- Title Pages
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- A Note on Sources
- Introduction
-
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
-
7 Knighting Elms - Death of a Concord Kingpost
-
8 A Kingdom of Primitive Oaks - Boxborough’s Ancient Oaks
-
9 Transformed by Snow - A World Made New
-
10 In a Barque of Bark - Sailing a Sea of Green
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
- List of Thoreau Excerpts
- Illustration Credits
- Index
- Index
Forest Lessons
Forest Lessons
- Chapter:
- (p.82) Forest Lessons
- Source:
- Thoreau and the Language of Trees
- Author(s):
Richard Higgins
Richard Higgins
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
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.
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?...
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- Title Pages
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- A Note on Sources
- Introduction
-
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
-
7 Knighting Elms - Death of a Concord Kingpost
-
8 A Kingdom of Primitive Oaks - Boxborough’s Ancient Oaks
-
9 Transformed by Snow - A World Made New
-
10 In a Barque of Bark - Sailing a Sea of Green
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
- List of Thoreau Excerpts
- Illustration Credits
- Index
- Index
