer and his family, and at last enjoyed “its perfect summer life.” Whose “faith in a resurrection and immortality,” Thoreau asks, “is not strengthened by hearing of this story?” When he saw a frozen, leafless tree encased in ice in the woods one day, he knew that its death was not final: “She is not dead, but sleepeth.” Witch hazel is both a deciduous shrub and a small tree that blossoms in the fall as the rest of the woods is dying. Thoreau loved it for that reason. “The autumn, then, is indeed a spring,” he wrote of seeing witch hazel bloom in October. “All the year is a spring. I see two blackbirds high overhead, going south, but I am going north in my thought with these hazel blossoms. . . . This is a part of the immortality of the soul.” Thoreau’s immersion in forest dynamics in the late 1850s deepened his association of trees with rebirth. As he studied how forests regenerate, he became further impressed by their resilience and fertility. On November 25, 1860, he saw a young forest of pitch pines, white pines, and birches filling an abandoned pasture that, fifteen years earlier, as he recalled, had lacked a single tree. “I confess I love to be convinced of this inextinguishable vitality in Nature.” Thoreau was then forty-three. Yet what he said that day about the young forest did not reflect a wisdom gained with age. Twenty-five years earlier, at the outset of his career, he mused on the spiritual meaning of the succession in the forest. In the second entry of the journal he began in 1837, at the age of twenty, he drew an analogy between the way trees enrich the soil and the destinies of our souls. How we live our lives, he wrote, prepares the soil of our second growth. “The oak dies down to the ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mould, which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest.” Pines leave a sandier soil, he said, hardwoods a more fertile one. “As I

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live now so shall I reap. If I grow pines and birches, my virgin mould will not sustain the oak; but pines and birches, or, perchance, weeds and brambles, will constitute my second growth.” Thoreau declares the spirituality of trees most forthrightly in The Maine Woods. He begins by contrasting the higher and lower uses of the pine, skewering the loggers, tanners, and others who see only its material value. “The pine is no more lumber than man is,” he writes. Cutting down a pine tree for timber or turpentine is like killing people “to make buttons and flageolets,” or flutes, of their bones. “It is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize,” he writes. “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” One person who did not miss the religious dimension of Thoreau’s writing was Emerson. At Thoreau’s funeral, Emerson said that despite his “petulance” toward churches, he was “a person of a rare, tender and absolute religion.” Whatever “faults or obstructions of temperament” might cloud our memory of him, “he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.”

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I RECOVER MY SPIRITS The sound of wind in the trees one summer day led Thoreau to a moment of intense joy and gratitude to God for his life. The cricket, the gurgling stream, the rushing wind amid the trees, all speak to me soberly yet encouragingly of the steady onward progress of the universe. My heart leaps into my mouth at the sound of the wind in the woods. I whose life was but yesterday so desultory and shallow suddenly recover my spirits, my spirituality, through my hearing. I see a goldfinch go twittering through the still, louring* day, and am reminded of the peeping flocks which will soon herald the thoughtful season. Ah! if I could so live that there should be no desultory moment in all my life! That in the trivial season, when small fruits are ripe, my fruits might be ripe also. That I could match nature always with my moods! That in each season when some part of nature especially flourishes, then a corresponding part of me may not fail to flourish. Ah, I would walk, I would sit and sleep, with natural piety. What if I could pray aloud or to myself as I went along by the brooksides a cheerful prayer like the birds! For joy I could embrace the earth; I shall delight to be buried in it. . . . I thank you God. I do not deserve anything. I am unworthy of the least regard, and yet I am made to rejoice. I am impure and worthless, and yet the world is gilded for my delight, holidays are prepared for me, and my path is strewn with flowers. Journal, august 17, 1851

*Dark or threatening, as from a lowering sky.

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THE SECRET IN THE SNOWY WOODS The trees covered with snow admit a very plain and clean light, but not brilliant, as if through windows of ground glass; a sort of white darkness it is, all of the sun’s splendor that can be retained. You glance up these paths, closely embowered by bent trees, as through the side aisles of a cathedral and expect to hear a choir chanting from their depths. You are never so far in them as they are far before you. Their secret is where you are not and where your feet can never carry you. I tread in the tracks of the fox which has gone before me by some hours, or which perhaps I have started, with such a tiptoe of expectation as if I were on the trail of the Spirit itself which resides in these woods, and expected soon to catch it in its lair. The snow falls on no two trees alike, but the forms it assumes are as various as those of the twigs and leaves which receive it. They are, as it were,

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predetermined by the genius of the tree. So one divine spirit descends alike on all, but bears a peculiar fruit in each. The divinity subsides on all men, as the snowflakes settle on the fields and ledges and takes the form of the various clefts and surfaces on which it lodges. Journal, january 30, 1841

TRACKS IN THE WINTER WOODS Why do the vast snow plains give us pleasure, the twilight of the bent and half-buried woods? Is not all there consonant with virtue, justice, purity, courage, magnanimity? Are we not cheered by the sight? And does not all this amount to the track of a higher life than the otter’s, a life which has not gone by and left a footprint merely, but is there with its beauty, its music, its perfume, its sweetness, to exhilarate and recreate us?

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Where there is a perfect government of the world according to the highest laws, is there no trace of intelligence there, whether in the snow or the earth, or in ourselves? No other trail but such as a dog can smell? Is there none which an angel can detect and follow? None to guide a man on his pilgrimage, which water will not conceal? Is there no odor of sanctity to be perceived? Is its trail too old? Have mortals lost the scent? If one could detect the meaning of the snow, would he not be on the trail of some higher life that has been abroad in the night? Are there not hunters who seek for something higher than foxes, with judgment more discriminating than the senses of fox hounds, who rally to a nobler music than that of the hunting-horn? Journal, january 1, 1854

CRAWLING TO HEAVEN A distant white birch, erect on a hill against the white, misty sky, looks, with its fine twigs, so distinct and black, like a millipede crawling up to heaven. Journal, february 15, 1859 Sketch by Thoreau

SPRINGING A PRAYER TO HEAVEN It is a leaf which hangs over my head in the path. I bend the twig and write my prayers on it; then letting it go, the bough springs up the scrawl to heaven. As if it were not kept shut in my desk, but were as public a leaf as any in nature. It is papyrus by the riverside; it is vellum in the pastures; it is parchment on the hills. I find it everywhere, as free as the leaves which troop along the lanes in autumn. Journal, february 8, 1841

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A DIM RELIGIOUS LIGHT The pitch pine woods on the right of the Corner road. A piercing cold afternoon, wading in the snow. R. Rice was going to Sudbury to put his bees into the cellar for fear they would freeze. He had a small hive; not enough to keep each other warm. The pitch pines hold the snow well. It lies now in balls on their plumes and in streaks on their branches, their low branches rising at a small angle and meeting each other. A certain dim religious light comes through this roof of pine leaves and snow. It is a somber twilight, yet in some places the sun streams in, producing the strongest contrast of light and shade. Journal, december 17, 1851

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THE DARKEST WOOD In “Walking” Thoreau invokes the Latin term sanctum sanctorum, or “holy of holies,” the innermost part of the Temple in Jerusalem. He also alludes to the biblical image of John the Babtist eating “locusts and wild honey.” When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place—a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength—the marrow of Nature. The wild wood covers the virgin mould—and the same soil is good for men and for trees. . . . A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the reformer eating locusts and wild honey. “Walking”

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CALLING THE PINES TO LIFE A play of light stirred in pine trees by a strong March wind was seen by Thoreau as a current electrifying and awakening them from winter. Is not this wind an awaking to life and light of the pines after their winter slumber? The wind is making passes over them, magnetizing and electrifying them. Seen at midday, even, it is still the light of dewy morning alone that is reflected from the needles of the pine. This is the brightening and awakening of the pines, a phenomenon perchance connected with the flow of sap in them. I feel somewhat like the young Astyanax at sight of his father’s flashing crest. As if in this windstorm of March a certain electricity was passing from heaven to earth through the pines and calling them to life. Journal , march 19, 1859

THE AUTUMN IS INDEED A SPRING The witch hazel here is in full blossom on this magical hillside, while its broad yellow leaves are falling. Some bushes are completely bare of leaves, and leather-colored they strew the ground. It is an extremely interesting plant—October and November’s child—and yet reminds me of the very earliest spring. Its blossoms smell like the spring, like the willow catkins; by their color as well as fragrance they belong to the saffron dawn of the year, suggesting amid all these signs of autumn, falling leaves and frost, that the life of Nature, by which she eternally flourishes, is untouched. It stands here in the shadow on the side of the hill, while the sunlight from over the top of the hill lights up its topmost sprays and yellow blossoms. Its spray, so jointed and angular, is not to be mistaken for any other. I lie on my back with joy under its boughs. While its leaves fall, its blossoms spring. The autumn, then, is indeed a spring. All the year is a spring. I see two blackbirds high overhead, going south, but I am going north in my thought with these hazel blossoms. It is a faery place. This is a part of the immortality of the soul. Journal, october 9, 1851

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“ MY SECOND GROWTH ” On the first page of the journal that he began in 1837, Thoreau, at age twenty, wrote of the decomposition of trees as a metaphor for our own spiritual destinies. Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another. The oak dies down to the ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mould, which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest. The pine leaves a sandy and sterile soil, the harder woods a strong and fruitful mould. So this constant abrasion and decay makes the soil of my future growth. As I live now so shall I reap. If I grow pines and birches, my virgin mould will not sustain the oak; but pines and birches, or, perchance, weeds and brambles, will constitute my second growth. Journal, october 24, 1837

AS HIGH A HEAVEN On his visits to Maine, Thoreau wrote that he did not see as many white pines as he could see “in a single walk in Concord.” The trees were gone, he felt, because men did not know the true value of the tree. Here he gives his own view of the white pine, declaring it to have a living spirit no less immortal than his own. Can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have “seen the elephant”? These are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use. . . . Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet; he it is who makes the truest use of the pine, who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane, who knows whether its heart is false without 110

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Pines tower over Thoreau’s grave at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord.

cutting into it, who has not bought the stumpage of the township on which it stands. All the pines shudder and heave a sigh when that man steps on the forest floor. No, it is the poet, who loves them as his own shadow in the air, and lets them stand. I have been into the lumber-yard, and the carpenter’s shop, and the tannery, and the lampblack factory, and the turpentine clearing; but when at length I saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, I realized that the former were not the highest use of the pine. It is not their bones or hide or tallow that I love most. It is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts. It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still. The Maine Woods

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Thoreau loved the muscularity of the oak, the beauty of the basswood, the fluted grace of the elm, and the scrappiness of the wild apple. But his affection for the pine, and especially the Eastern white pine, topped them all. It was “the emblem of my life.” Pines appear more often in his writings than any other genus of tree. They also figured in one of his oldest memories. When his family visited Walden Pond in 1822, when he was five years old, his soul took to “that recess among the pines,” he recalled years later, “as if it had found its proper nursery.” Tellingly, Thoreau described pines in sensory images. He returned to them after an absence “as a hungry man to a crust of bread.” “There is no scent” in society “so wholesome” as the rich, aromatic, spicy fragrance of the pine. Pines thrummed like “great harps” in the wind. As he returned from Mount Monadnock, in New Hampshire, tall, handsome white pines he saw from the train so captured him that they turned his usually clear prose opaque. Their trunks were so perfectly round, straight, and perpendicular, he wrote, “that my eyes slid off.” Thoreau deepened his acquaintance with the white pine when he famously cut down some young “arrowy” ones by Walden Pond in April 1845 to build his house. As he labored to hew their trunks into posts and beams, he got so much pitch on his hands and clothes that at noontime, he said, his buttered bread smelled of pine. While he lived at Walden, Thoreau said, “my best room” was the pine wood behind his house. It was his “withdrawing room” for receiving distinguished summer guests, kept in order by “a priceless domestic” who “swept the floor and dusted the furniture.” Fourteen years after building his house, Thoreau made up for cutting the pines. He planted a quarter pound of white pine seed, which Emerson bought for one dollar, on his mentor’s woodlot on the pond’s northwest shore, where he had lived. The woods had been badly damaged by fire in the years since he left. Thoreau also transplanted four hundred white pine saplings from the woodlots of George Heywood and Freeman Brister to his former bean field, choosing bushy, foot-tall ones growing on open land in the sun over “spindling dark-green ones” from the shade. Aided by a horse and cart and two 114

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hired men, he placed the saplings “diamondwise” fifteen feet apart. “I set every one with my own hand, while another digs the holes where I indicate,” he wrote on April 22, 1859. The pines were a little-known outdoor memorial to Thoreau until 1938, when the great hurricane of that year toppled the last of them. Thoreau was attracted by the pine’s undomesticated nature. Birch, beech, maple, and elm were Saxon and Norman trees, but “the pine stands in the woods like an Indian—untamed, with a fantastic wildness about it, even in the clearings.” (The broader, rougher pitch pines “are the ghosts of Philip and Massasoit,” while “the white pine has the smoother features of the squaw.”) Eagles, hawks, and other wild birds nest in pine, he noted, and its branches appeared often to point west. “It stands for the west, the wild.” Thoreau was also drawn by the white pine’s erect stance. Other conifers’ branches droop, which can make them look dispirited, and some pitch pines are crooked. But the white pine doesn’t bow. It holds its whorled boughs out straight, almost horizontal to the trunk, in tapered tiers, like a pagoda. The lower branches may sag a bit under heavy snow, but the spine of the pine remains unbent. Thoreau saw a moral quality in this. The tree’s uprightness asserted the “ancient rectitude and vigor of nature.” “Nothing stands up more free from blame in this world Thoreau sketched the pine’s than a pine tree.” upright stance. No other tree has played so big a role in America’s history. The Eastern white pine is the tallest tree east of the Rockies. “This ancient and majestic inhabitant of the North American forests is still the loftiest and most valuable of their productions,” the French botanist François André Michaux wrote in his magisterial survey, North American Sylva, in 1819. “Its summit is seen at an immense distance aspiring towards heaven, far above the heads of the surrounding trees.” In 1846, when the naturalist George Barrell Emerson— Ralph Waldo Emerson’s cousin—surveyed the forests of Massachusetts, he called the white pine “much the tallest of our native trees.” M Y E M B L E M, TH E P I NE

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The English explorer George Weymouth was jubilant to see tall white pines fringing the coast of Maine on a scouting mission for the Royal Navy in 1605—and not for their beauty. The perfectly straight trunks were ideal masts. England had depleted its own white pine forests and badly needed a new source for masts; at the time it was piecing together Scotch pine trunks. Not only were joined masts weaker, but Denmark and Sweden controlled the supply of Scotch pine. White pine was the answer. Although light and soft, its wood is strong in proportion to its weight and almost impervious to rot. Pine was a source of wealth for New England’s settlers, and they saw it as their right to spend it as they pleased. But so many big pines were felled that royal agents began marking the tallest, clearest ones as the king’s property. Penalties for ignoring the “King’s Broad Arrow” were severe. In response, the furious colonialists turned the white pine into a symbol of liberty and defiance—just as the first imposition of forest law, by England’s new Norman kings after 1066, led Robin Hood and his merry cell of insurgents to reign over Sherwood Forest. It could be argued that as armed British agents fanned out along New England’s rivers to smash and burn its sawmills, and as whole towns, sometimes disguised as Indians, attacked them at night in their camps and sank their boats, the first fighting of the Revolution was fought decades before 1775. No wonder the first flag of American soldiers in the War of Independence bore a white pine. The pine was just as important economically. Its wood was turned into posts, panels, clapboards, floorboards, shingles, furniture, ornamental moldings, pails, and crates. Bridge beams, steeples, hoe handles, and boat timbers were made of pine. Milling it for these products, as well to produce paper, pitch, and turpentine, and exporting it in prodigious quantities, drove the economy of the colony and then the young nation. In Thoreau’s day it was assumed that the tallest white pines were gone. Up until fairly recently, forestry textbooks gave their maximum height as 80 to 100 feet. The stories of 200-foot-tall pines told by New England’s early settlers have long been regarded with suspicion, but they may contain a kernel of fact. In the past twenty years, a group of volunteer tree scientists has found an astonishing number of pines nearly that tall in the Northeast.

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Using rigorous methods and new technologies, including laser range finders, the Native Tree Society has found seven Eastern white pines that reach 180 feet—all in the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to Pennsylvania. Thoreau’s home state, remarkably, is among the most productive of these giants. Massachusetts has 170 white pines that top 150 feet, the most of any New England state; 20 of them currently top 160 feet. The first living tree in Massachusetts known to be 150 feet tall was confirmed in 1991. It stands on a steep slope above Dunbar Brook in Monroe State Forest, in the western part of the state. It has been climbed and measured many times since. In late 2015 Robert Leverett, cofounder of the Native Tree Society, found that it is now 160.1 feet tall and 13.3 feet in girth, and that its trunk and limbs occupy 1,002 cubic feet—a tree volume rarely seen in the state. It is one of only two white pines in Massachusetts with a circumference of 13 feet to reach a height of 160 feet. Leverett named it the Henry David Thoreau Pine. That Thoreau’s mother was Cynthia Dunbar adds to the wisdom of his choice. It is, Leverett said, “the flagship white pine of Massachusetts.” The white pine was also central to Thoreau’s work as a naturalist. He marveled at the ingenious ways it wafts its pine seeds through the air. The thin sack that nourishes and protects the seeds inside the pine cone has “a handle to it such as the wind can take hold of . . . expressly that it may transport the seed” hither and yon, he wrote. White pines were the “light infantry” of the forest, Thoreau said. They take the first and longest strides to reclaim land given up by the farmer or consumed by fire, leaping two or three feet in a season toward the sky. Pitch pines go about it differently, he found. Their seeds reside in pairs in tiny cavities beneath the cone’s prickly scales. The sun and wind “have the key to these apartments” and unlock them in winter. The dark brown seeds “lie exposed with their thin, curved handles upward and outward to the wind, which ever and anon extracts them and conveys them away.” They are blown across ice and crusty snow to new destinations. “The restless pine seeds go dashing . . . like an Eskimo sled with an invisible team until, losing their wings or meeting with some insuperable obstacle, they lie down once

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and for all, perchance to rise up as pines. Nature has her annual sledding to do, as well as we.” Thoreau rarely commented on his periodic struggles with depression. In January 1858, however, he admitted that he was not finding life “as rich and inviting as it should be.” His spirits were lifted, at least briefly, however, by the form suggested by a snowflake. “My attention was caught by a snowflake on my coat sleeve,” he wrote. “It was one of those perfect, crystalline, star-shaped ones, six-rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes, only the spokes were perfect little pine trees in shape, arranged around a central spangle. This little object, which . . . rested unmelting on my coat, so perfect and beautiful, reminded me that Nature had not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart?”

