“I’ve been sick, joking aside. The trouble seems to be that I wasn’t taken up carefully enough in Franconia nor replanted soon enough in South Shaftsbury. It has been a bad job of transplanting. I lost a lot of roots (the tap root entirely) and the roots I have left are pretty well impaired by too long exposure to the air out of the ground. You’re a poet yourself and finely constituted; so you don’t have to be told how it is with poets. The time of year too has been against me, let them say what they will in rural journalism. Even in the case of evergrins [sic] I find that the fall is not a favorable time for transplanting. And I’m not an evergrin. It has gone hard with me.”

Robert Frost

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“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.”

E. B. White

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