Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts 2.djvu/109

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or low birch, rare in New England, and it is four or five feet high; quotes Parry as saying the wild bergamot (Monarda fatulosa) is found here by Lake Calhoun, but did not see it. Parry also noted the Triglochin elatum on the upper St. Peter’s River. Thoreau finds it on the shore of Lake Calhoun, along with S. pedicellaria, and "some of it more than two feet high." The Pyrus coronaria he finds there six feet high with thorns an inch long. The trees appear to be from seven to ten years old, and mostly from an old stock, but some are seedlings. He seems to determine the age from a fact which he states, that "from eight to twelve years old a thick bark scales off the trunk below." By Lake Harriet he hears of some rose with a white flower and a fruit as large as a hen’s egg and yellow. In a pasture formerly a meadow, but now grown up to hazel, the snowberry bush, the smooth sumac, viburnum and young oaks, he seeks and at last finds, as already noted (June 9), the wild apple-tree. "They have a long tap-root going down into the clay beneath; I could not pull up a small one. One or two hundred young trees were there;

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