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PA E A N S TO T H E P I N E

NO FINER TREE Walked through that beautiful soft white pine grove on the west of the road in John Flint’s pasture. These trees are large, but there is ample space between them, so that the ground is left grassy. Great pines two or more feet in diameter branch sometimes within two feet of the ground on each side, sending out large horizontal branches on which you can sit. Like great

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harps on which the wind makes music. There is no finer tree. The different stages of its soft glaucous foliage completely concealing the trunk and branches are separated by dark horizontal lines of shadow, the flakes of pine foliage, like a pile of light fleeces. Journal, september 16, 1857

PERFECT PERPENDICULARITY I saw some of the handsomest white pines that I ever saw, even in Maine, close by the railroad. One by which I stood was at least three and a half feet in diameter at two feet from the ground, and, like several others about it, rose perfectly straight without any kind of limb to the height of sixty feet at least. What struck me most in these trees was not merely their great size, for they appeared less than they were, but their perfect perpendicularity, roundness, and apparent smoothness, tapering very little, like artificial columns of a new style. Their trunks were so very round that they appeared smoother than they were, marked with interrupted bands of light-colored lichens. Their singular beauty made such an impression that I was forced to turn aside and contemplate them. They were so round and perpendicular that my eyes slid off, and they made such an impression of being finished and even polished, as if they had an enameled surface. Journal, june 4, 1858

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SIGN FROM A PINE My eye wanders across the valley to the pine woods which fringe the opposite side, and in their aspect my eye finds something which addresses itself to my nature. Methinks that in my mood I was asking Nature to give me a sign. I do not know what it was that attracted my eye. I experienced a transient gladness, at any rate, at something which I saw. I am sure that my eye rested with pleasure on the white pines, now reflecting a silvery light, the infinite stories of their boughs, tier above tier, a sort of basaltic structure, a crumbling precipice of pine horizontally stratified. Each pine is like a great green feather stuck in the ground. Myriad white pine boughs extend themselves horizontally, one above and behind another, each bearing its burden of silvery sunlight, with darker seams between them. . . . On this my eyes pastured, while the squirrels were up the trees behind me. That at any rate [was what] I got by my afternoon walk, a certain recognition from the pine, some congratulation. Journal, november 30, 1851

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TOUCHSTONE FOR THE AIR

Sketch by Thoreau

The needles of the pine are the touchstone for the air. Any change in that element is revealed to the practiced eye by their livelier green or increased motion. They are the telltales. Now the white pine needles are a cadaverous, misty blue; anon a lively, silvery light plays on them, and they seem to erect themselves unusually, while the pitch pines are a brighter yellowish-green than usual. The sun loves to nestle in the boughs of the pine and pass rays through them. Journal, february 4, 1852

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A HIGHER LAW REGARDING PINES Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light—to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success. But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure. There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. . . . Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. The Maine Woods

Herbert Wendell Gleason

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RISING BY LEAPS. . . How suddenly pines seem to shoot up and fill the pastures. Today, perchance, as I go through some run-out pasture, I observe many young white pines dotting the field, where last year I had noticed only blackberry vines; but I see that many are already destroyed or injured by the cows, which have dived into them to scratch their heads or for sport (such is their habit). They break off the leading shoot and bend down the others. . . . A year or two later, as I pass through the same field, I am surprised to find a flourishing young woodlot, from which the cows are now carefully fenced out, though there are many open spaces, and I perceive how much further advanced it would have been if the farmer had been more provident and begun to abet nature a few years earlier. It is surprising by what leaps—two or three feet in a season—the pines stretch toward the sky, affording shelter also to various hardwoods which plant themselves in their midst. Journal, may 20, 1857

. . . LEADING THE CHARGE Two or three pines will run swiftly forward a quarter of a mile into a plain, which is their favorite field of battle, taking advantage of the least shelter, as a rock, or fence, that may be there, and entrench themselves behind it, and if you look sharp, you may see their plumes waving there. Or, as I have said, they will cross a broad river without a bridge, and as swiftly climb and permanently occupy a steep hill beyond. . . . Pines take the first and longest strides. Oaks march deliberately in the rear. The pines are the light infantry, voltigeurs, supplying the scouts and skirmishers; the oaks are the grenadiers, heavy-paced and strong, that form the solid phalanx. Journal, october 19, 1860

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AN EMBLEM OF HIS LIFE, STILL As Thoreau stood on the hill above Concord’s North Bridge, he saw a tall white pine on the edge of a swamp that looked as though it had been banished there by the town. He took it as his emblem. In 1991, the white pine below became the first tree in Massachusetts accurately measured to be 150 feet tall. Recently measured by laser range finder, the pine in Monroe State Forest is now 160.1 feet, one of seventeen pines in the state attaining 160 feet. This first giant was named the Henry David Thoreau Pine, a fitting emblem to a man who knew and loved the pine.

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As we stand by the monument on the Battle-Ground, I see a white pine dimly in the horizon just north of Lee’s Hill, at 5:30 P.M., its upright stem and straight horizontal feathered branches, while at the same time I hear a robin sing. Each enhances the other. That tree seems the emblem of my life; it stands for the west, the wild. The sight of it is as grateful to me as to a bird whose perch it is to be at the end of a weary flight. I am not sure whether the music I hear is most in the robin’s song or in its boughs. My wealth should be all in pine-tree shillings. The pine tree that stands on the verge of the clearing, whose boughs point westward; which the village does not permit to grow on the common or by the roadside; which is banished from the village; in whose boughs the crow and the hawk have their nests. Journal, april 21, 1852

TURPENTINE TEARS As I clambered over those great white pine masts which lay in all directions one upon another on the hillside south of Fair Haven, where the woods have been laid waste, I was struck, in favorable lights, with the brilliancy of the sawed ends thickly bedewed with crystal drops of turpentine—thickly as a shield, as if the dryads or pinewood nymphs had seasonably wept there at the fall of the tree. The perfect sincerity of these terebinthine drops, or drops of dew heaven-distilled and trembling to their fall, is incredible. And is this that pitch which you cannot touch without being defiled? Journal, march 9, 1855

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TREES HAVE HEARTS A clump of white pines, seen far westward over the shrub oak plain, which is now lit up by the setting sun, a soft, feathery grove, with their gray stems indistinctly seen, like human beings come to their cabin door, standing expectant on the edge of the plain, impress me with a mild humanity. The trees indeed have hearts. With a certain affection the sun seems to send its farewell ray far and level over the copses to them, and they silently receive it with gratitude, like a group of settlers with their children. The pines impress me as human. A slight vaporous cloud floats high over them, while in the west the sun goes down apace behind glowing pines, and golden clouds like mountains skirt the horizon. Nothing stands up more free from blame in this world than a pine tree. Journal, december 20, 1851

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A MAJESTIC PINE IS NO MORE On December 30, 1851, Thoreau heard the sound of a saw in the woods near Walden Pond. From a rise, he saw two men cutting down one of the biggest pines left in town, a straight, one-hundred-foot-tall “kingly survivor” of past logging. His account, combining sharp observation, a dramatic narrative, and moral outrage, gave a fitting sendoff to a Homeric tree. I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive manikins with their crosscut saw which could scarcely span it. . . . I watch closely to see when it begins to move. Now the sawyers stop, and with an axe open it a little on the side toward which it leans, that it may break the faster. And now their saw goes again. Now surely it is going; it is inclined one quarter of the quadrant, and, breathless, I expect its crashing fall. But no, I was mistaken; it has not moved an inch; it stands at the same angle as at first. It is fifteen minutes yet to its fall. Still its branches wave in the wind, as if it were destined to stand for a century, and the wind soughs through its needles as of yore; it is still a forest tree, the most majestic tree that waves over Musketaquid. The silvery sheen of the sunlight is reflected from its needles; it still affords an inaccessible crotch for the squirrel’s nest; not a lichen has forsaken its mast-like stem. Now, now’s the moment! The manikins at its base are fleeing from their crime. They have dropped the guilty saw and axe. How slowly and majestically it starts! As if it were only swayed by a summer breeze, and would return without a sigh to its location in the air. And now it fans the hillside with its fall, and it lies down to its bed in the valley, from which it is never to rise, as softly as a feather, folding its green mantle about it like a warrior, as if, tired of standing, it embraced the earth with silent joy, returning its elements to the dust again. But hark! there you only saw, but did not hear. There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks, advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. It rushes to embrace the earth, and mingle its elements with the dust. And now all is still once more and forever, both to eye and ear.

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Its gracefully spreading top was a perfect wreck on the hillside as if it had been made of glass, and the tender cones of one year’s growth upon its summit appealed in vain and too late to the mercy of the chopper. The space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next two centuries. It is lumber. He has laid waste the air. When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch, and the hen-hawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled, see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new aerie, but the woodman is preparing to lay his axe at the root of that also. Journal, december 30, 1851

WHAT A CANNON, UP CLOSE! Thoreau returned the next day to measure the fallen giant as tears streamed from its sapwood. It was 4 feet in diameter and 105 feet long. How deceptive the size of a large pine! . . . As you approach it, even within a rod or two, it looks only like a reasonable stick fit for the sill or the beams of an old fashioned house. This you think is a generous appreciation and allowance. Not till you stand close to its foot, upon one of its swelling insteps, and compare its diameter with the diameter of your own eyeballs, do you begin to discover its width. Stand by its side, and see how it shuts out a hemisphere from you. Why, it is as wide as a front door. What a slender arrow, a light shaft, now that you stand a rod or two off! What a ballista, a battering ram,

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a mighty vegetable monster, a cannon, near at hand! Now set a barrel, aye, a hogshead beside it. You apply your measures. The foot rule seems suddenly shrunk. Your umbrella is but half as long as it was. Journal, december 31, 1851

A STAR DROPPED DOWN Thoreau once elevated his perspective by climbing a white pine. In “Walking,” he tells of doing that to pick the delicate, reddish, cone-like blossoms on its top. That their beauty was at once so near to us, and also so far away, seemed to him a metaphor for our relationship to nature. We hug the earth—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me—it was the end of June—on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I carried straight away to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets, for it was court week, and to farmers and lumber dealers and woodchoppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them. “Walking”

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7 KNIGHTING ELMS

Thoreau ’ s response to Sylva, or A Discourse on Forest Trees, a seventeenth-century work on forestry by John Evelyn, was uncharacteristic of him. In his reading notes about it, Thoreau said Evelyn was smitten by his subject and exaggerated the virtues of trees, repeating, for example, the belief that the shade of oaks was curative to paralytics. “Evelyn is as good as several old druids,” Thoreau wrote, “and his Sylva is a new kind of prayer book, a glorifying of the trees.” It was a curious criticism to say the least. Thoreau may have been much the better writer, but he glorified trees himself. He imbued them with virtues—generosity, good citizenship, a long-term perspective—that he saw lacking among people. He also exaggerated wildly. Thoreau’s trees were sagacious, steadfast, and self-sacrificing. They were guardians, good providers, hard workers, dukes and barons, teachers, ministers, and even abolitionists! Thoreau knew that these things weren’t factual, but he believed they expressed a larger truth. They were metaphors and fables he employed as a romantic writer and social critic to call us to see the power and virtue of nature. No single tree may have stirred these impulses more than the Davis Elm, the tallest tree in Concord. When it was cut down in 1856, Thoreau poured out nearly three thousand words of chronicle, mourning, indignation, and appreciation. In tribute, he turned all of Concord’s elms into symbols of Yankee moral virtues. On January 21, 1856, he watched as workers finished felling the huge elm. The 110-foot-tall tree stood on the main road into Concord, opposite the church and below the site of Concord’s first meetinghouse. A huge limb over the house of Charles B. Davis, who ran a store and the town post office, was cracked. It had creaked ominously during a recent storm, alarming his wife. Davis decided to take down the tree before it fell on them. Thoreau narrated the felling, which had begun a few days earlier. The chopper, a Mr. White, was paid ten dollars and part of the eleven cords of wood the elm yielded. His workers fastened a block-and-tackle with five stops to the base of a big sycamore twenty yards away, which still stands. As a horse drew the rope taut, a worker “pulled twenty turns” on the hardware 134

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to shift the tree a bit, so it would fall harmlessly on the road. “I measured it at 3 p.m., just after the top had been cut off,” Thoreau wrote, as if he had been at the foot of the Cross. He described the tree in exquisite detail. It was so tall the choppers could see Sleepy Hollow Cemetery over the Old Burying Hill. Its trunk was almost 24 feet around near the base and 19 feet in circumference at 15 feet from the ground. People said it was 200 years old, but Thoreau, who counted the rings, put its age at 132. In 1856, that was still more than half as old as the town. The Davis Elm had been a good-sized tree when British troops marched under it in 1775. “Curious fine black lines,” likely the work of insects, gave its wood a “geographical look.” A currant bush grew in a branch notch high up, and an old brick the tree had swallowed was lodged inside the trunk. The trunk, “lying prostrate” on Lexington Road, was taller than the tallest man in town, Thoreau reported. At 8 feet, 4 inches in diameter the longest way, the stump was wide enough to hold a dinner party of seven— table, chairs, and people included. The loss of “this old citizen of the town” rattled Thoreau. It was a tree he knew well. He had measured it by 1852, for that June he reported that the great elm in front of the Town House was slightly larger in girth “than C. Davis’s elm.” It was also a nostalgic link to Concord’s agricultural past, an era that, in the 1850s, was slipping away. And love of elm trees ran in his family. His father, John Thoreau, was one of the organizers of the Concord Ornamental Tree Society, which was founded in 1833 to plant trees to shade and beautify the town’s streets. Their favorite ornament for that purpose was the graceful elm, and Thoreau shared their admiration for it. Elms set around a house, he said, were “a surer indication of old family distinction and worth than any evidences of wealth.” Their tall, curvaceous tops, seen from a distance, suggested the “quiet rural and domestic life passing beneath it.” To cut down so grand and significant a specimen of the species as the Davis Elm without a public word spoken was a “sacrilege,” Thoreau wrote. It was time to deliver a sermon. Opening his journal the next day, he mounted the pulpit.

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On January 22, 1856, Thoreau wrote that he attended the funeral of the elm—he explained that while he usually didn’t go to funerals, he did so in this case because the deceased’s next of kin could not easily attend—as both eulogist and “chief, if not the only, mourner.” No town leaders came to the service, which was held, of necessity, on the burial site, and Thoreau had to speak above the din of “axe boys” chipping off and selling sections of the corpse. The virtue of the venerable elm, he said, was that it grew steadily to the very end. Now it was gone, like the stagecoach and “the clergy of the old school,” and its fall ended an epoch in the town’s history. “You have laid the axe, you have made fast your tackle, to one of the king-posts of the town. I feel the whole building wracked by it.” Thoreau’s “building” was the town, which he referred to fifteen times in his 530-word eulogy (“town” twelve times and “Concord” three), a respectable show of civic interest for a man who even today is still called a hermit. “Another link that bound us to the past is broken,” he wrote. “How much of old Concord was cut away with it!” Thoreau’s tone grew steelier two days later, as he turned to those next of kin, Concord’s remaining “stately elms.” He portrayed them as honorable citizens, reminders of the men of principle who once lived in the town. When he sees the magnificent elms on the horizon, they suggest a village, a community, to him. Indeed, they “constitute a borough” and deserve political representation more than humans do. The legislator “sent out from beneath their shade will not suggest a tithe of the dignity, the true nobleness and comprehensiveness of view, the sturdiness and independence, and the serene beneficence that they do,” he wrote. “A fragment of their bark is worth the backs of all the politicians in the union.” In an ingenious analogy, his elms then become unbending abolitionists. That January, as Thoreau wrote, blood was being spilled in Kansas in a battle over whether slavery should be permitted there and in other territories. The issue led to the creation of the anti-slavery Free Soil Party. Punning on the its name, Thoreau enrolled Concord’s elms as charter members. They were “free-soilers in their own broad sense.” Their roots extended far in every direction, reaching even under Kansas and Carolina. There, unsuspected,

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these “underground railroads” enriched the soil that the “conservatives” who lived there had never bothered to disturb. Unlike the politicians wrangling over slavery in Boston and Washington, D.C., Thoreau wrote, Concord’s elms were unswerving moral beacons. They refused to compromise on their principles. They endured centuries of storms and persevered in the face of adversity—something Thoreau sought to do himself as his hopes of success as a writer and speaker faded. “See what scars they bear, what limbs they lost before we were born!” he declared, as if he were addressing the Roman Senate in the Forum. “Yet they never adjourn; they steadily vote for their principles, and send their roots further and wider from the same centre. . . . They attend no caucus, they make no compromise, they use no policy. Their one principle is growth.” Thoreau finally extends his political analogy to the elms’ anatomy and concludes with a pun on “Old Dominion,” the nickname of the leading Confederate state, Virginia. The elm tree combines conservatism and radicalism. The radical part is its radicle (the botanical term for a plant’s main root), burrowing under surrounding institutions. The conservative part is the “dead but solid heartwood,” the core of old cells in the trunk, which provides “a firm column of support” to the tree’s radicalism. The conservative part dies out first, while the growing part survives. Thus “half a century after they are dead at the core, they are preserved by radical reforms,” wrote Thoreau. In this way the elms “acquire new states and territories, while the old dominions decay, and become the habitation of bears and owls and coons.” As Thoreau was memorializing the Davis Elm, he was also, at the age of thirty-eight, reviewing his own life. At Christmas a few weeks earlier, he and his mother had jotted down every house in Concord in which they had lived. He wrote down childhood memories—the cow that came through the front door “after pumpkins,” his going to bed wearing a new pair of boots, the time a pig bladder burst as John played with it by the hearth. Two tales still amuse: Thoreau asking, as a child, “Who owns all the land?” and after receiving a medal for geography in school, asking his mother, “Is Boston in Concord?”

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If his stories were not completely factual, they were so sanctified by his family and the passage of time that they were as good as true. The same is true of much of what Thoreau wrote about the elms of Concord. They were, on one level, the exaggerations of a man smitten by his subject. But owing in part to his artistry as a writer, Thoreau’s portrayal of the civic and moral example set by elm trees rings truer than the claim that the shade of an oak tree can cure paralysis. In the notes he took on Evelyn’s book, Thoreau said he would regard that and other assertions Evelyn made about trees “as a metaphorical expression of the invigorating influence of rude, wild, robust nature.” Thoreau’s noble elms were exactly that.

