“There was a time when only God could make a tree, but now John D. Rockefeller, Jr. can do it too. Our visit to New York happens to coincide with the arrival of the great elms along Fifth Avenue, those lovely seventy-foot trees which are springing full grown from the pavement in front of Radio City.”

***

“I think elm-birth is the prettiest fairy tale in the city’s wonderbook, for the big trees are delivered at night, when earth hangs down away from the light and fowls are stirring on their roosts. In all the long swing of time there has never been a fortnight such as this—these midnights when late strolling citizens come suddenly on a giant elm, arriving furtively in the marketplace and sliding into position for early risers to discover on their way to work.”

—both quotes come from E. B. White’s March 1939 essay “Education,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1944), 57.