The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard fought field.—Thoreau, Excursions.
August 12th I started for the Orange Mountains, in search of Cardinal Flowers, and various other blossoms, which I hoped to find about Eagle Rock. Arriving at those ragged cliffs, overhanging the brow of the mountains above West Orange, I climbed up the winding stone stairs and entered the park. The woods were strewn with small yellow flowers and ferns.
The view from the Rock is vast, as the eye sweeps off over the Great Salt Meadows beyond Newark, to Brooklyn Heights. On a clear day, the tall buildings of New York and the piers of Brooklyn Bridge are discernible. The Goddess of Liberty in the Bay also stands out clearly, and the slow-moving sails and funnels of outgoing steamers are visible. Most people seek Eagle Rock for this view alone.
Farther back in the woods, in May and June, the Pinxter-Flower, False Solomon’s Seal, yellow and blue violets, bluets, and anemone everywhere decorate the rocky soil. Numerous tall weeds towered coarsely along the mountainsides, to-day flaunting their disagreeable perfume ever before me.
I followed southwesterly, along the summit for a mile or more, to Crystal Lake, passing the park called “Wildmont,” to the right of which stands Cobblestone Cottage. The building appears very ancient.
All the vast solitudes of the parks of Orange Mountains are locked within gates, and the entrance labelled, “No Trespassing, Under Penalty of the Law.” Law is a specific designation for a certain kind of a broad-headed, bow-legged quadruped—a thoroughbred species not mentioned in the scientific annals of the Hoosac Highlands. After passing the lake, I followed up the swamp toward the distant walls of Wildmont, very desirous of trespassing and seeing the Wild Law in his cage. Soon I found a place where the stones were tumbled out, and where, by lifting a barbed wire, I could crawl through. So happily and leisurely I began to trespass about the woods. I found luxuriant colonies of the Maiden-Hair Fern, tall spirit-like spikes of feathery flowers, and club-like spikes of fringed-purple weeds not seen in the Hoosac Valley. They were so common that I did not gather any, so I never determined their title. In the deeper pools grew a few plants of the Skunk Cabbage. The low bushes and plants were overgrown and coarse in the extreme, amid the dense shades of chestnut and elm trees. The forest, apparently, was still in its primeval state.
As I approached the cottage of Wildmont, I ran upon an old cellar hole, where a building had once stood. The ruins were now prettily covered with myrtle and ivy. From this site, between the parting boughs, I caught glints of a sea of blues in the valley of the Oranges, which was overflowing with glistening house-tops and church-spires. Here I turned about and found a great colony of Indian Pipes.
As I turned from the shades of Wildmont, I walked toward Crystal Lake, along a dry brook bed. Here, indeed, I found a Cardinal show; over a hundred spikes of that brilliant flower danced before my eyes and lighted up the glooms. I had never before seen such flowers as these. The Cardinal-Flower (Lobelia cardinalis) is not frequent in Hoosac Valley—at least I have never collected it there. John Burroughs writes of it: “It is not so much something colored as it is color itself.”[60] I gathered many spikes of this flaring colored flower, and passed out to the shore of the lake; children, with their sailboats, ran teasingly after me, until I escaped to a quiet retreat where ice-cream was served. The waiter and the children alike were strangely unfamiliar with this flower, growing so close to their homes.
I passed out over the rocky slopes northward, where I ate huckleberries to my heart’s content. The ghost-like Feathery Plumes, and common Purple Clubs of this region towered everywhere among the woods; and low beautiful plants of the Yellow Gerardia were in full bloom. As I rounded the slope, below the Rock, I collected a fine specimen of the gorgeously colored Orange Butterfly-Weed, or Pleurisy-Root (Asclepias tuberosa), of the Milkweed Family. In the swamp farther south on the Orange Mountains, I have formerly collected the Swamp Milkweed flowers, which are similar to Butterfly-Weed, save that they are of a delicate rose-purple color. Our common species northward is the Purple-Flowered Silkweed. It grows along our roadside walls and river banks, and its tender leaves are used as greens, proving very delicious food.
I sat some time on the hillside under Eagle Rock, recalling the various flowers collected along the Northfield Road the year past. Llewellyn and Hutton Parks, along these summits, are always fragrant with blossoms in May and June. I once spent a holiday in Pleasant Valley beyond St. Cloud, in May and June, collecting among other flowers the beautiful Tulip-Tree blossoms (Liriodendron Tulipifera), which some lads graciously gathered for me.
The swamps and woods about this vale produce about the same species of flowers and trees as the hills of Mosholu and Lowerre above New York City—marsh marigolds, violets, anemones, dogwoods, and glowing apple orchards that one does not soon forget. One rare flower, however, graces the Orlando Williams Swamp in Pleasant Valley that I find nowhere else. It is the Painted-Cup (Castilleja coccinea) of the Figwort Family. It is very similar to the Scarlet Painted-Cup that Bryant wrote about as growing on the prairies.[61]
The Star-blossoms of the Grass of Parnassus (Parnassia Caroliniana), and the Ladies’ Tresses.
