“Thursday.  P.M. — To Dugan Desert and Ministerial Swamp.  The character of the past month, as I remember, has been, at first, very thick and sultry, dogdayish, the height of summer, and throughout very rainy, followed by crops of toadstools, and latterly, after the dogdays and most copious of the rains, autumnal, somewhat cooler, with signs of decaying or ripening foliage.  The month of green corn and melons and plums and the earliest apples, — and now peaches, — of rank weeds.  As July, perchance, has its spring side, so August has its autumnal side….  The Hieracium Canadense is, methinks, the largest and handsomest flower of its genus, large as the fall dandelion; the paniculatum the most delicate.  To-day and yesterday quite warm, or hot, again.  I am struck again and again by the richness of the meadow-beauty lingering, though it will last some time, in little dense purple patches by the sides of the meadows.  It is so low it escapes the scythe.  It is not so much distinct flowers (it is so low and dense), but a colored patch on the meadow.  Yet how few observe it!  How, in one sense, it is wasted!  How little thought the mower or the cranberry-raker bestows on it!  How few girls or boys come to see it!”

(Journal, 5:407-12)