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D E AT H O F A C O N C O R D K I N G P O ST

THE FELLING OF A GREAT ELM Four men, cutting at once, began to fell the big elm at 10 a.m., went to dinner at 12, and got through at 2:30 p.m. They used a block and tackle with five falls, fastened to the base of a buttonwood, and drawn by a horse, to pull it over the right way; so it fell without harm down the road. One said he pulled twenty turns. I measured it at 3 p.m., just after the top had been cut off. It was 15 feet to the first crotch. At 75 feet, the most upright and probably highest limb was cut off, and measured 27 inches in circumference. As near as I could tell from the twigs on the snow, and what the choppers said who had just removed the top, it was about 108 feet high. At 15 feet from the stump, it divided into two parts, about in equal size. One was decayed and broken in the fall, being undermost, the other (which also proved hollow) at its origin was 11 4/12 feet in circumference. (The whole tree directly beneath this crotch was 19 3/12 round.) . . . I could count pretty well 105 rings. . . . I judged that there were at least seven cords then in the road, supposing one main limb sound, and Davis thought that the pile in the yard, from the limbs taken off last week, contained four more. . . . In some places the trunk as it lay on the ground was as high as a man’s head.

A condemned Concord street tree, the tree warden’s ruling nailed to its bark. The 165-year-old red oak was felled in 2010. Its main limbs severed, the tree calmly awaits its fate as a crane lowers a noose.

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. . . This tree stood directly under the hill, which is some sixty feet high, the old burying hill, south of where the flagstaff was planted when the British marched into town. This tree must have been some fifty years old and quite sizable then. . . . [It] was so sound I think it might have lived fifty years longer; but Mrs. Davis said that she would not like to spend another such a week as the last before it was cut down. They heard it creak in the storm. One of the great limbs which reached over the house was cracked. The two main limbs proved hollow. Journal, january 21, 1856

Workers from Calvary Tree Service wait for a Druid, whom a passerby had asked to come and offer a final prayer.

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THE MEASURE OF THE DAVIS ELM Measured again the great elm in front of Charles Davis’s on the Boston road, which he is having cut down. The chopper, White, has taken off most of the limbs and just begun, tried his axe, on the foot of the tree. He will probably fall it on Monday or the 21st. At the smallest place between the ground and the limbs, seven feet from the ground, it is 15 feet, 2 inches, in circumference; at one foot from the ground on the lowest side, 23 feet and 9 inches. White is to have ten dollars for taking off the necessary limbs and cutting it down merely, help being found him. He began on Wednesday. Davis and the neighbors were much alarmed by the creaking in the late storms, for fear it would fall on their roofs. It stands two or three feet into Davis’s yard. Journal, january 19, 1856

The elm tree planted in 1858 to replace the Davis Elm. It is framed by the same sycamore used to shift the Davis Elm’s fall, in 1856. Local history holds that it grew from a cutting of the great tree. Now thirty years older than the Davis Elm was in 1856, and famous in its own right as one of the town’s most beautiful trees, it amply fills the place of the tree whose end Thoreau mourned.

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A LINK TO THE PAST IS BROKEN I’ve attended the felling and, so to speak, the funeral of this old citizen of the town, I who commonly do not attend funerals, as it became me to do. I was the chief if not the only mourner there. I have taken the measure of his grandeur; have spoken a few words of eulogy at his grave. . . . But there were only the choppers and the passers-by to hear me. Further the town was not represented; the fathers of the town, the selectmen, the clergy were not there. But I have not known a fitter occasion for a sermon of late. . . . Its history extends back over more than half the whole history of the town. Since its kindred could not conveniently attend, I attended. Methinks its fall marks an epoch in the history of the town. It has passed away together with the clergy of the old school and the stage-coach which used to rattle beneath it. Its virtue was that it steadily grew and expanded from year to year to the very last. How much of old Concord falls with it! The town clerk will not chronicle its fall. I will, for it is of greater moment to the town than that of many a human inhabitant would be. Instead of erecting a monument to it, we take all possible pains to obliterate its stump, the only monument of a tree which is commonly allowed to stand. Another link that bound us to the past is broken. A few such elms would alone constitute a township. They might claim to send a representative to the General Court to look after their interests, if a fit one could be found, a native American one in a true and worthy sense, with catholic principles. Our town has lost some of its venerableness. No longer will our eyes rest on its massive gray trunk, like a vast Corinthian column by the wayside; no longer shall we walk in the shade of its lofty, spreading dome. It is as if you had laid the axe at the feet of some venerable Buckeley or Ripley. You have laid the axe, you have made fast your tackle, to one of the kingposts of the town. I feel the whole building wracked by it. Is it not sacrilege to cut down the tree which has so long looked over Concord beneficently? Journal, january 22, 1856

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Another view of the elm said to have grown, in the same spot, from a cutting of the Davis Elm

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CONCORD ’ S PRINCIPLED ELMS I have seen many a collection of stately elms which better deserved to be represented at the General Court than the manikins beneath, than the barroom and victualling cellar and groceries they overshadowed. When I see their magnificent domes, miles away in the horizon, over intervening valleys and forests, they suggest a village, a community, there. I find that into my idea of the village has entered more of the elm than of the human being. They are worth many a political borough. They constitute a borough. The poor human representative of his party sent out from beneath their shade will not suggest a tithe of the dignity, the true nobleness and comprehensiveness of view, the sturdiness and independence, and the serene beneficence that they do. They look from township to township. A fragment of their bark is worth the backs of all the politicians in the union. They are free-soilers in their own broad sense. They send their roots north and south and east and west into many a conservative’s Kansas and Carolina, who does

Herbert Wendell Gleason

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not suspect such underground railroads, they improve the subsoil he has never disturbed, and many times their length, if the support of their principles requires it. They battle with the tempests of a century. See what scars they bear, what limbs they lost before we were born! Yet they never adjourn; they steadily vote for their principles, and send their roots further and wider from the same center. They die at their posts, and they leave a tough butt for the choppers to exercise themselves about, and a stump which serves for their monument. They attend no caucus, they make no compromise, they use no policy. Their one principle is growth. Their radicalism is not cutting away of roots, but an infinite multiplication and extension of them under all surrounding institutions. Their conservative heartwood, in which sap no longer flows, does not impoverish their growth, but is a firm column to support it; and when their expanding trunks no longer require it, it utterly decays. Their conservatism is a dead but solid heartwood, which is the pivot and firm column of support to all this growth, appropriating nothing to itself, but forever by its support assisting to extend the area of their radicalism. Half a century after they are dead at the core, they are preserved by radical reforms. They do not, like men, from radicals turn conservative. Their conservative part dies out first; their radical and growing part survives. They acquire new States and Territories, while the old dominions decay, and become the habitation of bears and owls and coons. Journal, january 24, 1856

MISCOUNTING THE ELM ’ S YEARS Men have been talking now for a week at the post office about the age of the great elm, as a matter interesting but impossible to be determined. The very choppers and travellers have stood upon its prostrate trunk and speculated upon its age, as if it were a profound mystery. I stooped and read its years to them (127, at nine and a half feet), but they heard me as the wind that once sighed through its branches. They still surmised that it might be 200 years old, but they never stooped to read the inscription. Truly they love darkness

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rather than light. One said it was probably 150, for he had heard somebody say that for 50 years the elm grew, for 50 it stood still, and for 50 it was dying. (Wonder what portion of his career he stood still!) Truly all men are not men of science. They dwell within an integument of prejudice thicker than the bark of the cork tree, but it is valuable chiefly to stop bottles with. Tied to their buoyant prejudices, they keep themselves afloat when honest swimmers sink. Journal, january 26, 1856

Thoreau found the Davis Elm was 132 years old. He counted 127 rings but allowed five years for it to reach the height at which he started. Its annual rings began in two centers in the trunk about fourteen inches apart, corresponding to the elm’s two initial main leaders, but these rings later merged. On January 26, 1856, Thoreau drew the rings in his journal. Any resemblance to a human face is purely coincidental.

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8 A KINGDOM OF PRIMITIVE OAKS

In the fall of 1860, trees were at the center of Thoreau’s life. His long interest in how they live, grow, and propagate intensified after his lecture on succession on September 20, the acclaim for which gave him a rare bit of outside encouragement. He threw himself into forest history, measuring trunks, counting rings, and digging up the roots and shoots of trees with almost the same youthful zeal with which he had fathomed the bottom of Walden Pond years earlier. His enthusiasm for this left little room for anything else. As he rushed around to record findings and test insights about trees from October 1 to November 30, he poured out a torrent of words in his journal, nearly nine hundred a day on average—but said not one about the election of the gangly but promising senator from Illinois as president on November 6. Thoreau classified local forests by age. The oldest was first-growth, “a primitive wood” untouched by man. “We have none,” he said. He examined the older trees in Concord for any that might be the next generation, or second-growth, but concluded that these were almost “extinct” too. On November 2, he was pleased to find some 150-year-old oaks in Daniel Wetherbee’s small five-acre woodlot, noting that they imparted “an unusual dignity to the earth.” A few more oaks a century or more old turned up three days later on another woodlot, and he was thrilled to count 160 annual rings in one stump. “This will probably do for a specimen of a primitive oak forest hereabouts,” he wrote, adding almost wistfully, “Such probably was the size and aspect of the trees.” On November 9, however, his assessment changed. Thoreau went to Boxborough (as the name of the town is now spelled), two towns over, to check out a neighbor’s report of an old wood. After taking the train to West Acton and walking a couple of miles, he was stunned to find, eight miles from his home, a vast forest of oldgrowth oak “waving and creaking in the wind.” It was Inches Woods, a 450to 500-acre tract that straddled the Harvard Turnpike (Route 111 today) 150

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just over the Boxborough line. It was part of a larger forest, an original land grant from the English crown, that was acquired around 1800 by Henderson Inches, a merchant and selectman in Boston. Inches logged portions and sold off small lots until his death in 1857. Thankfully, Thoreau noted, Inches stuck to his prices and wouldn’t break up his lots, such that in 1860 most of the oak forest remained unsold and uncut. “It is a primitive oak wood,” Thoreau declared, “and said to be the most of one in Massachusetts.” He stood under trees untouched for centuries in an oak wood nearly a hundred times larger than Wetherbee’s lot. The woods consisted mostly of white, but also black, red, and scarlet oak. Some were as wide and spreading as pasture trees, but most were straight and tall, with trunks three to four feet in diameter. Clearly awed, Thoreau commented on looking up at “the great mass of gray-barked wood that fills the air.” Thoreau saw no wagon tracks or other signs of farming or logging, which he thought afforded a view of what the landscape looked like to the Pilgrims—“a full-grown oak forest stretching uninterrupted for miles,” filled with trees “whose interlacing branches form a complete and uninterrupted canopy.” Inches Woods was as fine as any oak forest in the state, maybe all of New England, Thoreau said. For a naturalist who didn’t want to leave Concord, it was the best of both worlds: an uncharted continent of trees eight miles from his front door. Thoreau knew that his estimate of Inches Woods was not widely shared, however. “That grand old oak wood is just the most remarkable and memorable thing in Boxboro,” he wrote the day after his first visit, “and yet if there is a history of this town written anywhere, the history or even mention” of Inches Woods is probably omitted, “while that of the first (and may be last) parish is enlarged on.” Two weeks later, Thoreau found a letter that contained just such a history. It had been written in 1767 by the minister of Stow, Massachusetts, which then included Boxborough. In his journal, Thoreau quoted the Reverend John Gardner as saying that Stow had the fewest “remarkables” of any town in the area. The only thing “worthy of publick notice” that Gardner could think of, Thoreau recounted, was the grave of a local man who had been

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Oliver Cromwell’s clerk of the exchequer. Gardner did not know whether or not this unnamed man came to Stow to escape the English civil wars, since it was not clear if the 1652 amnesty in England had protected him from Cromwell’s enemies. “Whether he was excluded from the Act of Oblivion or not,” the Stow minister wrote, “I cannot tell.” To which Thoreau replies dryly, “I can assure Mr. Gardner that he was not excluded from the act of oblivion.” By early 1861, Thoreau foresaw a worse fate for Inches Woods than simple neglect. It was “likely to be cut off within a few years for ship timber and the like,” he wrote on January 3, one month into his bout with bronchitis. Again, Thoreau’s fears were realized. The approaching Civil War raised the price of oak wood sufficiently that Inches’s heirs decided to sell the forest to John Trickey, a New Hampshire lumber king and government contractor. In 1861 and 1862, Trickey cut the old trees, milled them into ship timber and sold them to the Union Navy. After his discovery in early November 1860, Thoreau lavished praise on Inches Woods in his journal, portraying it (not altogether accurately) as a saving remnant of what nature was like before white men set foot in New England. According to Walter Harding, he was as “ebullient in his enthusiasm as a child with a new toy.” Thoreau matched his high praise with high purpose, however. He used the ancient forest as an example of riches that are unseen or unappreciated—and which therefore slip through our fingers. He wanted to use his writing about Inches Woods to conclude his longer “Wild Fruits” project, but he did not live to do so. Since placed there by scholars, the passages, which include some of Thoreau’s strongest calls for preservation, make a fitting ending. Each town, he wrote, should have a primitive forest of five hundred to a thousand acres, he wrote, “where a stick should never be cut for fuel, nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses—a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.” The symbolic link the old oaks offered to the past was especially important to Thoreau. A tree whose years spanned centuries reminded him that

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he, too, like Homer and Virgil, descended from a “heroic race of men of whom there is tradition.” Thoreau’s second visit to Inches Woods was on November 16. A few days later, he was sent a cross-section of an old white cedar trunk that had been used to make railroad ties, or “sleepers.” He was astonished to count 250 growth rings. It was the oldest, as well as the slowest-growing, tree whose annual rings he had personally counted. Adding a few years for the tree to reach the height from which the cross-section came, Thoreau figured that the cedar sprouted before Jamestown was settled in 1607. “Thus the cars on our railroad, and all their passengers, roll over the trunks of trees sleeping beneath them which were planted years before the first white man settled in New England.” Thoreau knew well that few people shared his esteem for old trees. “We cut down the few old oaks which witnessed the transfer of the township from the Indian to the white man,” he wrote in his journal in January 1861, “and commence our museum with a cartridge box taken from a British soldier in 1775!” Inches Woods also reinforced Thoreau’s view of nature as a public treasure. “Precious natural objects of rare beauty should belong to the public” in America, as the crown gems do in European countries. The problem here, as he understood, was getting Americans to recognize their gems. “I do not believe there is a town in this country which realizes in what its true wealth consists,” he wrote. As a result, the most beautiful landscapes may remain unknown to others because those who live nearest them “do not value nor perceive them.” Thoreau makes his point with a map. Between the squiggly lines that represent roads, there may be a small blank square or triangular space and another one close by that looks just like it. “Yet the one may be covered, in fact, with a primitive oak wood, like that of Boxboro, waving and creaking in the wind, . . . while the other is a stretching plain with scarcely a tree on it. The waving woods, the dells and glades and green banks and smiling fields, the huge boulders, etc., etc., are not on the map.” They may not be, but, thanks to Thoreau, Inches Woods is. His sometimes awestruck, sometimes indignant words about it made it “worthy of

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publick notice.” Thoreau wanted pines, elms, maples, and other trees as well to be represented cartographically and, more broadly, to enter the public mind. Even the planting of an ordinary row of elms “deserves to be recorded.” Many years hence it may be the most interesting “relic of the past” in a town. Thoreau’s immediate return on his efforts was poor. Before long, it was as if Inches Woods had never existed. Trickey, the timber mogul who bought it, was ruined in a postwar financial panic. The Union ships made of Boxborough oak wore out or were scuttled. Thoreau, who died in 1862, did not live to see it, but his prediction that a “dense white pine wood” would rise up after the oaks were cut was correct. Most of that pine forest was cut down in the early 1900s for timber, packing crates, and matches, and the rest was cut fifty years later to make way for bland tract houses. Today, one street in that Boxborough subdivision is Inches Brook Lane, an honor that Thoreau would have considered as dubious as putting the pine tree on a shilling. On a recent visit, a few very tall, spindly white pines towered here and there over the small houses. These lonely survivors of the pine forest in which they rose had so few branches below their tops that they looked like palm trees. A curious footnote to the story of Inches Woods occurred on January 21, 1864. Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire introduced Trickey to Abraham Lincoln at the White House that night, proudly telling the president that his constituent had “furnished more timber for the Navy since the rebellion commenced than any other person.” Lincoln, shaking his hand, was said to have replied, “Then you must have a big timber lot, Mr. Trickey.” It is a mercy that Thoreau was not alive by then—and not just because of the insult to the oaks. He would likely have been incensed that it was the New Hampshire senator who made the introduction. Hale had been a founder of the abolitionist Free Soil party, in whose cause Thoreau had enrolled Concord’s elms in 1856. In light of this uninspiring outcome, I thought it my duty to try to find some saving grace, a historical trace, however small, of the great oaks that inspired Thoreau. I researched and researched. Nothing. My hopes rose when

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I found some newspaper reviews of an alternative jazz-rock fusion band that played in the Chicago club scene in the 1990s. It was named the Henderson Inches. Pay dirt, I thought. The group’s leader is probably a direct descendant of the owner of Inches Woods, perhaps a ring-nosed recipient of an oak forest annuity. No luck. The band, too, was extinct.

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A VISIT TO INCHES WOODS This wood is some one and three quarters miles from West Acton, whither we went by railroad. It is in the east part of Boxboro, on both sides of the Harvard Turnpike. . . . The old oak wood, as we saw from the bare hill at the south end, extends a great deal further west and northwest, as well as north, than we went, and must be at least a mile and a half from north to south by a mile to a mile and a quarter possibly from east to west. Or there may be a thousand acres of old oak wood. The large wood is chiefly oak, and that white oak, though black, red, and scarlet oak are also common. White pine is in considerable quantity, and large pitch pine is scattered here and there, and saw some chestnut at the south end. . . . I was pleased to find that the largest of the white oaks, growing thus in a dense wood, often with a pine or other tree within two or three feet, were of pasture oak size and even form, the largest commonly branching low. Very many divide to two trunks at four or five feet only from the ground. You see some white oaks and even some others in the midst of the wood nearly as spreading as in open land. . . . It is an endless maze of gray oak trunks and boughs stretching far around. The great mass of individual trunks which you stand near is very impressive. Many sturdy trunks (they commonly stand a little aslant) are remarkably straight and round, and have so much regularity in their roughness as to suggest smoothness. The older or largest white oaks were of a rougher and darker bark than Wetherbee’s and Blood’s, though often betraying the same tendency to smoothness, as if a rough layer had been stripped off near the ground. I noticed a great many trunks (the bark) had been gnawed near the ground, different kinds of oak and chestnut, perhaps by squirrels. Journal, november 9, 1860

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A white oak near Spencer Brook in Concord, 19 ½ feet in circumference, as it looked in 2005. It sprouted around the time Thoreau did, in 1817. The trace of a stone wall (lower left) suggests it may have been a pasture oak. In 2009, a storm split off its massive right leader (inset).

