Thoreau Farm

By Corinne H. Smith

In recent years, Dr. Richard B. Primack and his Boston University associates have used Henry Thoreau’s meticulous botanical notes to track global warming. Henry recorded the days when various flowers bloomed annually in Concord in the 1850s. The BU folks compared his dates to current data and proved that plants were now flowering earlier. Finally, Mr. Thoreau gained the scientific reputation that he deserved all along.

But I have learned that you don’t have to be an academic researcher in order to figure out the difference that a century and a half makes. All you have to do is watch the crab apple trees.

When Thoreau traveled to Minnesota in 1861, he and traveling companion Horace Mann Jr. “botanized” from the train windows. They crossed southern Michigan via the Michigan Central Railroad on May 21, and began to glimpse trees with pink and white blossoms in the distance. What were they? The Massachusetts men weren’t sure. They were given no chances to jump out at any station stops and examine the branches closely.

After spending an extra day in Chicago, the duo crossed northern Illinois on May 23. Again, they saw the mysterious trees in bloom as they rattled through farmland and prairie land. And once again, they never stopped close enough to one to scrutinize it or to grab a sample.

Our northern Spring explodes with pink and white hues: cherry trees, Japanese cherries, apple trees, dogwoods, red buds, crab apples. Each one adds beauty to a landscape that is just beginning to otherwise grow green. The brilliant blossoms can create the most remarkable scenes, especially when the warmer days come on the heels of a cold and colorless Winter. We almost don’t remember that such colors exist, until Spring revives them. Today, it can feel as if we’ve suddenly gone from the set of a 1950s black and white movie to a 21st-century high definition thriller. And sometimes, the transformation can occur overnight.

Henry Thoreau knew about these other trees, but not about the crab apple, Malas coronaria. It was not a New England native. He’d never seen one before. He had read about them, and he had even considered buying one from a Pennsylvania nursery and planting it in his yard in Concord. Now he suspected that this Midwestern specimen was the crab apple that had to date eluded him. He considered it a “half-fabulous tree” and was dismayed that he had been “launched on the bosom of the Mississippi without having touched one.” He may have mourned this lost opportunity.

Thoreau and Mann spent about a month in Minnesota. It wasn’t until June 11th that Henry returned to the idea of tracking down a crab apple. He finally found one that had been planted by a nurseryman who had relocated from Virginia and had brought some southern species with him. Thoreau clipped a sample for his herbarium. But of course, by then the flowers were long gone. He never did get a chance to examine the beautiful blossoms.

The bottom line is that Thoreau saw crab apples in bloom in the Midwest on May 21 and 23, 1861. When did your crab apple blossoms appear this year?

Where I live in southeastern Pennsylvania, the crabs came out during the third week of April. I suspect that they’re still blooming in Massachusetts and other points north as I pen this post. Even taking regional differences into account, our crab apples emerge well before the ones Thoreau saw, back then. Yes, our season begins earlier than his. But wouldn’t Thoreau be pleased to know that, thanks to contemporary landscaping techniques, crab apples now grow in many yards in Concord? Today he wouldn’t have to go far to see one.

It’s an expansive time of year – leaves, light, day’s limits, everything unfurls –  and, when I’m inside, I’m itchy to be elsewhere, as long as “elsewhere” is outside. So, in this season even my reading tends toward travel of a local or farflung nature. Thoreau’s Maine Woods, for all it geographic proximity, seems a right reading; it draws me in the spring. The other day, as Henry and friends pressed deeper into an older, deep-timbered Maine, I came across a character called Kennebec Man; Kennebec Man stuck in my mind, and around this burr of name a small poem formed (It also, despite April’s passing, seems the season of the poem).

What new characters or poems have taken up lodging in your mind?

