Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau is most famous for writing about his back to nature experiment on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Walden Pond property. And for going to jail rather than paying taxes. But he was also a serious student of botany, particularly the natural fruits he encountered on his walks, which he documented in a notebook published in 2000 as “Wild Fruits.”
Thoreau, perhaps an antecedent to today’s low maintenance edible landscapers, wrote “famous fruits imported from East or South and sold in our markets…do not concern me so much as many an unnoticed wild berry whose beauty annually lends a new charm to some wild walk or which I have found palatable to an outdoor taste.”
Reading this reminds me of Michael McConkey’s Afton, Va Edible Landscaping orchard. Both he and Thoreau devote a lot of space to native plants like shad bushes/juneberries, mulberries, blueberries, blackberries, elderberries, cranberries, plums and native nuts.
Unfortunately however, unlike McConkey’s very practical business, Thoreau is more useful to the result-focused gardener as an ecstatic and often overwrought nature philosopher than as a dependably accurate guide to anything.
For example, Thoreau’s section on roses is limited to discussion of Sweet Briar Rose hips and is hampered by his or his time’s mistaken notion that the Sweet Briar Rose is a Dog Rose with spinier fruits.
Other passages still feel contemporary, albeit formal. “The value of any experience is measured, of course, not by the amount of money, but the amount of development we get out of it…The rich man’s son gets cocoa-nuts and the poor man’s pignuts, but the worst of it is that the former never goes a-cocoa-nutting and so never gets the cream of the cocoa-nut, as the latter does the cream of the pignut…you cannot buy the highest use and enjoyment of [fruits].”
So, Thoreau has some worthwhile tidbit to outweight every passage that elicits a “whatevs bro.”
And he quotes several Roman intellectuals who will be in future blog posts, like Cato the Elder and Pliny.
The next post in this series will focus on German polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s oberservations on roses.
Dog Rose, Rosa Canina
- Sweet Briar Rose, Rosa Rubiginosa
A Practical Pleasure Garden 