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Trees
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“... when I am alone in the forest I always say my prayers; and that occasional solitary communion with God is surely the only true religion for intelligent beings.”
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“A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.”
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“Where once stood the steadfast pines, great, beautiful, sweet, my hand touched raw, moist stumps. All about lay broken branches, like the antlers of stricken deer. The fragrant, piled-up sawdust swirled and tumbled about me. An unreasoning resentment flashed through me at the ruthless destruction of the beauty that I love.”
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“A rainy day is the perfect time for a walk in the woods.”
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“Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature, is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place?”
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“Upon the highest ridge of that round hill covered with planted oaks, the shafts of the trees show in the light like the columns of a ruin.”
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“One only leaf upon the top of a tree — the sole remaining leaf — danced round and round like a rag blown by the wind.”
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“Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.”
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“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”
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“... the trees, though not fully clothed, were in that delightful state, when farther beauty is known to be at hand, and when, while much is actually given to the sight, more yet remains for the imagination.”
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“He looks at trees with an astonishing degree of love and trust and penetration; almost as though he were exiled from being a tree himself.”
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“I cannot love evergreens — they are the misanthropes of nature. To them the spring brings no promise, the autumn no decline; they are cut off from the sweetest of all ties with their kind — sympathy. ... I will have no evergreens in my garden; when the inevitable winter comes, every beloved plant and favorite tree shall drop together — no solitary fir left to triumph over the companionship of decay.”
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“A dead tree, falling, made less havoc than a live one. It seemed as though a live tree went down fighting, like an animal.”
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“It is impossible to be among the woods animals on their own ground without a feeling of expanding one's own world, as when any foreign country is visited.”
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“Maples are such sociable trees ... They're always rustling and whispering to you.”
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“... trees, unlike so many humans, always improve on acquaintance. No matter how much you like them at the start you are sure to like them much better further on, and best of all when you have known them for years and enjoyed intercourse with them in all seasons.”
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“Trees have as much individuality as human beings. Not even two spruces are alike. There is always some kink or curve or bend of bough to single each one out from its fellows.”
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“A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree.”
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“The talking oak / To the ancients spoke. / But any tree / Will talk to me.”
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“... there is no woe the forest can not heal, nor any grief.”
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“Now plums were ripening in the wild-plum thickets all along Plum Creek. Plum trees were low trees. They grow close together, with many little scraggly branches all strung with thin-skinned, juicy plums. Around them the air was sweet and sleepy, and wings hummed.”
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“There is memory in the forest.”
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“Every time I meet a tree, if I am truly awake, I stand in awe before it. I listen to its voice, a silent sermon moving me to the depths, touching my heart, and stirring up within my soul a yearning to give my all.”
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“It is such a comfort to nestle up to Michael Angelo Sanzio Raphael when one is in trouble. He is such a grand tree. He has an understanding soul. After I talked with him and listened unto his voice, I slipped down out of his arms.”
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“When one does look up at the grand trees growing up almost to the sky, one does always have longings to pray.”
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“The woods is gray in winter, when come cold days. And gray shadows walk among the trees. They touch one's face with velvet fingers, when one goes walking there in the woods. In the winter, old gray leaves grow to look like lace.”
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“For millennia the two-million acre redwood ecosystem thrived and sheltered myriad species of life. In the last 150 years, 97 percent of the original redwood forests have been destroyed by timber corporations. ... Big business cut-and-run logging operations have instilled a false dichotomy: jobs versus the environment.”
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“I lean against the birch-tree, / My arms around it twine, / It pulses, and leaps, and quivers, / Like a human heart to mine.”
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“I was lying under the alder tree. My soul was completely under its spell. I looked up into its leaves. The sun dyed them a shining yellow. And thus they stood on their delicate red stems and laughed into the sky.”
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“... enter into the life of the trees. Know your relationship and understand their language, unspoken, unwritten talk. Answer back to them with their own dumb magnificence, soul words, earth words, the God in you responding to the God in them.”
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“Oaks sometimes endure the worst conditions. Other times, with a touchiness hard to believe, they topple over in the dead of a soundless night, and the heavy thud can be heard for miles.”
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“... there was not a tree on the place, only the horrible prickly pear bushes thrusting out their distorted arms as if exulting in their own nakedness.”
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“The trees tell secrets.”
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“... I became intensely aware of the being-ness of trees. The feel of rough sun-warmed bark of an ancient forest giant, or the cool, smooth skin of a young and eager sapling, gave me a strange, intuitive sense of the sap as it was sucked up by unseen roots and drawn up to the very tips of the branches, high overhead.”