THE MOST MEMORABLE THING IN BOXBOROUGH How little there is on an ordinary map! How little, I mean, that concerns the walker and the lover of nature. Between those lines indicating roads is a plain blank space in the form of a square or triangle or polygon or segment of a circle, and there is naught to distinguish this from another area of similar size and form. Yet the one may be covered, in fact, with a primitive oak wood, like that of Boxboro, waving and creaking in the wind, such as may make the reputation of a county, while the other is a stretching plain with scarcely a tree on it. The waving woods, the dells and glades and green banks and smiling fields, the huge boulders, etc., etc., are not on the map, nor to be inferred from the map. 158

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That grand old oak wood is just the most remarkable and memorable thing in Boxboro, and yet if there is a history of this town written anywhere, the history or even mention of this is probably altogether omitted, while that of the first (and may be last) parish is enlarged on. . . . How many have ever heard of the Boxboro oak woods? How many have ever explored them? I have lived so long in this neighborhood and but just heard of this noble forest—probably as fine an oak wood as there is in New England, only eight miles west of me. I noticed young white pines springing up in the more open places and dells. There were considerable tracts of large white pine wood and also pine and oak mixed, especially on the hills. So I see that the character of a primitive wood may gradually change, as from oak to pine, the oaks at last decaying and not being replaced by oaks. Though a great many of those white oaks of the Inches Woods branch quite as low and are nearly as spreading as pasture oaks, yet generally they rise up in stately columns thirty or forty or fifty feet, diminishing very little. The black and red and scarlet oaks are especially columnar, and tall, without branches for a long distance, and these trees are shaped more in their trunks like an elm than a pasture oak. They commonly stand aslant at various angles. When, in the midst of this great oak wood, you look around, you are struck by the great mass of gray-barked wood that fills the air. . . . I did not notice a single cart-path where a wheel-track was visible—at most a slight vista, and one footpath. . . . Seeing this, I can realize how this country appeared when it was discovered. Such were the oak woods which the Indian threaded hereabouts. . . . We have but a faint conception of a full-grown oak forest stretching uninterrupted for miles, consisting of sturdy trees from one to three and even four feet in diameter, whose interlacing branches form a complete and uninterrupted canopy. Journal, november 10, 1860

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THE RUGGED BARK IN INCHES WOODS I observe that the black, red, and scarlet oaks are generally much more straight and perpendicular than the white, and not branched below. The white oak is much oftener branched below and is more irregular—curved or knobby. Some of the white oaks have a hard, rugged bark, in very regular oblong squares or checkers (an agreeably regular roughness like a coat “I see one white oak shaped like this.” of mail), while others have a comparatively finely divided and soft bark. . . . In the extreme northwesterly part of the wood, close to the road, are many large chestnuts—one eleven and three quarters feet in circumference with many great knobs or excrescences, another twelve and seven twelfths. . . . These [trees] are evidently the relics of one chestnut wood of which a part remains and makes the northwest part of Inches Wood, and the trees are all within about a quarter of a mile “Bark like straps or southeast and north west, the first two being by iron clamps” themselves at the southeast. The chestnut is remarkable for branching low, occasionally so low that you cannot pass under the lower limb. In several instances a large limb had fallen out on one side. Commonly, you see great rugged strips of bark, like straps or iron clamps made to bind the tree together, three or four inches wide and as many feet long, running more or less diagonally across the trunk and suggesting a very twisted grain, while the grain of the recent bark beneath them may be perpendicular. Perhaps this may be owing to old portions of the bark which still adhere, being wrenched aside by the unequal growth of the wood. I think that all these old trunks show this. Journal, november 16, 1860

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Herbert Wendell Gleason’s 1906 photo of a large chestnut in Inches Woods

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REALIZING OUR TRUE WEALTH How little we insist on truly grand and beautiful natural features. There may be the most beautiful landscapes in the world within a dozen miles of us, for aught we know—for their inhabitants do not value nor perceive them, and so have not made them known to others—but if a grain of gold were picked up there or a pearl found in a fresh-water clam, the whole state would resound with the news. . . . I do not believe that there is a town in this country which realizes in what its true wealth consists. I visited the town of Boxboro only eight miles west of us last fall, and far the handsomest and most memorable thing which I saw there was its noble oak wood. I doubt if there is a finer one in Massachusetts. Let it stand fifty years longer and men will make pilgrimages to it from all parts of the country, and for a worthier object than to shoot squirrels in it. And yet I said to myself, Boxboro would be very like the rest of New England if she were ashamed of that woodland. Probably, if the history of this town is written, the historian will have omitted to say a word about this forest—the most interesting thing in it—and lay all the stress on the history of the parish. It turned out that I was not far from right, for not long after I came across a very brief historical notice of Stow, which then included Boxboro, written by the Reverend John Gardner in the Massachusetts Historical Collections nearly a hundred years ago—in which Mr. Gardner, after telling us who was his predecessor in the ministry and when he himself was settled, goes on to say, “As for any remarkables, I am of the mind there have been the fewest of any town of our standing in the Province. . . . I can’t call to mind above one thing worthy of publick notice, and that is the grave of Mr. John Green” who it appears, when in England, “was made clerk of the exchequer” by Cromwell. “Whether he was excluded from the Act of Oblivion or not I cannot tell,” says Mr. Gardner. At any rate, he returned to New England and, as Mr. Gardner tells us, “lived and died, and lies buried in this place.” I can assure Mr. Gardner he was not excluded from the act of oblivion. . . . I have since heard, however, that Boxboro is content to have that forest

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stand, instead of the houses and farms that might supplant it, not because of its beauty, but because the land pays a larger tax now than it would then. Nevertheless it is likely to be cut off within a few years for ship timber and the like. It is too precious to be thus disposed of. I think that it would be wise for the state to purchase and preserve a few such forests. If the people of Massachusetts are ready to found a professorship of Natural History, do they not see the importance of preserving some portions of Nature herself unimpaired? Wild Fruits

A 200-year-old red oak, one of Concord’s last great pasture trees. The same oak, seen here in winter, wears its summer dress in the photo opening this chapter.

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9 T RA N S FOR M E D B Y S N OW

Thoreau wrote about the seasons in his earliest known work, a school essay he composed at age eleven. (“There are four seasons in a year, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. I will begin with Spring. Now we see the ice beginning to thaw and the trees to bud . . . ”) He was still writing about them when he died, and he almost certainly had more to say. Their revolutions meant more to him, he said, than those of kingdoms. As the year passed, Thoreau loved seeing how the trees changed in all the seasons. But the trees of winter clearly beguiled him the most. Draped in snow or sheathed in ice, they riveted his eye and propelled his pen, sometimes unleashing almost manic creativity in him. During the rest of the year Thoreau had to work at making the familiar old woods and fields look new to him. Winter did it for him in a blink. It made the world “new to the eye.” Being deeply nonconformist, Thoreau loved winter’s tendency to subvert or cancel routine. A heavy storm turned his world topsy-turvy, and there were no snow blowers or monstrous plow trucks to set it aright. “All day a driving snow-storm, imprisoning most, stopping the cars, blocking up the roads,” he recorded on December 29, 1853, as the worst snowstorm he could remember buried Concord. “No school today. I cannot see a house fifty rods off from my window.” Not a footfall broke the snow. “In one place the drift covers the front yard fence and stretches thence upward to the top of the front door, shutting all in, and frequently the snow lies banked up three or four feet high against the front doors. . . . It is as if the inhabitants were all frozen to death, and now you threaded the desolate streets weeks after that calamity.” Imagining the town buried like Pompeii did not appear to trouble him. “I wade to the post office as solitary a traveller as ordinarily in a wood path in winter,” he wrote, with more bemusement than concern. Whether or not a snowstorm was “more to him than Christ,” as a family friend is reported to have once said about Thoreau, winter did afford him a new way to observe trees. It was easier to see their leafless limbs then— and easier still against a backdrop of snow. “The trees, especially the young oaks covered with leaves, stand out distinctly in this bright light from contrast with the snow,” he wrote. Even the shadows of the trees were “more 166

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minutely distinct than at any other season—not dark masses merely, but finely reticulated, each limb and twig represented, as they cannot be in summer.” Even a light snow limned the limbs and branches of trees in white against their bark. A heavier one, he wrote, could make the woods a blizzard of “dim white lines lying at various angles, like a vast network over the woods,” with branches “crossing at every conceivable angle on every side, from the ground to thirty feet in height, each with its zigzag wall of snow four or five inches high.” Walking in it meant stooping through “a loose woven and downy screen” of snow. Winter waved a magic wand over the woods for Thoreau. “How new all things seem,” he exclaimed after a huge snow in January 1855. “It is like the beginning of the world.” Dawn was the time to see the transformation. “He who visits them [even] half an hour after sunrise will have lost some of their most delicate and fleeting beauties. The trees wear their snowy burden but coarsely after midday, and it no longer expresses the character of the tree. I observed that early in the morning every pine needle was covered with a frosty sheath, but soon after sunrise it was all gone.” One January, as Thoreau walked to town from Walden, the familiar, rutted old road, covered that morning with a fresh blanket of snow, suddenly looked smooth and freshly made. “The sight of the pure and trackless road up Brister’s Hill, with branches and trees supporting snowy burdens bending over it on each side, would tempt us to begin life again.” Curiously, or endearingly, winter after winter, the same sights struck Thoreau as surreal or wonderful, and he recorded them anew. Phantasmagoric trees “wrapped in winding sheets of white.” Pines whose snow-laden branches turned them into firs. An ice-glazed woods, bright as burnished silver in the morning sun. The homey, protected feeling of a small “room” created beneath the lower branches of a tree blanketed in white. Rendering these images faithfully in his journal was a challenge Thoreau met squarely, and it called out some of his finest lines. He knew he could never fully capture the beauty of winter trees—and he never stopped trying. In pines sagging with snow he saw travelers “bending to the storm”

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in cloaks “through which you can tell where their heads and elbows are.” The squirrel and the rabbit fled winter’s fury for the “whited towers” of a big pitch pine covered in snow. The small “rooms” created beneath the lower branches of pine trees had “the snug inviting look of a cottage on the moors” and evoked a feeling of “household comfort” in Thoreau. Indeed, the whole woods could feel like one big house. “I have observed on a clear winter’s morning that the woods have their southern window as well as the house, through which the first beams of the sun stream along their aisles and corridors. The sun goes up swiftly behind the limbs of the white pine, as the sashes of a window.” If Thoreau felt that his description had somehow missed the mark, he would pull another verbal arrow from his quiver and keep shooting until he hit it. In a single sentence on January 4, 1859, he used six such arrows to depict snow on the branches of a pine: “At the same time the lowermost small black and dead horizontal limbs near the ground, where there is least wind and jar, these almost exclusively, say for six or eight feet up, are covered with upright walls of snow five or six times their own height and zigzagging with them like the Wall of China; or like great white caterpillars they lie along them, these snowy sloths; or rather it is a labyrinth, a sort of cobweb, of broad white belts in the air.” Two long consecutive journal entries on the 19th and 20th of January 1855 stand out for their descriptive drive, lyricism, and zestful imagery. A massive storm ended the morning of January 19. The landscape looked as though a white linen napkin “with many folds and dimples” had been dropped on it. Pines and oaks as high as twenty-five feet tall arched down to the ground like bows strung taut. “Fleecy mounds” of snow looked like “bread that had spewed out and baked outside the pan.” The snow fused together the ends of pine branches, which “hung down like fans or the webbed feet of birds.” It sat atop pitch pines in the shape of coconuts or fruit balls the size of a person’s head. A white pine wore a white robe “like a maiden that has taken the veil.” Entering a pine grove, Thoreau stepped into a “titanic sculptor’s studio,” in which the artist’s work

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was draped in white sheets. The forest, usually dark, was suffused with a soft light, its beauty enhanced, he wrote, by “the “delicate fawn-colored and cinnamon tints” of withered oak leaves poking through the snow. The passages go on like this for a total of 3,400 words. Nowhere does the intensity of the writing lag. Yet at the very end of the second entry, Thoreau makes a surprising remark: “I doubt if I can convey an idea of the appearance of the woods yesterday, as you stood in their midst and looked round on their boughs and twigs laden with snow.” Still troubled by this a week later, he apologized again, on January 20, 1855: “I am afraid I have not described vividly enough the aspect of that lodging snow of the 19th.” It is true that something is always lost in the translation from eye to pen, and Thoreau may have genuinely felt that his words did not do justice to the scene. In light of what he did manage to get down in the pages of his journal, however, his remark does more to suggest the boundless beauty he must have seen in the trees of winter.

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PAGODAS The great pine woods have a peculiar appearance this afternoon. This rather fine snow has lodged in their limbs and given them a grayish look, but as it lies thicker along the core of the limb, it has the appearance, at a distance, of dim white lines lying at various angles like a vast network over the woods, or, rather, like cobwebs seen on the grass on summer mornings. A kind of film over them. I never saw the pitch pines better snowed up. They look like Chinese pagodas. Journal, january 9, 1852

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TRAVELERS BENDING TO THE STORM Last evening, walked to Lincoln to lecture in a driving snow storm, but the invisible moon gave light through the thickest of it. I observed how richly the snow lay on the cedars. This afternoon, in dells of the wood and on the lee side of the woods, where the wind has not disturbed it, the snow still lies on the trees as richly as I ever saw it. It was just moist enough to stick. The pitch pines wear it best, their plumes hang down like the feathers of the ostrich or the tail of the cassowary, so purely white—I am sorry that I cannot say snowy white, for in purity it is like nothing but itself—from contrast with the dark needles

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Herbert Wendell Gleason

and stems of the trees, whiter than ever on the ground. Even the bare apple tree limbs and twigs in the hollows support a little ridge of snow, a collar of snow, five or six inches high. The trees are bent under the weight into a great variety of postures—arches, etc. Their branches and tops are so consolidated by the burden of snow, and they stand in such new attitudes, the tops often like canopies or parasols, agglomerated, that they remind me of the pictures of palms and other Oriental trees. In some places bent to the ground on each side, quite closing the path, bowed not with grief but in a contented wintry sleep; looking often, when the tops or branches or plumes only are bent, like travellers . . . bending to the storm under white mantles through which you can tell where their heads and elbows are. Sometimes the lower limbs of the pitch pine, divested of plumes, under such plumes and canopies, bear each their ridge of snow, crossing and interlacing each other like latticework, so that you cannot look more than a rod into the rich tracery. The sunlight, breaking forth at sundown on these snowed trees, is faint and uncertain . . . a whitish glow on the snow and the oak leaves. Journal, january 7, 1852

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A WRECK OF JEWELS, A CRASH OF GEMS Every leaf and twig was this morning covered with a sparkling ice armor; even the grasses in exposed fields were hung with innumerable diamond pendants, which jingled merrily when brushed by the foot of the traveller. It was literally the wreck of jewels and the crash of gems. It was as though some superincumbent stratum of the earth had been removed in the night, exposing to light a bed of untarnished crystals. The scene changed at every step, or as the head was inclined to the right or the left. There were the opal and sapphire and emerald and jasper and beryl and topaz and ruby. Such is beauty ever—neither here nor there, now nor then, neither in Rome nor in Athens—but wherever there is a soul to admire. If I seek her elsewhere because I do not find her at home, my search will prove a fruitless one. Journal, january 21, 1838

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SILVER BOUGHS This afternoon it snows, the snow lodging on the ice, which still adheres to the trees. The more completely the trees are changed to ice trees, to spirits of trees, the finer. Instead of minute frostwork on a window, you have whole forests of silver boughs. . . . Along some causeway or fence in the meadow, the trees are changed into silvery wisps. Nothing dark met the eye but a silvery sheen, precisely as if the whole tree—trunk, boughs, and twigs—were converted into burnished silver. You exclaimed at every hedgerow. Sometimes a clump of birches fell over every way in graceful ostrich plumes, all raying from one center. . . . Suddenly all is converted to crystal. The world is a crystal palace. The trees, stiff and drooping and encased in ice, looked as if they were sculptured in marble, especially the evergreens. Journal, january 3, 1853 A WO R L D M A D E NE W

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TEMPTED TO BEGIN ANEW This forenoon it snowed pretty hard for some four hours, the first snow of any consequence thus far. It is about three inches deep. I go out at 2:30, just as it ceases. Now is the time, before the wind rises or the sun has shone, to go forth and see the snow on the trees. The clouds have lifted somewhat, but are still spitting snow a little. The vapor of the train’s steam engine does not rise high in the misty air. I go around Walden via the almshouse. The branches of deciduous trees, oaks and maples, etc., especially the gray oaks of Hubbard’s Close on the side hill, support long, lightning-like arms of snow, many times their own thickness. It has fallen so gently that it forms an upright wall on the slenderest twig. The agreeable maze which the branches make is more obvious than ever. Every twig thus laden is as still as the hillside itself. The effect of the snow is to press down the forest, confound it with the grasses, and create a new surface to the earth above, shutting us in with 17 6

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it, and we go along somewhat like moles through our galleries. The sight of the pure and trackless road up Brister’s Hill, with branches and trees supporting snowy burdens bending over it on each side, would tempt us to begin life again. The ice is covered up, and skating gone. The bare hills are so white that I cannot see their outlines against the misty sky. The snow lies handsomely on the shrub oaks, like a coarse braiding in the air. Journal, december 26, 1853

NO TWO TREES WEAR THE ICE ALIKE Down RR to Cliffs. A clear day—a pure sky with cirrhi. In this clear air and bright sunlight, the ice-covered trees have a new beauty. Especially the birches along under the edge of Warren’s wood on each side of the railroad, bent quite to the ground in every kind of curve. At a distance, as you are approaching them endwise, they look like the white tents of Indians under the edge of the wood. . . . The birches droop over in all directions like ostrich A WO R L D M A D E NE W

