Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/23

Rh Meadow. They are the more striking for growing in such green localities in meadows where the brilliant purple, more or less red, contrasts with the green grass. Found four perfect arrowheads, and one imperfect, in the potato field just plowed up for the first time that I remember, at the Hubbard bathing place

Clintonia borealis a day or two. Its beauty at present consists chiefly in its commonly three very handsome, rich, clear, dark-green leaves, which Bigelow describes truly as &quot;more than half a foot long, oblanceolate, smooth, and shining.&quot; They are perfect in form and color, broadly oblanceolate, with a deep channel down the middle, uninjured by insects, arching over from a centre at the ground; and from their midst rises the scape, a foot high, with one or more umbels of &quot;green, bell-shaped flowers,&quot;—yellowish-green, nodding or bent downward, but without fragrance. In fact, the plant is all green, both leaves and corolla. The leaves alone—and many have no scape—would detain the walker. Its berries are its flower. A single plant is a great ornament in a vase, from the beauty of its form and the rich, unspotted green of its leaves.

The sorrel now reddens the fields far and wide. As I look over the fields thus reddened in extensive patches, now deeper, now passing