Literary Pilgrimages of a NaturalistPackard, Winthrop
History
Literary Pilgrimages of a Naturalist
Packard, Winthrop
Natural history -- Outdoor books; New England -- Description and travel
“The wide-spreading pond and the mill that stood by it” have long
since done their work and the mill of Woodworth’s day has passed.
Yet the pond remains in all respects as he knew it, the deep
tangled wildwood lining its one shore, the road and a fringe of
houses skirting the other, and below it another mill, long since
fallen into disuse and decay, for the one that Woodworth recalled
was a product of the century before the last one. Over the stones
of the old dam the water trickles down and meets the salt tides
of the sea, and here at a step the boy of more than a century
ago passed from one country of romance to another. Up stream lie
to-day as they did then the rolling billows of land, fertile
fields, wooded hills and the tangle of swamp and thicket that is,
I believe, more luxuriant in those parts of Plymouth County where
the forest comes down to the sea than in any other place. I have
never found, in tropical jungle or the warmer countries of the
temperate zone, such matted areas of richly growing shrub and vine
as you meet in these Plymouth County bottom lands where the fresh
water comes down to meet the salt. Fox grapes luxuriate there and
woodbine and convolvulus climb and twine, but the toughest of the
tangle is due to the greenbrier, to penetrate which one needs to
use a machete as much as ever Cuban did in Camaguay. The greenbrier
is tough and its thorns repellent, yet its glossy smilax leaves
are beautifully decorative and its close-set bunches of deep blue
fruit, now ripe, please the eye if not the palate. Thickets like
these border the pasture paths in this rich bottom land walling
in the wanderer with high tapestried walls of vivid green, richly
patterned with varied leaves and flowers the long summer through.
Somewhere there may be a more beautiful country than such pasture
land. Wandering far I have failed to find it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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