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feathers. Most woods paths are impassable now to a carriage, almost to a foot traveller, from the number of saplings and boughs bent over even to the ground in them. Both sides of the deep cut now shine in the sun as if silver-plated, and the fine spray of a myriad bushes on the edge of the bank sparkle like silver. . . . We pick our way over a bed of pine boughs a foot or two deep, covering the ground, each twig and needle thickly encrusted with ice, one vast gelid mass, which our feet crunch, as if we were walking through the cellar of some confectioner to the gods. The invigorating scent of the recently cut pines refreshes us—if that is any atonement for this devastation. Even far in the horizon the pine tops are turned to fir or spruce by the weight of the ice bending them down, so that they look like a spruce swamp. No two trees wear the ice alike. The short plumes and needles of the spruce make a very pretty and peculiar figure. I see some oaks in the distance which, by their branches being curved or arched downward and massed, are turned into perfect elms, which suggests that that is the peculiarity of the elm. Few if any other trees are this wisp-like, the branches gracefully drooping. I mean some slender red and white oaks which have recently been left in a clearing. Just apply a weight to the ends of the boughs, which will cause them to droop on all sides, and to each particular twig, which will mass them together, and you have perfect elms. Seen at the right angle, each ice-incrusted stubble shines like a prism with some color of the rainbow— an intense blue, or violet, and red. . . . It is remarkable that the trees ever recover from this burden which bends them to the ground. I should like to weigh a limb of this pitch pine. The character of the tree is changed. I have now passed the bars, and am approaching the Cliffs. The forms and variety of the ice are particularly rich here . . . especially very small white pines almost merged in the ice-incrusted ground. All objects, even the apple trees and [fence] rails, are to the eye polished silver. It is a perfect land of faeries. As if the world were a great frosted cake with its ornaments. The bells are particularly sweet this morning. I hear more, methinks, than ever before. How much more religion in their sound, than they ever call

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men together to. Men obey their call and go to the stove-warmed church, though God exhibits himself to the walker in a frosted bush today, as much as in a burning one to Moses of old. Journal, january 2, 1853

GHOSTS IN WINDING SHEETS The trees were the ghosts of trees appearing in their winding sheets, an intenser white against the comparatively dusky ground of the fog. I rode to Acton in the afternoon of the 13th, and I remember the wonderful avenue of these faery trees which everywhere overarched my road. The elms, from their form and size, were particularly beautiful. As far as I observed, the frostwork was deepest in the low grounds, especially on the Salix alba

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[white willow] there. I learn from the papers that this phenomenon prevailed all over this part of the country, and attracted the admiration of all. The trees on Boston Common were clad in the same snow-white livery with our Musketaquid trees. . . . The whole effect is peculiarly soft and spirit-like, for there is no marked edge or outline. How could you draw the outline of these snowy fingers seen against the fog, without exaggeration? Journal, january 18, 1859

A PEN-AND-INK DRAWING A snow storm, which began in the night, is now three or four inches deep. The ground, which was more than half bare before, is thus suddenly concealed, and the snow lodges on the trees and fences and sides of houses, and we have a perfect wintry scene again.

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As I look toward the woods beyond the poorhouse, I see how the trees, especially apple trees, are suddenly brought out relieved against the snow, black on white, every twig as distinct as if it were a pen-and-ink drawing the size of nature. The snow being spread for a background, while the storm, still raging, confines your view to near objects, each apple tree is distinctly outlined against it. . . . It is a moist and starry snow, lodging on trees—leaf, bough, and trunk. The pines are well laden with it. How handsome, though wintry, the side of a high pine wood, well grayed with the snow that has lodged on it, and the smaller pitch pines converted into marble or alabaster with their lowered plumes like rams’ heads! Journal, february 16, 1860

WHITE AS FROSTWORK I go to Walden via the almshouse and up the railroad. Trees seen in the west against the dark cloud, the sun shining on them, are perfectly white as frostwork, and their outlines very perfectly and distinctly revealed, great wisps that they are and ghosts of trees. The walls and fences are encased, and the fields bristle with a myriad of crystal spears. . . . The ice is from an eighth to a quarter of an inch thick about the twigs and pine needles. Their heads are bowed; their plumes and needles are stiff, as if preserved under glass for the inspection of posterity. . . . The pines thus weighed down are sharp-pointed at top and remind me of firs or even hemlocks, their drooping boughs being wrapped about them like the folds of a cloak or a shawl. The crust is already strewn with bits of the green neeThoreau sketched dles which have been broken off. Frequently the whole a snow-covered top stands up bare, while the middle and lower branches pine that drooped like a fir. are drooping and massed together. Journal, december 26, 1855

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NOVEL BUT GRACEFUL CURVES On January 19, 1855, Thoreau and his friend Ellery Channing were caught by a storm in the woods and tramped a mile back to town on the Walden road through blinding snow, the driven snowflakes stinging their eyes. Thoreau said the slog was worth it to see snow-plastered trees bent “like bows tautly strung.” He described the scene in delighted detail that day and the next. The damp snow still drives from the northwest nearly horizontally over the fields, while I go with C. toward the Cliffs and Walden. There is not a single fresh track on the back road, and the aspect of the road and trees and houses is very wintry. Though considerable snow has fallen, it lies chiefly in drifts under the walls. We went through the Spring Woods, over the Cliff, by the wood path at its base to Walden, and thence by the path to Brister’s Hill, and by road home. It was worth the while to see what a burden of damp snow lay on the trees notwithstanding the wind. Pitch pines were bowed to

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the ground with it, and birches also, and white oaks. I saw one of the last, at least twenty-five feet high, splintered near the ground past recovery. All kinds of evergreens, and oaks which retain their leaves, and birches which do not, up to twenty-five feet or more in height, were bent to the earth, and these novel but graceful curves were a new feature in the woodland scenery. Young white pines often stood draped in robes of purest white, emblems of purity, like a maiden that has taken the veil, with their heads slightly bowed

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and their main stems slanting to one side, like travellers bending to meet the storm with their heads muffled in their cloaks. The windward side of the wood, and the very tops of the trees everywhere, for the most part, were comparatively bare, but within the woods the whole lower two-thirds of the trees were laden with the snowy burden which had sifted down on to them. The snow, a little damp, had lodged not only on the oak leaves and the evergreens, but on every twig and branch, and stood in upright walls or ruffs five or six inches high, like miniature Chinese walls zigzagging over hill and dale, making more conspicuous than ever the arrangement and the multitude of the twigs and branches; and the trunks also being plastered with snow, a peculiar soft light was diffused around, very unlike the ordinary darkness of the forest, as if you were inside a drift or a snow house. In most directions you could not see more than four or five rods into this labyrinth or maze of white arms. On every side it was like a snowdrift that lay loose to that height. They were so thick that they left no crevice through which the eye could penetrate further. The path was for the most part blocked up with the trees bent to the ground, which we were obliged to go round by zigzag paths in the woods, or carefully creep under at the risk of getting our necks filled with an avalanche of snow. In many places the path was shut up by as dense a labyrinth, high as the tree tops and impermeable to vision, as if there had never been a path there. Often we touched a tree with our foot, or shook it with our hand, and so relieved it of a part of its burden, and, rising a little, it made room for us to pass beneath. Often singular portals and winding passages were left between the pitch pines, through which, stooping and grazing the walls, we made our way. . . . It was surprising to see what a burden of snow had lodged on the trees, especially the pitch pines in secluded dells in the woods out of the way of the wind. White oaks also, six inches in diameter and twenty-five feet high, were bent to the ground and sometimes broken or splintered by it. The trees were everywhere bent into the path like bows tautly strung, and you had only to shake them with your hand or foot, when they rose up and made way for you. Ever and anon the wind shook down a shower from high

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trees. You would not have believed there were so many twigs and branches in a wood as were revealed by the snow resting on them; perfect walls of snow; no place for a bird to perch. Journal, january 19, 1855

“ HOW NEW ALL THINGS SEEM ” The day after, January 20, was fine and clear and not too cold. Thoreau surveyed the transfigured landscape in amazement twice, in the morning and afternoon. In many instances the snow had lodged on trees yesterday in just such forms as a white napkin or counterpane dropped on them would take—protuberant in the middle, with many folds and dimples. An ordinary leafless bush supported so much snow on its twigs—a perfect maze like a whirligig,

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though not in one solid mass—that you could not see through it. We heard only a few chickadees. Sometimes the snow on the bent pitch pines made me think of rams’ or elephants’ heads, ready to butt you. In particular places, standing on their snowiest side, the woods were incredibly fair, white as alabaster. Indeed the young pines reminded you of the purest statuary, and the stately full-grown ones towering around affected you as if you stood in a titanic sculptor’s studio, so purely and delicately white, transmitting the light, their dark trunks all concealed. And in many places, where the snow lay on withered oak leaves between you and the light, various delicate fawncolored and cinnamon tints, blending with the white, enhanced the beauty. P.M.—To Conantum and [Charles] Miles place with [James] Tappan. There was a high wind last night, which relieved the trees of their burden almost entirely, but I may still see the drifts. The surface of the snow everywhere in the fields, where it is hard blown, has a fine grain with low shelves, like a slate stone that does not split well. We cross the fields behind

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Hubbard’s and slump into ditches concealed by the snow, up to the middle, and flounder out again. How new all things seem. Here is a broad, shallow pool in the fields, which yesterday was slosh, now converted into a soft, white, fleecy snow ice, like bread that has spewed out and baked outside the pan. It is like the beginning of the world. There is nothing hackneyed where a new snow can come and cover all the landscape. . . . The world is not only new to the eye, but is still as at creation; every blade and leaf is hushed: not a bird or insect is heard; only, perchance, a faint tinkling sleigh bell in the distance. . . . The snow still adheres conspicuously to the northwest sides of the stems of the trees quite up to their summits, with a remarkably sharp edge in that direction. You see where the trees have deposited their load on the snow beneath, making it uneven. The pines and oaks in the deepest hollows in the woods still support some snow, but the low swamps are half filled with snow to the height of ten feet, resting on the bent underwood, as if affording covert to wolves. Very musical and even sweet now, like a horn, is the hounding of a foxhound heard now in some distant wood, while I stand listening in some far solitary and silent field. I doubt if I can convey an idea of the appearance of the woods yesterday, as you stood in their midst and looked round on their boughs and twigs laden with snow. It seemed as if there could have been none left to reach the ground. These countless zigzag white arms crossing each other at every possible angle completely closed up the view, like a light drift within three or four rods on every side. The wintriest prospect imaginable. Journal, january 20, 1855

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10 IN A BARQUE OF BARK

For a writer who lived in landlocked Concord, Thoreau’s descriptions of trees are surprisingly full of nautical terms and images. He had a bit of the old salt in him, however, and a lifelong love of the sea. Knowing how many Americans also felt that way, he sought to portray his own life in his writing as a journey of exploration on an inward ocean. He did so by turning Concord’s woods into a maritime main with his pen. Thoreau scanned the woods with a ship’s glass, seeing trees as schooners, sloops, and bark-hulled boats he delighted in calling barques. Walden Pond had algae-covered “wrecks of the forest” on its bottom and plenty of seaworthy vessels around its shores. Tall pines near it stood like ships at sea, “full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light.” The annual shedding of leaves launched great fleets of tawny-colored leaf boats on the waters—“light, tight, and dry boats,” curled up by the sun on every side. In October, “each tree runs up its flag and we know what colors it sails under.” Like the “private signals” of a ship, those colors “must be such as can be distinguished at the greatest distance.” Thoreau described the scarlet oak leaf in nautical imagery. Its “alternate rounded bays” and “sharp-pointed rocky capes” look to the sailor like a “much indented shore.” Indeed, the leaf, he wrote in “Autumnal Tints,” is “a shore to the aerial ocean”—the winds that beat against it. Thoreau loved sailing, in real life and as a metaphor for fluid harmony with nature. When the wind was up, he would plant the stepped mast (a piece of birch, of course) in his flat-bottomed boat and haul away. After two days of soaking rain in April 1854, he cruised a Concord meadow in his boat. “I sail with a smacking breeze today, and fancy that I am a sailor on the ocean,” he wrote in his journal. Real water was not essential, however. In his imagination at least, Thoreau weighed anchor in the woods, rounded capes, and coasted exotic shores. In early September 1851, he saw one of the town’s highest elevations about four miles away, jutting above a “summer sea” of green. Annursnac Hill (he spelled it Anursnack) appeared to stand “on the opposite shore of a large lake” interspersed with “islands”—the tops of tall trees. He might sail out to one, he mused, even if it was only “the top of Holbrook’s elm.” Or perhaps 190

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he would navigate farther. “Oh, what a sail I could take, if I had the right kind of bark, over to Anursnack!” He would sail in thought over the farms and houses that lay “at bottom of that sea.” On August 1, 1836, Thoreau set out to test a boat he built. The real voyage ended in an imaginary shipwreck. In a letter to a Harvard classmate on August 5, “Captain Thoreau” included his “log book,” indicating that a squall had kicked up and swept his mast and mainsail overboard. “The vessel, being left at the mercy of the waves, was cast ashore on Nashawtuck Beach. The natives, a harmless, inoffensive race, principally devoted to agricultural pursuits, appeared somewhat astonished that a stranger should land so unceremoniously on their coast.” In his imaginary navigating, Thoreau used trees as celestial bodies to reckon his position. After an evening in the village, he would “set sail” for his “snug harbor in the woods,” he writes in Walden. Not needing to see the path he knew so well, he would “make all tight” above deck and then withdraw below to the “cabin” of his thought, “leaving only my outer man at the helm.” As he tended to get lost in thought, he often had to look up at the openings between the trees and “steer by the known relation of particular trees which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods.” The pleasant reverie ended when his hand touched the latch on his door. If anything could have pried Thoreau from his beloved hometown, it was the ocean. He was fascinated by its power, its beaches and far shores, and by sailors’ journeys upon it. Ellery Channing called his friend’s masterpiece “the log-book of his woodland cruise at Walden.” Thoreau did have salt in his blood. His father’s father, Jean Thoreau, sold ships’ wares on Long Wharf in Boston Harbor, the hub of nautical activity in New England. As Thoreau grew up, his mother, Cynthia Dunbar, sang him sea chanteys passed down from Dunbars who had been sailors, skippers, and sail makers. Thoreau was also drawn to the ocean as a primal force of nature, “the spring of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls,” as he wrote in Cape Cod. He went to the Maine woods three times, but he made four trips to Cape Cod, in 1849, 1850, 1855, and 1857, each time awed by the lore, dynamism, and power of the ocean.

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Thoreau thought that many of the things he loved about the sea applied to the woods. He distinguished little between them. “Our town, after all, lies but farther up a creek of the universal sea.” The “dry land” on which the forest stood, the poet-surveyor wrote, was but an extension of the “wet land” at the bottom of the ocean. Life at sea and life in the woods were both hard, and both had the value of being real encounters with unvarnished nature. “When I contemplate a hard and bare life in the woods,” Thoreau wrote in 1841, “I find my last consolation in its untrivialness.” Shifting without pause to the sea, he continued, “Shipwreck is less distressing because the breakers do not trifle with us. We are resigned as long as we recognize the sober and solemn mystery of nature. The dripping mariner finds consolation and sympathy in the infinite sublimity of the storm. It is a moral force as well as he.” Even nature’s ways in the forest and the sea had certain similarities in Thoreau’s mind. He heard an uncanny likeness, for example, between beach surf and the sound of the wind in the trees. A wind roared one November night through the pines near the Old Marlborough Road “like surf on countless beaches.” He heard a “windy surf ” singing wildly in a single pine on Fairhaven Hill. The sound of the breeze in pine tops a bit farther off was more muted, “like the surf on a distant shore.” And there were softer ocean sounds in the woods. Thoreau heard a breeze blow through the young leaves of an aspen tree, causing them “to rustle with a pattering sound, striking on one another. It is much like a gentle surge breaking on a shore, or the rippling of waves. This is the first softer music which the wind draws from the forest.” One passage Thoreau wrote likening wind in the trees to surf is especially lyrical and profound. As he walked home from Stow in January 1859, he passed through a stand of young white oaks. A breeze stirred, causing a “sharp, dry rustle” among the withered leaves. It was “the sound of the surf,” he wrote, “billows of air breaking on the forest like water on itself or on sand and rocks. It rises and falls, wells and dies away, with agreeable alternation as the sea surf does.” These two “grand murmurs” of nature are

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actually but “one voice, the earth voice,” he wrote. “The earth is our ship, and this is the sound of the wind in her rigging as we sail.” It would have been hard, of course, for Thoreau to escape the influence of the sea even if he had wanted to. Concord was tied to Boston, the bustling maritime center of nineteenth-century America. Though eighteen miles inland, it was still close enough, Thoreau said, that September gales left a taste of salt on the bark of the trees. The sea also dominated American popular culture at the time. The voyages of New England ships to exotic, far-off ports captured the nation’s fancy and celebrated its power. The record-breaking speed of the schooner yacht America in 1851 and the exploits of whalers, merchant mariners, and explorers were on everyone’s lips. On everyone’s but Thoreau’s, that is. He was unimpressed with his neighbors’ talk of foreign ports, which only confirmed his belief that people ignored what they had and valued what they did not. They rushed to make a grand tour of Europe rather than linger in Concord’s “placid cove amid the maples” as “lovely as the Bay of Naples,” as he put it in a poem. “I would rather hear a single shrub oak leaf at the end of a wintry glade rustle of its own accord at my approach,” he wrote, “than receive a ship-load of stars and garters from the strange kings and peoples of the earth.” The exotic ports of call that Thoreau could make in the wooded hills at home interested him more. “As I sail the unexplored sea of Concord, many a dell and swamp and wooded hill is my Ceram and Amboyna,” he wrote in his journal on November 23, 1860. The latter were islands in the Indian Ocean that were famous for a rare hardwood with a rich swirling grain, which American carpenters sought for ornamental woodwork. Oranges arrived in Concord that month from Havana and stirred the excitement of the Concord Social Club. Thoreau thought its members had their pick of fruit backward. He felt they should care less for far-fetched ones and more for fruits they fetched themselves. “It is not the orange of Cuba, but the checkerberry of the neighboring pasture” that delights a New Englander’s eye and palate, he said. “What if the Social Club,” he asked,

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“instead of eating oranges from Havana, should spend an hour in admiring the beauty of some wild berry from their own fields which they never attended to before?” Neither his love of sailing nor the lure of the ocean pulled Thoreau out of Concord, at least not for good. He loved his native landscape without equivocation. (“I shall ever pride myself on the place of my birth,” he wrote in his class book upon graduating from Harvard in 1837. While he had been “bodily” present with his college classmates, he confessed, he had remained “heart and soul” in Concord, “scouring the woods and exploring the lakes and streams of my native village.”) That village was the “most estimable place in all the world,” not because it was better than anywhere else, but because it was his. So he brought the ocean to him with his pen. If readers were captivated by a clipper ship cutting the blue, then he would draw them in by hoisting the sails on beautiful trees. He would show them that his life in the woods was as bold, as adventurous, and as worthy of admiration as any journey to new horizons.