Frequently country folk call this flower Indian’s Paint-Brush; it somewhat resembles a clover tuft daubed with vermilion. The species found in New Jersey and Staten Island are the same. Thoreau found the scarlet tufts of the Painted-Cup “very common in the meadows” on Staten Island in 1843.[62] The Alpine Painted-Cups of the White and Green Mountains are somewhat different from the species found southward and westward. A friend collected flowers of these strange plants near Woodmont in the vicinity of New Haven, and about Marbledale, Connecticut. These are typical little Figworts.
The lobelias, gerardias, milkweeds, butter-and-eggs, Leopard’s-Bane (Arnica acaulis), and field daisies are common in the pastures and woods of St. Cloud and Pleasant Valley. In the distant swamps the Sweet Bay Magnolia (Magnolia Virginiana) and the Tulip Tree are the only two common northern species of the Magnolia Family. A single tulip tree is found in the Hoosac Valley, at North Pownal. Tulip trees are abundant in New Haven, Connecticut, and in Bronx Park, and also on Orange Mountains. They thrive especially westward and southward, where they become beautiful flowering trees—often one hundred and forty feet high.
As I came down the Northfield Road from St. Cloud, in June, 1896, I found the pastures full of blooming briar-roses, and the meadows waving with white daisies and golden arnica. The latter flower is replaced in the meadows of the Hoosac Highlands by great patches of the Devil’s Paint-Brush or Orange Hawkweed (Hieracium aurantiacum), an emigrant weed from Europe, which is very pretty and fragrant. The Purple Gerardia (Gerardia purpurea), the Blue Lobelias (Lobelia syphilitica), and Lobelia spicata grow abundantly in Pownal-on-the-Hoosac in June.
As I passed homeward through the Salt Meadows, beyond Newark, on the new Plank Road to Desbrosses Ferry, I began to observe the large pink-purple blossoms of the Swamp Rose-Mallow (Hibiscus Moscheutos) and the Marsh-Mallow (Althæa officinalis), whose roots contain a mucilaginous substance, and which are closely allied to our cultivated hollyhocks. I soon neared an open ditch by the road, filled with blossoming Arrow-Head (Sagittaria latifolia) and Pickerel-Weed (Pontederia cordata). The former produces beautiful waxen white flowers, and the latter, blue spikes of ragged blossoms. Not far from this mud-hole on the dry, sandy roadside, I gathered the rank-scented Jimson-Weed or Thorn-Apple (Datura Stramonium), a poisonous emigrant weed from Asia, whose Arabic name was Tatorah. It is common everywhere about these regions in waste ground, as well as along Kingsbridge Road and Old East Chester near the City. I have also observed it near the poor-house in New Haven, but never in the Hoosac Valley region.
The Salt Meadows of New Jersey, during August and September, are rolling swales of tall sedges and cat-tail grasses. Later in the season, when the golden-rod and purple asters are frozen and brown, and thrown in heaps upon the ground by the autumn winds, one may see great flocks of geese, and the comical purple grackle—the crow blackbird—flying southward over these desolate lands. A deep, weird solitude surrounds these unfathomable swamps. The foot of man and his bog-hoe as yet have never penetrated their regions, although within hearing of Old Trinity’s chimes.
In the Hoosac Valley autumn is a season of glory. Late August produces the gorgeous colored tiger lilies. The swampy meadows in September are brightened with the delicate greenish-white stars of the Grass-of Parnassus (Parnassia Caroliniana), first found on that ancient Mount Parnassus in Greece, and described and named by Dioscorides in Christ’s day. Innumerable asters and golden-rod brighten the roadside hedges. In the open clearings of bushy pastures grows the Woolly Moonshine—the “everlasting” of which Thoreau wrote. It is sometimes called Cud-Weed, or Balsam-Weed (Gnaphalium decurrens). The Pearly-Everlasting or None-so-Pretty (Anaphalis margaritacea) is peculiarly fragrant and beautiful, banked in among the late golden-rods, and the crimson and chrome-colored autumn leaves of sumach and blackberry briars against the dark green pines. I have found these flowers unfolding amid the snows as late as December. Late spikes of Orchids, the Ladies’ Tresses of genus Gyrostachys, the Bitter-Buttons or Tansy-Weed (Tanacetum vulgare), numerous thistles (Carduus), the velvety leaves of St. Peter’s Mullen (Verbascum Thapsus), Wormwood (Artemisia Absinthium) grow along the roadsides over Mount Œta, while Thimble-Berry blossoms and the Bluebells-of-New-England fill in the waste places of fences and dug-away ledges.
When the cooler days of October come, we may look for that blue flower of heaven, the Fringed Gentian (Gentiana crinita), along the roadsides near the swamps of Etchowog, modestly and patiently waiting for the autumnal skies of blue:
So come and fade alike the rarest flowers and the commonest weeds among the Highlands of the Hoosac, the valley of peaceful waters.
It is in the deepest and most secluded swamps that the shy orchid blooms, far beyond the realm of lawn or garden. Few indeed realize what a world of beauty and order lies sleeping unsought and unseen in the mossy recesses of our mountains,—a wonderland of discovery to any one who persistently, though reverently, seeks to lure from Nature the secrets of her deep retreats.
The Hoosac River, Pownal, Vermont.