By the twentieth of August, everywhere in woods and swamps, we are
reminded of the fall, both by the richly spotted Sarsaparilla-leaves
and Brakes, and the withering and blackened Skunk-Cabbage and
Hellebore, and, by the river-side, the already blackening Pontederia.
The Purple Grass (_Eragròstis pectinàcea_) is now in the height of its
beauty. I remember still when I first noticed this grass particularly.
Standing on a hillside near our river, I saw, thirty or forty rods off,
a stripe of purple half a dozen rods long, under the edge of a wood,
where the ground sloped toward a meadow. It was as high-colored and
interesting, though not quite so bright, as the patches of Rhexia,
being a darker purple, like a berry’s stain laid on close and thick. On
going to and examining it, I found it to be a kind of grass in bloom,
hardly a foot high, with but few green blades, and a fine spreading
panicle of purple flowers, a shallow, purplish mist trembling around
me. Close at hand it appeared but a dull purple, and made little
impression on the eye; it was even difficult to detect; and if you
plucked a single plant, you were surprised to find how thin it was, and
how little color it had. But viewed at a distance in a favorable light,
it was of a fine lively purple, flower-like, enriching the earth. Such
puny causes combine to produce these decided effects. I was the more
surprised and charmed because grass is commonly of a sober and humble
color.
With its beautiful purple blush it reminds me, and supplies the place,
of the Rhexia, which is now leaving off, and it is one of the most
interesting phenomena of August. The finest patches of it grow on waste
strips or selvages of land at the base of dry hills, just above the
edge of the meadows, where the greedy mower does not deign to swing his
scythe; for this is a thin and poor grass, beneath his notice. Or, it
may be, because it is so beautiful he does not know that it exists; for
the same eye does not see this and Timothy. He carefully gets the
meadow hay and the more nutritious grasses which grow next to that, but
he leaves this fine purple mist for the walker’s harvest,—fodder for
his fancy stock. Higher up the hill, perchance, grow also Blackberries,
John’s-Wort, and neglected, withered, and wiry June-Grass. How
fortunate that it grows in such places, and not in the midst of the
rank grasses which are annually cut! Nature thus keeps use and beauty
distinct. I know many such localities, where it does not fail to
present itself annually, and paint the earth with its blush. It grows
on the gentle slopes, either in a continuous patch or in scattered and
rounded tufts a foot in diameter, and it lasts till it is killed by the
first smart frosts.
In most plants the corolla or calyx is the part which attains the
highest color, and is the most attractive; in many it is the
seed-vessel or fruit; in others, as the Red Maple, the leaves; and in
others still it is the very culm itself which is the principal flower
or blooming part.
The last is especially the case with the Poke or Garget (_Phytolacca
decandra_). Some which stand under our cliffs quite dazzle me with
their purple stems now and early in September. They are as interesting
to me as most flowers, and one of the most important fruits of our
autumn. Every part is flower, (or fruit,) such is its superfluity of
color,—stem, branch, peduncle, pedicel, petiole, and even the at length
yellowish purple-veined leaves. Its cylindrical racemes of berries of
various hues, from green to dark purple, six or seven inches long, are
gracefully drooping on all sides, offering repasts to the birds; and
even the sepals from which the birds have picked the berries are a
brilliant lake-red, with crimson flame-like reflections, equal to
anything of the kind,—all on fire with ripeness. Hence the _lacca_,
from _lac_, lake. There are at the same time flower-buds, flowers,
green berries, dark purple or ripe ones, and these flower-like sepals,
all on the same plant.
We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It
is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood. It asks a
bright sun on it to make it show to best advantage, and it must be seen
at this season of the year. On warm hillsides its stems are ripe by the
twenty-third of August. At that date I walked through a beautiful grove
of them, six or seven feet high, on the side of one of our cliffs,
where they ripen early. Quite to the ground they were a deep brilliant
purple with a bloom, contrasting with the still clear green leaves. It
appears a rare triumph of Nature to have produced and perfected such a
plant, as if this were enough for a summer. What a perfect maturity it
arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death
not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to
mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our
decay, like the Poke! I confess that it excites me to behold them. I
cut one for a cane, for I would fain handle and lean on it. I love to
press the berries between my fingers, and see their juice staining my
hand. To walk amid these upright, branching casks of purple wine, which
retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tasting each one with your eye,
instead of counting the pipes on a London dock, what a privilege! For
Nature’s vintage is not confined to the vine. Our poets have sung of
wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they never saw, as
if our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers. Indeed,
this has been called by some the American Grape, and, though a native
of America, its juices are used in some foreign countries to improve
the color of the wine; so that the poetaster may be celebrating the
virtues of the Poke without knowing it. Here are berries enough to
paint afresh the western sky, and play the bacchanal with, if you will.