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SAILING A SEA OF GREEN

THE SOUGH OF THE BREEZE IN THE PINES The moonlight now is very splendid in the untouched pine woods above the Cliffs, alternate patches of shade and light—the light has almost the brightness of sunlight, the fulgor. The stems of the trees are more obvious than by day, being simple black against the moonlight and the snow. The sough of the breeze in the pine tops sounds far away, like the surf on a distant shore, and for all sound beside there is only the rattling or chafing of little dry twigs—perchance a little snow falling on them, or they are so brittle that they break and fall with the motion of the trees. Journal, february 3, 1852

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Windblown snow on Walden Pond

SURF ON AN ENDLESS SHORE A bright, but cold day, finger-cold. One must next wear gloves, put his hands in winter quarters. There is a cold, silvery light on the white pines as I go through J. P. Brown’s field near Jenny Dugan’s. I am glad of the shelter of the thick pine wood on the Marlborough road, on the plain. The roar of the wind over the pines sounds like the surf on countless beaches, an endless shore; and at intervals it sounds like a gong resounding through halls and entries, i.e. there is a certain resounding woodiness in the tone. How the wind roars among the shrouds of the wood! Journal, november 11, 1851

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A FLEET OF LEAF BOATS I cannot easily dismiss the subject of the fallen leaves. How densely they cover the water for several feet in width, under and amid the alders and button-bushes and maples along the shore of the river—light, tight, and dry boats, dense cities of boats, their fibers not relaxed by the waters, undulating and rustling with every wave, of such various pure and delicate, though fading, tints, of hues that might make the fame of teas, dried on Nature’s coppers. And then see this great fleet of scattered leaf boats, still light, tight and dry, each one curled up on every side by the sun’s skill, like boats of hide, scarcely moving in the sluggish current, like the great fleets with which you mingle on entering some New York . . . [or] slowly moving round in some great eddy which the river makes, where the water is deep and the current is wearing into the bank. How gently each has been deposited on the water! Journal, october 22, 1853

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IN A BARQUE ABOVE THE TREES Anursnack is exactly like some round, steep, distant hill on the opposite shore of a large lake with here and there some low Brush Island in the middle of the waves (the tops of some oaks or elms). Oh, what a sail I could take, if I had the right kind of bark, over to Anursnack! For there she lies four miles from land as sailors say. And all the farms and houses of Concord are at the bottom of that sea. So I forget them, and my thought sails triumphantly over them. As I looked down where the village of Concord lay buried in fog, I thought of nothing but the surface of a lake, a summer sea over which to sail. Journal, september 9, 1851

The tree canopy below Thoreau’s beloved Fairhaven cliff. In the center is Fairhaven Bay.

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THE WIND IN THE EARTH ’ S RIGGING Going up the hill through Stow’s young oak woodland, I listen to the sharp, dry rustle of the withered oak leaves. This is the voice of the wood now. It would be comparatively still and more dreary here in other respects, if it were not for these leaves that hold on. It sounds like the roar of the sea, and is enlivening and inspiriting like that, suggesting how all the land is seacoast to the aerial ocean. It is the sound of the surf, the rut of an unseen ocean, billows of air breaking on the forest like water on itself or on sand and rocks. It rises and falls, wells and dies away, with agreeable alternation as the sea surf does. Perhaps the landsman can foretell a storm by it. It is remarkable how universal these grand murmurs are, these backgrounds of sound—the surf, the wind in the forest, waterfalls, etc.—which yet to the ear and in their origin are essentially one voice, the earth voice, the breathing or snoring of the creature. The earth is our ship, and this is the sound of the wind in 20 0

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her rigging as we sail. Just as the inhabitant of Cape Cod hears the surf ever breaking on its shores, so we countrymen hear this kindred surf on the leaves of the forest. Journal, january 2, 1859

STEERING HOME BY THE TREES It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it was plain sailing. I had many a genial thought by the cabin fire “as I sailed.” I was never cast away nor distressed in any weather, though I encountered some severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart path, to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably, in the darkest night. Sometimes, after coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until I was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, I have not been able to recall a single step of my walk, and I have thought that perhaps my body would find its way home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance. “The Village,” Walden

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A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

Keeping my facts straight and words in the right order would have been enough, but Bob Richardson also kept faith in me and this book. His writing also showed me how to take careful aim when shooting at beauty. I thank scholars Ron Hoag and Ron Bosco for reading the manuscript with insight and enthusiasm and for gently pointing out my stylistic stumbles. I also thank Jeff Cramer, Will Howarth, David Robinson and Alan Hodder for helpful comments on an early draft of the manuscript. And I’m thankful that I had the privilege and pleasure years ago of reading Thoreau, Emerson, Muir, and others with Dick Niebuhr of Harvard Divinity School, which planted the seeds of this book. Mike Frederick of the Thoreau Society, the writers Michael Berger and John Mitchell, Lea Sloan of American Forests, Dick Perkins, Keith Ross, Lisa White of Houghton Mifflin and not one but two Steve Longs—the writer in Vermont and the Nature Conservancy official in Boston—provided connections, moral support, or a clear head at various points along the way. Bob Leverett, the definitive big-tree expert, was a big boost. He took me to see the Thoreau Pine and was a delightful companion in the woods. The late photographer Ivan Masur improved my photos by telling me to complement, not illustrate. My friend Doug Wilhelm was my constant sounding board as I sought a publisher. The day I sent the book to Merrik Bush Pirkle, my editor at the University of California Press, was one of my

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luckiest. She immediately “got” what it was about and sheparded it into print with enthusiam and skill. Thoreau complained about the lack of words in English with which to paint the delicate tints of trees. I have a similar problem, with my wife. No words suffice to express how thankful I am, nor how indebted this book is, to Jenny Rankin, from whom the trees could learn a thing or two about patience and providing a firm column of support. Finally, whatever is not right about this book is my fault alone and the result of not consulting the foregoing people adequately.

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Abbreviations are used for some of Thoreau’s works. Full citations for these and all other works cited below are in the bibliography. Excursions The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Excursions Journal The Journal of Henry David Thoreau (14 vols., Houghton Mifflin, 1906) MW The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: The Maine Woods PJ The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Journal (8 vols., Princeton University Press, 1981–2009) Walden The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Walden A Week The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers INTRODUCTION p. 1 “ancient rectitude and vigor of nature,” A Week, 171; “stands up more free from blame,” Journal, December 20, 1851. p. 1 “I, too, am at least a remote descendant,” Journal, July 7, 1845. p. 2 “to preserve the flashing forest colors,” Graham, Nature in Books, 91–92. p. 2 “a cache of love letters,” Boudreau, Roots of Walden, 6. p. 3 “chandeliers of darkness,” PJ 3, 288 ( July 7, 1851); “a rich tracery,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 249. p. 4 A tall white pine . . . “as immortal as I am,” MW, 122. p. 5 “That sweet solitude,” PJ 2, 174 (August 6, 1845); “now the fruit begins to form,” Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 27. 205

p. 6 “Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds!” Journal, January 21, 1852; “rivers of sap,” A Week, 331; “What would human life,” “A Winter Walk,” in Excursions, 60; “tonics and barks,” “Walking,” in Excursions, 202; “A town is saved,” ibid., 205. p. 6 “sends its fibers forth,” Excursions, 202. p. 6 Wohlleben’s idea that trees exchange signals: Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees, says that trees are communal beings and use signals to share resources and alert each other to threats or changes in conditions such as moisture level or temperature. New York Times, January 30, 2016, A4. p. 7 “one day they will be planted,” Journal, September 4, 1851. p. 7 “are good for other things,” Journal, January 26, 1852; “stand and decay for higher uses,” Wild Fruits, 238. p. 7 Thoreau recounts climbing a tall white pine, “Walking,” in Excursions, 220.

1. AN EYE FOR TREES p. 10 Thoreau knew individual trees: “like a pagoda,” Walden, 202; “to keep an appointment,” ibid., 265. p. 10 “Look up at the tree-tops,” A Week, 159. p. 10 “A tree seen against other trees,” Journal, January 26, 1852. p. 10 the shrub oak . . . was “rigid as iron,” Journal, December 1, 1856; “honest scratches,” Journal, December 19, 1856. Thoreau mentions the smallest oak (more commonly called the scrub oak or bear oak) some two hundred times in the Journal. p. 11 “My power of observation,” Journal, November 7, 1855. Thoreau had exceptional eyesight. He writes of seeing a “large devil’s-needle,” or dragonfly, half a mile from shore in the middle of Moosehead Lake (MW, 108). Emerson said of him, “His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses” (from Emerson’s eulogy at Thoreau’s funeral, Emerson, Works, 439). p. 11 Thoreau . . . “wore a straw hat,” Emerson, Works, 438. p. 11 Thoreau examined the seeds of trees: the willow’s “exceedingly minute,” Journal, March 11, 1861; the pine cone’s “beautiful thin sack . . . as effectually as when seeds are sent by mail,” “The Succession of Forest Trees,” in Excursions, 167. p. 11 The eye . . . “has many qualities,” PJ 1, 275 (March 15, 1842); “The naked eye may easily see farther,” Journal, January 21, 1853.

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p. 11 meticulous in depicting trees: “so fair a bole,” Journal, November 7, 1851; “clean ankle,” “A Yankee in Canada,” in Excursions, 7; “parallelism of the twigs,” Journal, January 25, 1852; “a button was off,” Journal, January 4, 1853. p. 12 observation took all his senses: snapping and sniffing twigs, Journal, January 26, 1852; “intoxicated” by hickory buds and black birch bark, Journal, May 12, 1850; nibbled lichens, Journal, February 9, 1852. Walter Harding also describes Thoreau’s tasting of saps and syrups as well as four types of beers he made from birch trees (Harding in Thoreau, In the Woods and Fields of Concord, 364). p. 12 the play of light in trees: “loves to nestle in the boughs,” Journal, February 4, 1852; “That kind of sunset . . . light like a fire falls,” Journal, November 25, 1851. p. 12 A “fine, silvery light,” Journal, March 19, 1859. p. 12 “all the shapes and hues of the kaleidoscope,” PJ 1, 239 ( January 30, 1841); “the small, dark, and sharp tops,” MW, 108. p. 13 a small ash along the Assabet River: “forming a perfectly regular oval head,” Journal, September 25, 1857. Robert D. Richardson writes that philosophically, Thoreau had a “strongly held idealist position” (“Thoreau and Science,” 119). On Thoreau’s core neo-Platonic idealism, also see Richardson, Henry Thoreau, 184, 205; and Robinson, Natural Life, 112–15. p. 13 “For there is Cheney’s abele,” Journal, February 12, 1859. p. 13 “bearing aloft its scarlet standard,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 232; glowed “green, yellow, and scarlet,” Journal, October 3, 1858. p. 14 “It is impossible to describe,” Journal, October 26, 1858. p. 14 elms as “great brownish-yellow masses,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 235–36. p. 14 The brilliant red of scarlet oaks, Journal, October 31, 1858. A slightly different version of this entry appears in “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 254. p. 14 “like those of genius,” Journal, October 5, 1858; a red maple swamp “is the most obviously brilliant,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 234. p. 15 “You need to stand,” Journal, October 9, 1860. p. 15 seeing the beauty of a tree: “if the outer door,” Journal, August 21, 1851; “We cannot see anything,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 257. The latter is adapted from a more colorful journal entry on February 28, 1856: “From the brook in which one lover of nature has never during all his lifetime detected anything larger than a minnow, another extracts a trout that weighs three pounds, or an otter four feet long. How much more game he will see who carries a gun, i.e. who goes to see it! Though you roam the woods all your days, you never will

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see by chance what he sees who goes on purpose to see it. One gets his living by shooting woodcocks; most never see one in their lives.” p. 15 “A man shall perhaps rush by,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 230.

2. A HEART FOR TREES p. 36 “groveling appetite,” Journal, December 21, 1853. As friction between them grew in 1849, Emerson captured this aspect of Thoreau’s personality: “Henry does not feel himself except in opposition. He wants a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, requires a little sense of victory, a roll of the drums, to call his powers into full exercise” (Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 301). On Thoreau’s “deep capacity for renunciation,” see Richardson, Emerson, 462–63. p. 36 They stirred a boyish joy in him: “an inexpressible happiness,” Journal, December 15, 1841; “Nothing is so beautiful,” “A Winter Walk,” in Excursions, 60; “so perfect in all its details,” PJ 3, 43 ( January 5, 1850); “by an analogous expression of joy,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 246. p. 36 “one great scarlet fruit,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 232. p. 37 “But ah! The needles of the pine,” Journal, March 18, 1858; “What singular regularity,” Journal, December 14, 1855; “These beautiful accidents,” Journal, March 24, 1853; “What a feeble beginning,” Journal, November 23, 1860. p. 37 “I could study,” Journal, January 26, 1852; “How bright, how full,” Journal, May 17, 1852; “It is remarkable,” Journal, May 30, 1857; “Ah, those fugacious universal fragrances,” Journal, June 10, 1852; “What a glorious crimson,” Journal, May 25, 1857 . p. 38 Thoreau . . . felt personally connected to trees: “I feel a certain sympathy,” Journal, March 18, 1852; “something kindred,” Walden, 132. p. 38 trees as family: “Old trees are our parents,” Journal, October 23, 1855; “What cousin of mine,” Journal, December 1, 1856; “somewhat like the young Astyanax,” Journal, March 18, 1859; “inflict an unnecessary injury,” Journal, October 23, 1855. p. 38 “those who come nearest to being my friends,” Journal, December 17, 1851. Thoreau brooded over the growing gap between him and Emerson. He felt like scraggly “denuded pines” left over in a logged forest “with no old cloak to wrap about them, telling a pathetic story of the companions that clothed them. So stands a man. It is clearing around him. He has no companions on the hills” (Journal, December 31, 1851). p. 38 “I do not know if I am singular,” Journal, November 25, 1857.

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p. 38 recurring struggles with . . . “melancholy”: Richardson, in Henry Thoreau, describes Thoreau’s “marked depression of spirits” (235). William Howarth writes, “These cycles of alternative hope and despair were common in Thoreau’s middle years” (Book of Concord, 77). p. 39 “In the winter,” “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” in Excursions, 23; “stimulants of bright and cheering prospects,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 247. p. 39 “The spruce, the hemlock and the pine,” “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” in Excursions, 5. p. 39 “Surely joy is the condition of life,” ibid.

3. A POET ’ S TREES p. 52 “My Muse may be excused,” Walden, 192. p. 52 fresh, vivid images of trees: “slender eyelashes,” ibid., 186; “like chandeliers of darkness,” Journal, July 7, 1851; “plumes and standards,” Journal, January 26, 1852; “the wind roars,” Journal, November 10, 1851; “great harps,” Journal, Sept 1, 1857; “like the spires of a Venice in the forest,” MW, 102; “As I look up the street,” Journal, October 6, 1858. p. 52 “burning bushes,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 232; “by the tint of its maturity,” ibid., 233. p. 53 “the right kind of bark,” Journal, September 9, 1852; “two boughs crossed in the wood,” PJ 1, 236–37 ( January 29, 1841); “Methinks our estrangement,” Journal, December 31, 1851. Harding gives a good summary of the rift between Thoreau and Emerson in Days of Henry Thoreau, 298–99. p. 53 oaks “stand browned and crisped,” Journal, October 22, 1858. p. 53 “mere paper evidence,” Journal, November 8, 1858. p. 55 “raw material of tropes and symbols,” Journal, May 10, 1853; “The tree is full of poetry,” Journal, July 16, 1852; “but living poetry,” Walden, 309. p. 55 “It is not in vain,” Journal, September 26, 1852. p. 55 “the meaning and idea of the tree,” A Week, 159; “It is a type,” Excursions, 251; “more various in form,” A Week, 160. p. 55 “It is like teaching children,” Wild Fruits, 235. p. 55 “Something like the woodland sounds,” PJ 1, 133 ( June 20, 1840); “ignorantly erases mythological tablets,” MW, 229. p. 55 “the lengthening series of his journals,” Sanborn, Personality of Thoreau, 11.

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p. 56 his poem “Fair Haven,” Wood, An Observant Eye, 103. p. 56 “Trees are handsome towards the heavens,” Journal, January 26, 1852.

4. A MIND FOR TREES p. 76 “The yellow birch first,” Journal, May 12, 1853. p. 76 Thoreau undertook a study of trees: Richardson, Henry Thoreau, 298; Howarth, Book of Concord, 61–65; Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading, 58. p. 77 “by the balloon, or parachute, or hook, or barbed spear,” Journal, October 12, 1851. p. 77 This discovery solved the riddle of oaks and pines: “as often as every five feet,” Journal, September 24, 1857. p. 77 Thoreau’s study of forest dynamics: on his work in this area, see Foster, Thoreau’s Country, 134–38; Richardson, Henry Thoreau, 340–45, 385; Stoller, After Walden, 77–89; and Berger, Thoreau’s Late Career, 24–32, 58–68. p. 78 Not until 1993: On the recovery and publication of Thoreau’s “The Dispersion of Seeds” by Bradley Dean, see “Thoreau’s Broken Task,” Robert D. Richardson’s introduction to Thoreau, Faith in a Seed. Michael Berger writes, “ ‘The Dispersion of Seeds’ presents a more substantial development of Thoreau’s succession theory, extending and refining” his essay on the topic and “should eclipse” it “as the definitive scientific Thoreau text” (Thoreau’s Late Career, 8). p. 78 idealism . . . remained the final lens: “the shadow of the whole,” Journal, August 19, 1851; “A perception of her true meaning,” PJ 1, 19 (December 16, 1837); “Facts should only be as the frame,” Journal, November 9, 1853. For an overview of Thoreau’s approach in science, see Richardson, “Thoreau and Science,” 110–27. p. 78 the leaf . . . as a universal form: “expresses itself outwardly in leaves,” Walden, 306; “There are flowers of thought,” Journal, September 1, 1851; “the Maker of this earth,” Walden, 308. p. 79 “The most clear and ethereal ideas,” Journal, May 20, 1851. Berger describes Thoreau’s metaphorical approach to botany in Thoreau’s Late Career, 103. p. 79 “and I think the same is true,” Journal, November 5, 1860; “Man is like a tree,” PJ 1, 267 (February 18, 1841); “he glows with maturity,” Journal, November 14, 1853; “It is with the graves of trees,” Journal, October 20, 1860. p. 79 “So is it with men,” Journal, July 14, 1852. p. 80 it does not forget its “high calling,” “Wild Apples,” in Excursions, 274; “drop its perfect fruit,” ibid., 276.