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“It is the peculiar nature of the forest, that life and death may ever be found within its bounds, in immediate presence of each other; both with ceaseless, noiseless advances, aiming at the mastery; and if the influences of the first be most general, those of the last are the most striking.”
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“Of the infinite variety of fruits which spring from the bosom of the earth, the trees of the wood are the greatest in dignity.”
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“What a noble gift to man are the forests! What a debt of gratitude and admiration we owe for their utility and their beauty!”
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“Suddenly a mist of green on the trees, as quiet as thought.”
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“The trees change their voices in autumn as well as their shapes. No longer do they whisper to one another in muffled tones as they did in summer; they talk in a different leaf-language now. The wind moves through the boughs like fingers drawn across the strings of a harp filling the air with the harsh dry sound of sapless leaves. It is the main theme of the autumn music, this murmuring counterpoint of dead leaves.”
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“It is quite affecting to observe how much the olive tree is to the country people. Its fruit supplies them with food, medicine and light; its leaves, winter fodder for the goats and sheep; it is their shelter from the heat and its branches and roots supply them with firewood. The olive tree is the peasant's all-in-all.”
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“She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap.”
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“Depth isn't everything: the spruce / has no taproot, but to hold on / spreads its underpinnings thin — ...”
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“That is the charm of woods, anyway. Things live and breathe quietly and out of sight. You can sense it, but you don't know what or even if it isn't the wood itself, more alive than it seems.”
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“Trees move / at least as much as we do, / if only their heads and arms.”
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“He who plants a tree / Plants a hope.”
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“Trees is soul people to me, maybe not to other people, but I have watched the trees when they pray, and I've watched them shout and sometimes they give thanks slowly and quietly.”
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“You can't replace a tree anyway. Like people, you don't know how big they were till they're gone.”
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“I prayed to trees. This was easier than praying directly to God. There was nearly always a tree nearby.”
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“Today I have grown taller from walking with the trees.”
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“[Winter trees] are like tall-bodied women dancing unclothed in the tingling embrace of sky and wind ...”
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“... the aspen has éclat, a glorious brashness in defiance of the rules, the flapper who does the Charleston in the midst of the grand waltz.”
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“Here and there on the branch of an oak a congress of leaves still clung, rigid as flakes of bronze.”
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“The willows were sharp with tiny new leaves like the ears of baby field mice, transparent and infinitely frail.”
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“... the woods, tall as waves, sang in mixed / tongues that loosened the scalp ...”
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“Planting trees is a venture into the future, it is a hand held out to other generations.”
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“... why on earth do the French torture trees? Why those aggressive amputations? Espalier and cordon, fan-trained or pyramidal are all brilliant and desirable forms in certain places, but in France they seem to go mad with hostility toward their trees.”
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“Together with a few human beings, dead and living, and their achievements, trees are what I most love and revere.”
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“The wild apple trees were one shout of joy ...”
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“Wind / Gives speech / To trees.”
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“For the hewn oak a century fair, / A wound in earth, an ache in air.”
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“... the woods seemed all answer and healing and more than enough to live for ...”
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“The dead elm leaves hung like folded bats.”
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“Trees are more than just havens for animals, birds, insects, and humans; they are also the lungs of the earth. Just as we breathe oxygen into our lungs and exhale carbon dioxide, so trees breathe carbon dioxide into their leaves and exhale oxygen. Trees are really upside-down lungs: their trunks are equivalent to the trachea, their branches to the right and left main bronchi, and all their branching twigs and leaves to small bronchi and alveoli, or air sacs, where the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide takes place. Tree trunks and branches may appear solid, but they are really rigid channels that transmit water and nutrients to the leaves, the way the trachea and air passages transmit air to the alveoli.”
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“Summer is burning! From trees' red crowns / Ashes of June pour hotly down.”
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“Trees are so serious; it doesn't matter / about their hair, which is a distraction.”
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“The little birches haunt the hills / In silent, silver masses, / Their violet velvet shadow robes / Beside them on the grasses.”
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“The old trees have recorded another year, letting out their tough bark girdles to accommodate the new layer of muscle and adipose.”
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“What mighty battles have I seen and heard waged between the trees and the west wind — an Iliad fought in the fields of air.”
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“The trees? Could you explain to me / their unrelenting whispering? / The wind may know, you say to me, / but how, is just a mystery.”
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“When I stepped away from the white pine, I had the definite feeling that we had exchanged some form of life energy. ... Clearly white pines and I are on the same wavelength. What I give back to the trees I cannot imagine. I hope they receive something, because trees are among my closest friends.”