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 (_Eragrostis pectinacea_) is now in the height of its
beauty. I remember still when I first noticed this grass particularly.
Standing on a hill-side 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 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 hill-sides 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 hill-sides. 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.