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p. 80 “the great harvest of the year,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 240; “They still live in the soil,” ibid., 241. p. 80 “I cannot easily dismiss,” Journal, October 22, 1853. Thoreau began “Autumnal Tints” as a lecture in October 1858, drawing on his journal from 1858, 1857, and as far back as 1853. Over the next two years he considered, but eventually dropped, a longer project drawn from it, which he called “The Fall of the Leaf.” As his 1853 remark suggests, however, he had long been interested in the pageantry of the falling leaves as a symbol of death and rebirth. He wrote an elegiac poem in 1841 also called “The Fall of the Leaf.” It includes the stanza, Far in the woods, these golden days. Some leaf obeys its Maker’s call. And through their hollow aisles it plays. With delicate touch the prelude of the Fall. p. 81 A local newspaper reported: The Lynn Weekly Reporter reviewed Thoreau’s lecture on April 30, 1859. See Robert F. Clarke, “Thoreau’s Last Lecture.” p. 81 “appear to be melting away,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 249. On Thoreau’s metaphorical strategy in the scarlet oak leaf passage, see Berger, Thoreau’s Late Career, 107–11. p. 81 “arrived at a late and perfect maturity,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 223. p. 81 “How beautifully they go to their graves!” ibid., 241.

5. A SOUL FOR TREES p. 96 “nearer heaven than it was,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 233; “take a firmer hold,” Journal, January 24, 1856; “the bough springs up,” PJ 1, 259 (February 8, 1841); “driven back to earth,” Journal, October 14, 1860. p. 96 “Men run after the husk of Christianity,” Faith in a Seed, 178; “perhaps too many of the attributes,” PJ 1, 370 (March 11, 1842). p. 96 “We check and repress the divinity,” Journal, November 16, 1851; “A forest is in all mythologies,” PJ 1, 347 (December 23, 1841). p. 97 “When I would recreate myself,” “Walking,” in Excursions, 205; “my spirit is like a lit tree,” Journal, March 18, 1858. p. 97 “as if I were on the trail of the spirit,” PJ 1, 239 ( January 30, 1841); “Is there no trace of intelligence,” Journal, January 1, 1854.

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p. 97 “Nature is full of genius,” Journal, January 5, 1856; “the flowing sail, the running stream,” PJ 1, 350 (December 29, 1841); “If by watching all day,” Journal, September 7, 1851; “all objects, even the apple trees,” Journal, January 2, 1853. p. 98 Chaucer’s “familiar but innocent . . . way of speaking of God,” PJ 1, 370 (March 11, 1842). Edward Wagenknecht writes, “I do not believe that any writer since Chaucer . . . has spoken of God more freely, naturally, and without cant or embarrassment” (Henry David Thoreau, 167). p. 98 “A certain dim religious light,” Journal, December 17, 1851 (the reference here is to “casting a dim religious light” in John Milton’s “Il Penseroso”); “desecration and destruction,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 236; “as if through windows,” PJ 1, 239 ( January 30, 1841); “I believe in the forest,” in Excursions, 202. p. 98 “cheap preachers, permanently settled,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 233; “return to dust again,” ibid., 241; “In the new Adam’s rise,” Journal, February 12, 1851. p. 99 “go by a large dead swamp white oak log,” Journal, October 21, 1857. p. 99 “could not have worshipped in groves,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 235; “our little vegetable redeemers,” “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” in Excursions, 23; “We pluck and eat,” Wild Fruits, 52. p. 99 “pierces the Empyrean,” Journal, May 20, 1851; “The pines spire without end,” A Week, 159 ; “I was struck by this universal spiring,” MW, 109. p. 100 “hatched perchance by the heat of an urn,” Walden, 333. p. 100 “She is not dead, but sleepeth,” Journal, December 31, 1851. p. 100 “The autumn, then, is indeed a spring,” Journal, October 9, 1851. p. 100 “I confess I love to be convinced,” Journal, November 25, 1860. p. 100 “The oak dies down to the ground,” PJ 1, 5 (October 24, 1837). p. 101 “The pine is no more lumber than man is,” MW, 121–22. In 1858, when it published “Chesuncook,” Thoreau’s article about his second trip to Maine, The Atlantic omitted the famous line “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” The editor, James Russell Lowell, struck it even after Thoreau wrote “stet,” or keep, on the galley proofs. In a scalding letter, Thoreau said Lowell cut the line in a “mean and cowardly manner.” Lowell, with whom Thoreau had earlier crossed swords, never replied. However, reviewing Thoreau’s posthumous works seven years later, in 1865, Lowell, the most important literary critic of his day, dismissed Thoreau as an imitator of others and a self-inflated complainer, injuring his literary reputation for almost twenty years. Why Lowell struck the line is not known, but it was unlikely an objection to a spiritual view of nature—or even pine trees. In 1845 Lowell published

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a poem addressed to a pine tree on Maine’s Mount Katahdin “who towerist / from thy bleak throne to heaven” (Howarth, Book of Concord, 149; Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 393–95). Lowell also wrote an article, “Humanity to Trees,” proposing the establishment of a “society for the prevention of cruelty to trees” (Huth, Nature and the American, 143). p. 101 “a person of a rare, tender and absolute religion,” Emerson’s eulogy to Thoreau, “Biographical Sketch,” in Emerson, Works, 421.

6. MY EMBLEM, THE PINE p. 114 “the emblem of my life,” Journal, April 21, 1852; “that recess among the pines,” PJ 2, 174 (August 6, 1845). p. 114 “as a hungry man,” Journal, December 12, 1851; “There is no scent,” “Natural History of Massachusetts,” in Excursions, 4; pines were “great harps,” Journal, September 1, 1857; “that my eyes slid off,” Journal, June 5, 1858. p. 114 “my best room,” Walden, 141. p. 114 Thoreau’s planting of pines at Walden Pond: Journal, April 22, 1859; see also Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 410; Foster, Thoreau’s Country, 90. p. 115 “The pine stands in the woods,” PJ 1, 308 (May 9, 1841); “It stands for the west, the wild,” Journal, April 21, 1852; “ancient rectitude and vigor,” A Week, 171; “Nothing stands up more free from blame,” Journal, December 20, 1851. p. 115 “This ancient and majestic inhabitant,” Michaux, North American Sylva, 161; “much the tallest of our native trees,” George Barrell Emerson, A Report on the Trees and Shrubs, 47. p. 115 On the history of the white pine in New England, see Rutkow, American Canopy, 21–36, and Peattie, A Natural History of Trees, 26–33. p. 117 Giant white pines in Massachusetts today: According to Native Tree Society cofounder Robert Leverett, more than 1,000 white pines in Massachusetts are known to reach 100 feet in height. Researchers have documented 20 that are at least 160 feet. Two more are inches away from that height. The Native Tree Society remeasures these “superpines” regularly, both by laser range finder and by climbing them and using a tape drop. Seventeen of the 160-footers are in one place: Mohawk Trail State Forest in the Berkshires. Leverett said it abounds in “superpines” because its location above the Deerfield River offers ready access to water and favorable soil and rock chemistry. As a state forest reserve, it is also protected from logging. For more information, see www.nativetreesociety.org. p. 117 “a handle to it such as the wind can take hold of,” Faith in a Seed, 50; “light infantry,” ibid., 167.

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p. 118 sun and wind “have the key,” ibid., 25, 27. p. 118 not finding life “as rich and inviting as it should be,” Journal, January 5, 1858.

7. KNIGHTING ELMS p. 134 “Evelyn is as good as several old druids,” Journal, June 9, 1852. p. 134 Thoreau . . . glorified trees: Stoller writes that Thoreau made extravagant claims about trees or projected noble qualities onto them as a utopian social critic (After Walden, 73). p. 134 “pulled twenty turns,” Journal, January 21, 1856. p. 135 He described the tree in exquisite detail, Journal, January 22, 1856. p. 135 “this old citizen of the town,” ibid. p. 135 Concord’s agricultural past: New England farms were abandoned in the late 1840s and 1850s during the social transformation brought on by the railroads, which increased competition in produce markets and made cities more alluring. Foster describes “the astonishing march of forest across the open landscape” as chiefly a cultural change brought on by industrialization rather than by a decline in the productivity of New England farmland (Thoreau’s Country, 122–26). See also Bell, “Did New England Go Downhill?” 450–66. p. 135 Elms . . . were “a surer indication of old family distinction,” Journal, July 2, 1851; an elm suggested a “quiet rural and domestic life,” Journal, October 12, 1857. p. 136 “stately elms,” Journal, January 24, 1856. p. 136 “free-soilers in their own broad sense,” ibid. p. 137 “See what scars they bear,” ibid. p. 137 “dead but solid heartwood,” ibid. p. 137 He wrote down childhood memories, Journal, January 7, 1856. p. 138 “as a metaphorical expression,” Journal, June 9, 1852.

8. A KINGDOM OF PRIMITIVE OAKS p. 150 the center of Thoreau’s life: see Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 436–38; Maynard, Walden Pond, 143–45; Howarth, Book of Concord, 197–98. p. 150 Thoreau classified local forests by age: “a primitive wood,” Journal, November 4, 1860; “this will probably do for a specimen,” Journal, November 5, 1860. p. 150 a neighbor’s report of an old wood: “On October 23, 1860, Anthony Wright told him of the existence of a large tract of virgin forest” (Harding, Days

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of Henry Thoreau, 440). For Thoreau’s initial visit to Inches Wood, see Journal, November 9, 1860. p. 151 “waving and creaking in the wind,” Journal, November 10, 1860. p. 151 “by the great mass of gray-barked wood,” ibid. p. 151 “a full grown oak forest stretching uninterrupted,” ibid. p. 151 “That grand old oak wood,” ibid. p. 151 Thoreau found a letter: Journal, November 26, 1860, and Wild Fruits, 234. Thoreau intended to include some journal entries on Inches Woods in his ambitious “Wild Fruits” project, a series of detailed observations of native wild fruits and berries that he began in early 1860. He left it even less complete than “The Dispersion of Seeds,” which it complements and with which it overlaps. In 1970 Leo Stoller extracted the essay “Huckleberries” from Thoreau’s drafts and notes on wild fruits. In 2001, Bradley Dean assembled and edited Thoreau’s full manuscript, published as Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript. p. 152 “ebullient in his enthusiasm,” Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 440. p. 152 “where a stick should never be cut,” Wild Fruits, 238. This section of Wild Fruits was formerly published as the essay “Huckleberries” in The Natural History Essays. p. 153 a “heroic race of men,” Journal, November 21, 1860. p. 153 “We cut down the few old oaks,” Journal, January 3, 1861. p. 153 “Precious natural objects of rare beauty,” Wild Fruits, 233. p. 153 “Yet the one may be covered,” Journal, November 10, 1860. p. 154 introduced Trickey to Abraham Lincoln: from the diary of assistant presidential secretary William Stoddard, owned by a Boxborough resident and Stoddard descendant whom I interviewed.

9. TRANSFORMED BY SNOW p. 166 “There are four seasons in a year,” Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 27. p. 166 “new to the eye,” Journal, January 20, 1855. p. 166 “more to him than Christ,” Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 464; “The trees, especially the young oaks,” Journal, February 3, 1852. p. 167 “dim white lines lying at various angles,” Journal, January 9, 1852. p. 167 “How new all things seem,” Journal, January 20, 1852; “He who visits them,” Journal, December 17, 1851. p. 167 “The sight of the pure and trackless road,” Journal, December 26, 1853. p. 167 trees “wrapped in winding sheets,” Journal, January 18, 1859.

NOTE S

2 15

p. 167 travelers “bending to the storm,” Journal, January 7, 1852; “I have observed on a clear winter’s morning,” PJ 1, 211 (December 28, 1840).

CHAPTER 10. IN A BARQUE OF BARK p. 190 “wrecks of the forest,” Walden, 201; “light, tight, and dry boats,” Journal, October 22, 1853; “each tree runs up its flag,” Journal, October 31, 1858; “a shore to the aerial ocean,” “Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 252. p. 190 “I sail with a smacking breeze,” Journal, April 28, 1854. p. 190 a “summer sea” of green, Journal, September 9, 1852. p. 191 “The vessel, being left at the mercy of the waves,” Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: The Correspondence, Volume 1, 13. p. 191 “snug harbor in the woods,” Walden, 169. p. 191 “the log-book of his woodland cruise,” Channing, Thoreau, 260. p. 191 some salt in his blood: Williard Bonner describes Thoreau’s nautical connections and interests in Harp on the Shore, 13–20. p. 191 “the spring of springs,” Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Cape Cod, 215. p. 192 “Our town, after all, lies but farther up a creek,” Journal, April 15, 1852; “When I contemplate a hard and bare life,” PJ 1, 269 (February 19, 1841). p. 192 “like surf on countless beaches,” Journal, November 10, 1851; “windy surf,” Journal, September 5, 1851; “like the surf on a distant shore,” Journal, February 3, 1852; “to rustle with a pattering sound,” Journal, May 17, 1860. p. 192 a “sharp, dry rustle,” Journal, January 2, 1859. p. 193 “placid cove amid the maples,” “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” in Excursions, 19; “I would rather hear a single shrub oak leaf,” Journal, February 8, 1857. p. 193 “It is not the orange of Cuba,” Journal, November 23, 1860. p. 194 “I shall ever pride myself,” Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Early Essays and Miscellanies, 113–14; “most estimable place in all the world,” Journal, December 27, 1856.

216

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B I B L I O G R AP H Y

WORKS BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings. Edited by Bradley Dean. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993. (A recovered late manuscript incorporating “The Succession of Forest Trees.”) Henry David Thoreau: An American Landscape; Selected Writings from His Journals. Edited by Robert L. Rothwell. New York: Paragon House, 1991. In the Woods and Fields of Concord: Selections from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Edited by Walter Harding. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1982. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. 14 volumes. Edited by Bradford Torrey and F. H. Allen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. Letters to a Spiritual Seeker. Edited by Bradley P. Dean. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. The Natural History Essays. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1984. (Introduction by Robert Sattelmeyer.) Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition. Edited by Jeffrey Cramer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript. Edited by Bradley Dean. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. (Another late Thoreau manuscript incorporating “Wild Apples,” “Autumnal Tints,” and “Huckleberries.”) The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Cape Cod. Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: The Correspondence, Volume 1. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Early Essays and Miscellanies. Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin Moser. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.

2 17

The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Excursions. Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. (Thoreau’s natural history essays, including “Natural History of Massachusetts,” “A Walk to Wachusett,” “A Winter Walk,” “The Succession of Forest Trees,” “Walking,” “Autumnal Tints,” “Wild Apples,” and “Huckleberries.”) The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Journal. 8 volumes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981–2009. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: The Maine Woods. Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Walden. Edited by J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Edited by Carl F. Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Witherell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

OTHER WORKS Bell, Michael M. “Did New England Go Downhill?” Geographical Review, vol. 79, no. 4 (October 1989). Berger, Michael Benjamin. Thoreau’s Late Career and “The Dispersion of Seeds”: The Saunterer’s Synoptic Vision. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. Blanding, Thomas. “Historic Walden Woods.” Concord Saunterer, vol. 20, no. 1–2 (December 1988). Bonner, Willard H. Harp on the Shore: Thoreau and the Sea. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985. Botkin, Daniel. No Man’s Garden: Thoreau and a New Vision for Civilization and Nature. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001. Boudreau, Gordon V. The Roots of Walden and the Tree of Life. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1990. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Channing, William Ellery. Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist. Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed, 1902. Clarke, Robert F. “Thoreau’s Last Lecture.” Thoreau Society Bulletin, no. 266 (Spring 2009). Connor, Sheila. New England Natives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

218

B I B LI OGRAPH Y

Cramer, Jeffrey, ed. I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Dame, Lorin Low, and Henry Brooks. Typical Elms and Other Trees of Massachusetts. Boston: Little, Brown, 1890. Emerson, George Barrell. A Report on the Trees and Shrubs Growing Naturally in Massachusetts. Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1846. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. 10, Lectures and Biographical Sketches. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909. Evelyn, John. Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions. Martyn Allestry: London, 1664. Foster, David R. Thoreau’s Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Gleason, Herbert Wendell. Through the Year with Thoreau: Sketches of Nature from the Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. Graham, P. Anderson. Nature in Books. London: Methuen, 1891. Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau. New York: Knopf, 1965. Harding, Walter, and Michael Meyer, eds. The New Thoreau Handbook. New York: New York University Press, 1980. Hayman, Richard. Trees: Woodlands and Western Civilization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Heinrich, Bernd. The Trees in My Forest. New York: Harper Collins, 2009. Hoag, Ronald W. “Thoreau’s Later Natural History Writings,” in The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Joel Myerson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Hodder, Alan D. Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Howarth, William. The Book of Concord: Thoreau’s Life as a Writer. New York: Viking, 1982. Huth, Hans. Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Maynard, W. Barksdale. Walden Pond: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Michaux, François André. The North American Sylva, or A Description of the Forest Trees of the United States, Canada and Nova Scotia. Paris: C. d’ Hautel, 1819. Peattie, Donald. A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950.

B I B L I O G R AP HY

2 19

Richardson, Robert D., Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. ———. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. ———. “The Last Leaves of Henry Thoreau,” in Henry David Thoreau, October, or Autumnal Tints. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. ———. “Thoreau and Science,” in American Literature and Science, Robert Scholnick, ed. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. Robinson, David. Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Rutkow, Eric. American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation. New York: Scribner, 2012. Sanborn, F. B. The Life of Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. ———. The Personality of Thoreau. Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed, 1901. Sattelmeyer, Robert. Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Schofield, Edmund, and Robert Baron, eds. Thoreau’s World and Ours: A Natural Legacy. Golden, CO: North American Press, 1993. Simmons, James Raymond. The Historic Trees of Massachusetts. Boston: Marshall Jones, 1919. Sims, Michael. The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man’s Unlikely Path to Walden Pond. New York: Bloombury USA, 2014. Stoller, Leo. After Walden: Thoreau’s Changing Views on Economic Man. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957. Taplin, Kim. Tongues in Trees: Studies in Literature and Ecology. Bideford, UK: Green Books, 1989. Tudge, Colin. The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter. New York: Crown, 2006. Wagenknecht, Edward. Henry David Thoreau: What Manner of Man? Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate; Discoveries from a Secret World. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2016. Wolfe, William J. Thoreau: Mystic, Prophet, Ecologist. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1974. Wood, David. An Observant Eye: The Thoreau Collection at the Concord Museum. Concord, MA: Concord Museum, 2006.

