We now have roses on the land and lilies on the water--both land and water have done their best--now, just after the longest day. Nature says, "You behold the utmost I can do." The red rose, with the intense colour of many suns concentrated, spreads its tender petals perfectly fair, its flower not to be overlooked, modest yet queenly, on the edges of shady copses and meadows.... And the water-lily floats on the smooth surface of slow waters, amid rounded shields of leaves, bucklers, red beneath, which simulate a green field, perfuming the air. The highest, intensest colour belongs to the land; the purest, perchance, to the water.
It was not Thoreau's practice to pluck many flowers; he preferred, as a rule, to leave them where they were; but he speaks of the fitness of having "in a vase of water on your table the wildflowers of the season which are just blossoming": thus in mid-June he brings home some rosebuds ready to expand, "and the next morning they open and fill my chamber with fragrance." At another time the grateful thought of the calamint's scent suffices him: "I need not smell it; it is a balm to my mind to remember its fragrance."
It was characteristic of Thoreau that he loved to renew his outdoor pleasures in remembrance, by pondering over the beautiful things he had witnessed, whether through sight or sound or scent. His mountain excursions were not fully apprehended by him, until he had afterwards meditated on them. "It is after we get home," he says, "that we really go over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do?" So it was with his flowers: even in the long winter evenings they were still his companions and friends.
I have remembered, when the winter came, High in my chamber in the frosty nights,
How, in the shimmering noon of summer past, Some unrecorded beam slanted across The upland pastures where the johnswort grew.
On a January date we find him writing in his _Journal_: "Perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. How we leap by the side of the open brooks! What life, what society! The cold is merely superficial; it is summer still at the core." Thus, by memory, his winters were turned into summers, and his flower-seasons were continuous.