And what flutes its ensanguined stems would make, to be used in such a
dance! It is truly a royal plant. I could spend the evening of the year
musing amid the Poke-stems. And perchance amid these groves might arise
at last a new school of philosophy or poetry. It lasts all through
September.
At the same time with this, or near the end of August, a to me very
interesting genus of grasses, Andropogons, or Beard-Grasses, is in its
prime. _Andropogon furcatus_, Forked Beard-Grass, or call it
Purple-Fingered Grass; _Andropogon scoparius,_ Purple Wood Grass; and
_Andropogon_ (now called _Sorghum_) _nutans_, Indian-Grass. The first
is a very tall and slender-culmed grass, three to seven feet high, with
four or five purple finger-like spikes raying upward from the top. The
second is also quite slender, growing in tufts two feet high by one
wide, with culms often somewhat curving, which, as the spikes go out of
bloom, have a whitish fuzzy look. These two are prevailing grasses at
this season on dry and sandy fields and hillsides. The culms of both,
not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple tinge, and help
to declare the ripeness of the year. Perhaps I have the more sympathy
with them because they are despised by the farmer, and occupy sterile
and neglected soil. They are high-colored, like ripe grapes, and
express a maturity which the spring did not suggest. Only the August
sun could have thus burnished these culms and leaves. The farmer has
long since done his upland haying, and he will not condescend to bring
his scythe to where these slender wild grasses have at length flowered
thinly; you often see spaces of bare sand amid them. But I walk
encouraged between the tufts of Purple Wood-Grass, over the sandy
fields, and along the edge of the Shrub-Oaks, glad to recognize these
simple contemporaries. With thoughts cutting a broad swathe I “get”
them, with horse-raking thoughts I gather them into windrows. The
fine-eared poet may hear the whetting of my scythe. These two were
almost the first grasses that I learned to distinguish, for I had not
known by how many friends I was surrounded,—I had seen them simply as
grasses standing. The purple of their culms also excites me like that
of the Poke-Weed stems.
Think what refuge there is for one, before August is over, from college
commencements and society that isolates! I can skulk amid the tufts of
Purple Wood-Grass on the borders of the “Great Fields.” Wherever I walk
these afternoons, the Purple-Fingered Grass also stands like a
guide-board, and points my thoughts to more poetic paths than they have
lately travelled.
A man shall perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his
head, and cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have
cut many tons of them, littered his stables with them, and fed them to
his cattle for years. Yet, if he ever favorably attends to them, he may
be overcome by their beauty. Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call
it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours; and yet how
long it stands in vain! I had walked over those Great Fields so many
Augusts, and never yet distinctly recognized these purple companions
that I had there. I had brushed against them and trodden on them,
forsooth; and now, at last, they, as it were, rose up and blessed me.
Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised. Heaven might
be defined as the place which men avoid. Who can doubt that these
grasses, which the farmer says are of no account to him, find some
compensation in your appreciation of them? I may say that I never saw
them before,—though, when I came to look them face to face, there did
come down to me a purple gleam from previous years; and now, wherever I
go, I see hardly anything else. It is the reign and presidency of the
Andropogons.
Almost the very sands confess the ripening influence of the August sun,
and methinks, together with the slender grasses waving over them,
reflect a purple tinge. The impurpled sands! Such is the consequence of
all this sunshine absorbed into the pores of plants and of the earth.
All sap or blood is now wine-colored. At last we have not only the
purple sea, but the purple land.
The Chestnut Beard-Grass, Indian-Grass, or Wood-Grass, growing here and
there in waste places, but more rare than the former, (from two to four
or five feet high,) is still handsomer and of more vivid colors than
its congeners, and might well have caught the Indian’s eye. It has a
long, narrow, one-sided, and slightly nodding panicle of bright purple
and yellow flowers, like a banner raised above its reedy leaves. These
bright standards are now advanced on the distant hill-sides, not in
large armies, but in scattered troops or single file, like the red men.
They stand thus fair and bright, representative of the race which they
are named after, but for the most part unobserved as they. The
expression of this grass haunted me for a week, after I first passed
and noticed it, like the glance of an eye. It stands like an Indian
chief taking a last look at his favorite hunting-grounds.