Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/62

52, five inches in diameter when you flatten out their petals, like great dull-red roses. Their petals are of a peculiar red, and the upper sides of their calyx leaves, of a shiny leather red or brown red, are agreeable.

A slippery elm, Ulmus fulva, on Lee's Cliff, red elm. Put it with the common. It has large rough leaves and straggling branches, a rather small, much-spreading tree, with an appearance between the common elm and ironwood.

The aspect of the dry rocky hills already indicates the rapid revolution of the seasons. The spring, that early age of the world, following hard on the reign of winter, and the barren rocks yet dripping with it, is past. How many plants have already dried up, lichens and algæ, which we can still remember as if belonging to a former epoch, saxifrage, crowfoot, anemone, columbine for the most part, etc. It is Lee's Cliff I am on. There is a growth confined to the damp and early spring. How dry and crisp the turf feels there now, not moist with melted snows, remembering, as it were, when it was the bottom of the sea. How wet-glossy the leaves of the red oak now, fully expanded. They shine as when the sun comes out after rain.

I find on a shelf of the rock the Turrìtis stricta, now gone to seed, two feet two inches