Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/83

Rh of Mt. Washington, above almost all the shrubs with which we are familiar, the same kind which they have in Greenland, and again, when we get home, in the lowest swamps, with a kind which the Greenlander never found.—First, there is the early, dwarf blueberry, the smallest of the whortleberry shrubs, the first to ripen its fruit, not commonly erect, but more or less reclined, often covering the earth with a sort of dense matting. The twigs are green, the flowers commonly white. Both the shrub and its fruit are the most tender and delicate of any that we have. The Vaccinium Canadense may be considered a more northern form of the same.—Some ten days later comes the high blueberry, or swamp blueberry, the commonest stout shrub of our swamps, of which I have been obliged to cut down not a few, when running lines in surveying through the low woods. They are a pretty sure indication of water, and when I see their dense curving tops ahead, I prepare to wade or for a wet foot. The flowers have an agreeable, sweet, and very promising fragrance, and a handful of them plucked and eaten have a subacid taste agreeable to some palates.—At the same time with the last, the common low blueberry is ripe. This is an upright slender shrub, with a few long, wand-like branches, with green bark and glaucous green leaves, its