This Then is Upland Pastures Being some out-door essays dealing with the beautiful things that the spring and summer bring — A Reader’s Guide

The Season's Frankness and the Human Longing

Knapp contrasts the early spring's sociability with the later season's busy rush. She notes that in a few weeks, plants will be too occupied with growth to visit with even the lovingest human friends. This observation leads her to a striking meditation on memory and expectation: each winter she thinks she remembers the spring's charm, yet each year it arrives as a new and unknown joy. The hope of spring quickens purest impulses, and she asks who does not dream that this best will withstand summer's heat and drouth. She then turns to a theological reflection, noting that the worshipping instinct vests nature in a personality we have long since pronounced unthinkable when applied to God. The situation, she says, has a saving humor that relieves it from grotesqueness. This passage reveals Knapp's method: close attention to natural phenomena becomes a springboard for philosophical inquiry, but she never loses the concrete detail.

The Dandelion's Lesson in Co-operation

In a later essay, Knapp examines a dandelion head, pulling apart its tiny florets. She observes that each wee tube or strap could have little life outside the aggregate blossom, yet the integrity and perfection of each is essential to the whole. The tiny single flower, if left alone, would attain ripeness, take to itself wings, and sail off to renew its life perhaps a thousand miles away. She notes that a poet might find a sonnet in its flight, a scientist universal law, a seer an argument for life eternal. But she emphasizes the law of co-operation: the isolated being is everywhere the comparatively helpless being. She compares a tree growing alone in a field—often more symmetrical—to a forest tree that makes better timber. The conclusion is that we must live with and for our fellows, but he does this best who opens widest his soul to the Source and grows to the full stature of a man, helping on the composite flower of the race, human civilization.

Scouring-Rush: A Miniature Forest with a Deep Past

Knapp describes discovering a forest of scouring-rush along a spring's margin, amid a tangle of wild blackberry. She loves to put her face close to the earth and, looking through the green stems, fancy herself a wee brownie wandering among a dense wilderness of pines. She details the growth process: slender brown fingers thrust up through the soil, then spread out brief verticillate branches as proudly as any great tree. The farmer dismisses them as no good, calling them horsetail. But Knapp recalls their many names—candle-rush, scouring-rush, equisetum—and their history: grandmothers strewed floors with them to keep boards snowy, and they were used for scouring. She then reveals that the rush belongs to the carboniferous age, having reached its highest perfection before man appeared. Its progenitors flourished with giant ferns and rank mosses. This juxtaposition of the puny present with a vast geological past gives the essay a temporal depth that enriches the immediate observation.

Knapp's essays reward readers who attend to both the precise natural detail and the philosophical turn. She does not offer a systematic argument but a series of thoughtful encounters, each grounded in a specific plant or season. The book's structure—short, focused pieces—invites dipping in and out, but reading sequentially reveals recurring concerns: the balance between individuality and co-operation, the tension between human longing and nature's indifference, and the deep time embedded in common things. Approach these essays as you would a spring walk: slowly, with attention to what is underfoot.

I finished This Then is Upland Pastures feeling like spring itself had briefly moved through me—her scouring-rush carried the weight of centuries without hurry. That quiet patience reminded me of another voice, softer still, in Miscellaneous Studies; a series of essays — Themes and Context. Both linger the way moss does, barely noticed until you stop to look.