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L I ST O F THOREAU EXCERPTS

Page numbers and sources for the excerpts from Thoreau’s writing, listed by chapter and excerpt title. Only the date of the entry is given for passages from Thoreau’s journal.

1. AGAINST THE SKY A TREE HAS PARTS Relieved against the sky ( January 25, 1852) A pleasing arrangement (February 12, 1854) Birches fringed in gold ( January 4, 1853) Hurling bolts at heaven ( January 4, 1853) Ebby Hubbard’s oaks (April 16 and 19, 1852) Lightshow in a pine grove (March 19, 1859) Leaning hemlocks (April 1, 1852) An exhibition in Forest Hall (December 31, 1851) Red fire in the woods (“Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 253–54) Fed by the forms of trees ( January 21, 1853) A perfect frame (November 6, 1853) Spotting a canoe birch (November 1, 1851) An expectant wood (November 8, 1850) Reading a woodlot (October 16, 1860) Pines in an ocean of mist (November 29, 1850)

17 18 18 19 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 32

221

2. HEARTWOOD Delighted by trees ( January 26, 1852) New leaves, so hopeful! (May 17, 1852) Too fair to be believed (“Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 232) How the needles shine! (March 18, 1858) “My new acquaintance,” a tall aspen (October 31, 1858) “A match found for me at last” (December 1, 1856) No poet sings of the shrub oak (December 19, 1856) Be kind to trees, our distant relations (October 23, 1855) Stimulants of cheering prospects (“Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 247) In the woods, an invisible companion ( January 7, 1857)

41 41 42 43 44 44 45 46 47 48

3. WOODPLAY Mirrored trees, Atlantic depths (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 48) A woodlot, etched against the sky (December 3, 1856) Dancing with the light (“Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 249) Trees breathing their last ( June 4, 1850) . . . and being ripped by saws (May 5, 1852) Traced in shadow ( July 7, 1851) Ciphers printed on the sky (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 159) Mythic tablets turned into footstools (The Maine Woods, 228–29) Joined below ground (April 8, 1838) A forest reading room (February 3, 1852) Soaring on invisible currents (Faith in a Seed, 92–93) By the waters of the Concord, tears of joy (Faith in a Seed, 63–65)

58 59 60 60 61 62 63 64 66 67 69 70

4. FOREST LESSONS Imbricate buds in blossom (April 15, 1852) A cascade of color (October 9, 1853) The leafing of the birches (May 12, 1853) Of men and trees ( July 16, 1852; November 14, 1853; November 5, 1860; September 30, 1851)

222

T H OREAU EX C ERPT S

83 83 84 85

Oaks under pines in Loring’s lot (May 13, 1856) The roots of ideas (May 20, 1851) Ideal trees, reflected I ( June 15, 1840) Ideal trees, reflected II (November 9, 1851) Losing their sap, not their spirit (December 17, 1856) They fall to rise again (October 16, 1857) They teach us how to die (“Autumnal Tints,” in Excursions, 241)

87 88 89 90 91 92 92

5. AS HIGH A HEAVEN I recover my spirits (August 17, 1851) The secret in the snowy woods ( January 30, 1841) Tracks in the winter woods ( January 1, 1854) Crawling to heaven (February 15, 1859) Springing a prayer to heaven (February 8, 1841) A dim religious light (December 17, 1851) The darkest wood (“Walking,” in Excursions, 205) Calling the pines to life (March 19, 1859) The autumn is indeed a spring (October 9, 1851) “My second growth” (October 24, 1837) As high a heaven (The Maine Woods, 121)

103 104 105 106 106 107 108 109 109 110 110

6. PAEANS TO THE PINE No finer tree (September 16, 1857) Perfect perpendicularity ( June 4, 1858) Sign from a pine (November 30, 1851) Touchstone for the air (February 4, 1852) A higher law regarding pines (The Maine Woods, 121–22) Rising by leaps . . . (May 20, 1857) . . . leading the charge (October 19, 1860) An emblem of his life, still (April 21, 1852) Turpentine tears (March 9, 1855) Trees have hearts (December 20, 1851) A majestic pine is no more (December 30, 1851) What a cannon, up close! (December 31, 1851) A star dropped down (“Walking,” in Excursions, 220) THO R E A U E XCE R P TS

120 121 122 123 124 125 125 126 127 128 129 130 131

223

7. DEATH OF A CONCORD KINGPOST The felling of a great elm ( January 21, 1856) The measure of the Davis Elm ( January 19, 1856) A link to the past is broken ( January 22, 1856) Concord’s principled elms ( January 24, 1856) Miscounting the elm’s years ( January 26, 1856)

140 142 143 145 146

8. BOXBOROUGH’S ANCIENT OAKS A visit to Inches Woods (November 9, 1860) The most memorable thing in Boxborough (November 10, 1860) The rugged bark in Inches Woods (November 16, 1860) Realizing our true wealth (Wild Fruits, 233–34)

157 158 160 162

9. A WORLD MADE NEW Pagodas ( January 9, 1852) Travelers bending to the storm ( January 7, 1852) A wreck of jewels, a crash of gems ( January 21, 1838) Silver boughs ( January 3, 1853) Tempted to begin anew (December 26, 1853) No two trees wear the ice alike ( January 2, 1853) Ghosts in winding sheets ( January 18, 1859) A pen-and-ink drawing (February 16, 1860) White as frostwork (December 26, 1855) Novel but graceful curves ( January 19, 1855) “How new all things seem” ( January 20, 1855)

171 172 174 175 176 177 179 180 181 182 185

10. SAILING A SEA OF GREEN The sough of the breeze in the pines (February 3, 1852) Surf on an endless shore (November 11, 1851) A fleet of leaf boats (October 22, 1853) In a barque above the trees (September 9, 1851) The wind in the earth’s rigging ( January 2, 1859) Steering home by the trees (“The Village,” Walden, 169)

224

T H OREAU EX C ERPT S

196 197 198 199 200 201

I L L U ST R AT I O N C R E D I T S

All photographs in the book are by the author, except for the thirteen noted below. p. 13 Sketches by Thoreau, Journal, February 12, 1859, and September 4, 1851 p. 18 Sketch by Thoreau, Journal, February 12, 1854 p. 18 Sketch by Thoreau, Journal, January 5, 1853 p. 20 Stereographic card, Robert N. Dennis Stereoscopic Views, Wikimedia Commons p. 20 Sketch by Thoreau, Journal, January 4, 1853 p. 21 Photograph by Herbert Wendell Gleason, courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library p. 22 Sketch by Thoreau, Journal, March 6, 1858 p. 22 Sketch by Thoreau, Journal, April 16, 1852 p. 23 Photograph by Herbert Wendell Gleason, courtesy of the Thoreau Society p. 48 Photograph of Nantucket church steeple, circa 1933, courtesy Library of Congress p. 54 Photograph courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service p. 58

Photograph by Herbert Wendell Gleason, courtesy of the Thoreau Society

p. 61 Photograph of Massachusetts sawmill, 1940, Stanley Mixon, courtesy Library of Congress

225

p. 64 Photograph of logging, circa 1900, courtesy Washington State Archives p. 65 Photograph courtesy of Stack’s Bowers Galleries p. 65 Photograph of lumberyard by Charles E. Mace, 1944, courtesy of the National Archives p. 67 Engraving by Hans Sebald Beham, Hercules Capturing Cerberus, 1545, Wikimedia Commons p. 83 Illustration by Pancrace Bessa, stamens of white (American) elm, plate 216 in Michaux, North American Sylva, 1819 p. 91 Sketch by Thoreau, Journal, December 17, 1856 p. 106 Sketch by Thoreau, Journal, February 15, 1859 p. 115 Sketch by Thoreau, Journal, January 4, 1859 p. 123 Sketch by Thoreau, Journal, January 22, 1856 p. 124 Photograph by Herbert Wendell Gleason, courtesy of the Thoreau Society p. 130 Lithograph of a white pine, courtesy of the Hathi Digital Trust p. 145 Photograph by Herbert Wendell Gleason, courtesy of the Walden Woods Project p. 147 Sketch by Thoreau, Journal, January 26, 1856 p. 150 Sketch by Thoreau, Journal, November 1, 1860 p. 160 Sketches by Thoreau, Journal, both November 16, 1860 p. 161 Photograph by Herbert Wendell Gleason, courtesy of the Walden Woods Project p. 173 Photograph by Herbert Wendell Gleason, courtesy of the Walden Woods Project p. 181 Sketch by Thoreau, Journal, December 23, 1855

226

I LLUST RAT I ON C REDI T S

INDEX

Agassiz, Louis, 76 ash trees, 13, 86 aspens, 44, 192 Assabet River, 13, 26, 71 Atlantic Monthly, 81, 212 basswood, 54, 63, 114 beeches, 10, 11, 36, 37, 115 birches, 12, 18, 19, 42, 84, 177; black, 12, 19, 76, 84; canoe, 30; white, 19, 76, 106; yellow, 10, 11, 18, 76 boundary trees, 53 Boxborough/Boxboro, xi, 5, 150–151, 154, 157–163 Chaucer, 98 Concord, 4–6, 10, 134–136, 190; agricultural past of, 53, 135, 214; elms in, 134–138; Thoreau’s devotion to, 1, 136, 193–194 Concord Ornamental Tree Society, 135 Concord River, 71–72

Darwin, 78 Davis Elm, 4, 134–138, 140–147; description, 135; felling of, 134; Thoreau’s praise of, 135–136 deforestation, 6 Dunbar, Cynthia. See Thoreau, Cynthia Dunbar elms, 10, 14, 62, 83, 89; in Concord, 134–138, 154; Pratt Elm, 19–21; as shade tree, 135; in snow, 178–179. See also Davis Elm Emerson, George Barrell, 76, 77, 115 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 11, 39, 89, 101, 114; relationship to Thoreau, 38, 53, 208, 209 Evelyn, John, 76, 134, 138 Fairhaven Hill, 43, 97, 192, 199 First Parish in Concord, 97, 99 forest: age of in Concord, 5, 150; forest law, 116; forest science, 76–77; forest succession, 5, 76, 100, 117;

227

forest (continued) necessity for life, 6, 48; propagation and growth of, 77, 100; as sacred place, 96; “shapes and hues” in, 12; similarities with ocean, 192; surveys of, in Massachusetts and North America, 76, 115. See also Inches Woods Free Soil Party, 136, 154 Gardner, Reverend John, 151 Gleason, Herbert Wendell, 2, 22, 24, 161; photographs by, 21, 23, 58, 124, 145, 161, 173 Gray, Asa, 79 Greeley, Horace, 5, 77 Hale, Senator John, 154 Harvard College, 55, 76, 78, 194 hemlocks, 10, 25–26, 37, 181 Hubbard, Ebby, 22 Inches, Henderson, 151 Inches Woods, 4, 5, 150–154, 157–165; description and history of, 150–151; as saving remnant, 152 King’s Broad Arrow, 116 leaf, as universal form, 78–79 Leverett, Robert, 115, 213 lichen, 11, 12, 26, 37, 38, 121 Lincoln, Abraham, 150, 154 Lowell, James Russell, 212

228

I N DEX

maples, 31, 52, 98, 115; red, 13–14, 36, 42, 83, 86; sugar, 11; white, 83 Michaux, François André, 76, 115 Native Tree Society, 117 oaks, 4, 22–23, 53, 151–154, 157–163; black, 23, 151, 159–160; red, 151, 159–160; scarlet, 14, 151, 159–160; scarlet, leaf of, 55, 60, 190; shrub, 10–11, 15, 44–46; swamp white, 83; white, 23, 151, 159–160, 192 pines, 1, 64, 76–77, 87, 109, 114–118, 120–131, 190, 196; Henry David Thoreau Pine, 117 pines, pitch, 10, 100, 115, 117 pines, white, 3, 4, 7, 12, 96, 100, 114–117, 159, 199; in American history, 115–116; economic role of, 115–116; height of, 115–117, 213; immortal spirit of, 101, 110–111; light reflected by, 12, 24–25, 37; seeds of, 11, 76–77, 117; as ship masts, 116; in snow, 167–168; as spires, 10, 12–13, 63, 99; tall, straight trunk of, 114–116; wildness of, 115 poplars, 13, 92 Pratt Elm, 19–21 Sanborn, Franklin, 55 Shakespeare, 56 slavery, 136–137

sycamores (buttonwoods), 134, 140, 142 spruces, 12, 39, 178 Thoreau, Cynthia Dunbar (mother), 117, 137, 191 Thoreau, Henry David —Life: affection for his hometown, 1, 136, 191, 193–194; clash with James Russell Lowell, 212–213; criticism of Christianity, 96; death of, 5, 23, 78, 154; discovery of Inches Woods, 150; dour temperament of, 36, 208; importance of the seasons to, 13, 166; love of sailing, 190–191; memories of childhood, 5, 114, 137; as naturalist, 5, 76–78, 150; philosophical idealism of, 13, 207, 210; planting of pines, 114; religious views of, 96; sense of God, 97–98, 212; salt in his blood, 191; on society, 4, 38, 48, 114; struggle with depression, 38, 209; as writer, 3, 36–37, 99, 134, 137– 138, 168, 190 —On trees: affinity for white pine, 114–118, 120–131; analogies between trees and people, 79–80, 85; anger at cutting of, 6, 53, 64, 129–130, 135; calls to preserve, 4, 124, 152, 163; on Concord’s elms, 136–137; counting rings of, 5, 76, 150, 153; details of, 10–11; disciplined observation of, 10–14; figurative language from, 52;

on form and stance of, 12–13; linkage with heaven, 96; personal identification with, 38, 80, 114–115; imagined as books, tablets, scrolls, 55; and immortality, 3, 100–101; joy trees gave him, 36–39, 41–49; love of colors of, 14–15, 27, 47–48; mysterious quality of, 98, 104; nautical imagery of, 190–191; nobility of, 1, 10, 134; old trees, 1, 4, 38, 152–153; philosophical view of, 3, 78–79; as poems, 53–54; poetic depictions of, 52–53, 167– 168, 190–191; religious imagery of, 98–99; role of in his poetic imagination, 53–54, 59; romantic view of, 4, 134–136, 138, 152; scientific study of, 3, 5, 76–80, 150; on seeds of, 10, 114; on seeing the beauty of, 15, 80; as sentient beings, 38; as ships in a metaphorical sea, 190–194; as spires, 12–13, 63, 96, 99; spiritual response to, 96–101; transformed by snow, 166–169 —Works mentioned in the text: “Autumnal Tints,” 5, 6, 15, 52, 55, 80–81, 98, 99, 190; Cape Cod, 191; “Dispersion of Seeds,” 6, 78, 210; Faith in a Seed, 78, 210; journal, xi, 2, 5, 10, 37, 55, 76, 78, 96, 100, 135, 150, 152, 167, 168; The Maine Woods, 1, 64–65, 101; “Natural History of Massachusetts,” 39, 99; “Succession of Forest Trees,” 5, 77;

I ND E X

229

Thoreau, Henry David (continued) Walden, 10, 52, 54, 78, 96, 99, 100, 191; “Walking,” 108, 131; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 63, 78, 99; “Wild Apples,” 80; Wild Fruits, 152, 215 Thoreau, John (brother), 39, 137 Thoreau, John (father), 135 Thoreau, Sophia (sister), 56 Thoreau house on Main Street, 55 tree: beauty of, 15, 37, 42, 52; as ideal form, 13, 55, 59, 63, 89; as poetry, 53–54; symbolizing renewal, 39, 80, 100; and universal truths, 3, 78. See also Thoreau, Henry David: on trees trees: ages of, 77–78, 150; in autumn, 13–14, 27, 47–48, 80–81; beauty of, 1, 27, 36, 121; characters of, 10, 86, 167, 178; ecological value of, 6; leaves of, 1, 14, 54–55, 79, 80–81, 98, 190; life cycle and age

230

I N DEX

of, 77–78, 150; as link to past, 1, 4, 152; people’s emotional response to, 36, 47–48; as poetic forms, 53–55; propagation of, 76; shapes and forms of, 12–13, 28, 159, 160; succession of in forest, 77; trunks of, 5, 11, 23, 36, 77, 114–115; in winter, beauty of, 166, 167, 169, 177, 186. See also Thoreau, Henry David: on trees Trickey, John 152, 154 Wagenknecht, Edward, 212 Walden Pond, 5, 25, 33, 114, 190, 197; Thoreau’s stay at, 38, 76; trees on shore of, 29, 52; woodcutting around, 6, 52 Weymouth, George, 115 willows, 11, 70–72, 89, 99 witch hazels, 100 Wohlleben, Peter, 6, 206 woods. See forest; trees

Pierre Chiha

Richard Higgins is a writer and editor in Concord, Massachusetts. He was a staff reporter and editor for The Boston Globe for twenty years, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Christian Century, Esquire, and Smithsonian. A graduate of Holy Cross College, Columbia Journalism School, and Harvard Divinity School, he is the coeditor of Taking Faith Seriously and coauthor of Portfolio Life. In the early 2000s, Thoreau’s natural history essays and journal reawakened and affirmed Higgins’s own childhood love of trees. He learned to walk where Thoreau walked, to love the same woods, and to see trees anew. He began to write about and photograph them. The result is this book.

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by Richard Higgins Designer and compositor: Lia Tjandra Text: Dante MT Display: Burford Prepress: Embassy Graphics Printer and binder: Maple Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Higgins, Richard, 1952– author, photographer. | Richardson, Robert D., 1934– writer of foreword. Title: Thoreau and the language of trees / Richard Higgins ; foreword by Robert D. Richardson ; photographs by Richard Higgins. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016046907| ISBN 9780520294042 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520967311 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862—Criticism and interpretation. | Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862—Knowledge—Natural history. | Trees in literature. Classification: LCC PS3057.N3 H47 2017 | DDC 818/.309—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046907 Manufactured in the United States of America 25 10

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