Reading Lesson – The Maine Woods

“Kennebec Man,” when we meet
you’re in another’s watershed

a seam across the central open
mitt of Maine your river away to

the southeast of this Penobscot that
Henry ascends with friends on his way

to far Ktaadn. What makes you
the moment’s ur-man is the writer’s

habit of surnaming only those
who settle to trade along this route

to an original interior and
perhaps his sympathy for seeing

a fellow elevated by water.
You are gone in the flick

of a page – your life may have
seemed so short too – but all day

you have poled upriver against
the general flow of forgetting

keeping current in my mind
making me wonder who you were.

by Deborah Bier

“If one advances confidently in the direction of one’s dreams, and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Henry Thoreau

On a sunny Saturday in April, at Thoreau Farm, we advanced confidently toward the garden with a new fence in mind, and we were successful beyond our wildest expectations! We built our fence thoughtfully, using as many recycled materials as possible, leaving a small carbon footprint; we wanted our fence to be natural and aesthetically pleasing. And we did not want to use any toxic chemicals.

At Thoreau Farm, we have been fortunate to have very little animal predation other than some small rodents (chipmunks, mice, squirrels). So our fence was mostly to keep young human animals out of the garden where their curious feet might bring them when their parents looked away.

We live a little more than a mile from Thoreau Farm, and last summer my husband, Rich, had felled some trees in our yard – a white oak, a spruce, and some self-sowed crab apples. We also had a number of large sycamore branches downed in storms. So, we had a huge pile of brush, and, instead of an enormous spring burn (Rich’s preference), I realized we could find most of our fence materials in this lovely wood.

Happily, we were able to cut all our posts and vertical fence members from this backyard wood, and as we did this, we grouped each type of wood (or at least tried to) to a single length of fence, our thinking being that each type of wood would rot at a different speed. When replacement time arrived, we would then replace an entire section of fence at the same time, rather than single pieces here and there.

To hold together these vertical slats, we used modern milled pine strapping. We knew that, at first, this fresh wood would stick out visibly, but that it would also age pleasantly in about a year, especially if we kept it outdoors over the winter. Though this aging would shorten the lifespan of the fence, it would be more aesthetically pleasing when seen in relation to the house’s circa-1878 exterior.

We built the fence over two weekends, using enthusiastic volunteers from our kitchen garden committee, their spouses, and other friends of Thoreau Farm. Our fence-building was like a barn-raising, only much, much more manageable. Still, the effect of neighbors working together with our hands to create something useful and beautiful was a pleasure and delight.

Yes, we used modern fasteners and tools — some human powered, others electric. But one must recall that our kitchen garden is not an historic re-enactment, but rather a working experiment in combining heirloom seeds with cutting edge organic and bio-intensive gardening methods.

As the fence went up that fresh wood just bugged me: it was so raw, and yet I hated to reduce the lifespan of the fence just to weather it. And then I recalled that I knew something about how to make new wood appear old, without using toxic chemicals or esoteric ingredients. I had learned of this process on Pinterest, of all places. Using this info, I created a brown stain by soaking steel wool in white vinegar for 5 days. The resulting solution was surprisingly light, at first, showing as just slightly more brown than the color of the wood. Within 30 seconds, however, it was considerably darker. After another minute, it was very dark. We could not believe how amazingly well it worked — we kept looking and exclaiming about it!

Afterward, we agreed that it was actually a bit comical how surprised we were, because it’s likely a process folks knew and took for granted back in Thoreau’s day, part of the every-day “how to do things” knowledge acquired by people here for centuries. Now, this knowledge had become rare again, exotic even.

Then it struck us: why should we all be so surprised? Don’t we recount on the Thoreau Farmhouse tour how the backs of houses used to be painted red using pigments made with inexpensive iron oxide? Which is just another way of saying “rust”! I don’t know why, but it took us all this time to put that together. Now, I recall that I read somewhere they had used iron nails instead of steel wool for stain, but hadn’t understood it until now. But what a great use for too bent or broken nails.

I also learned from Pinterest that you can use pennies and vinegar to create a blue stain. According to this article, you have to find pennies with a 1962 or earlier date, since there is so little copper in them now.
We can’t wait to try it!