
“The ash has lost its leaves and when I went out to get the mail and stopped to look up at it, I rejoiced to think that soon everything here will be honed down to structure. It is all a rich farewell now to leaves, to color. I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.”
May Sarton
more infosource: Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), 34.
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category: autumn, let go, nature, tree
medium: Journal
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way.”
William Blake
more infosource: letter to Reverend Dr. Trusler, August 23, 1799, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 702.
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medium: Letter
“Light is not easily perceived unless it falls on something. And much of the time the largest, most complex object visible outdoors will be a tree, or a mass of them—a wood, a forest. Therefore it is often when we look at trees that we actually see the beauty of a certain light.”
Martin Gayford
more infosource: A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 110.
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medium: Nonfiction
“A tree that lives a thousand years might know something about survival.”
David Milarch
more infosource: quoted in The Man Who Planted Trees by Jim Robbins (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2012), 8.
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category: nature, survival, tree
medium: Nonfiction
“Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.”
Jim Robbins
more infosource: “Why Trees Matter,” New York Times, April 11, 2012.
category: environment, ocean, sea, tree
medium: Op-Ed
“There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I’ll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! Think of it!”
Ray Bradbury
more info“I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they’re beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music.”
Maurice Sendak
more infosource: “The Pig Wants to Party: Maurice Sendak’s Latest,” Fresh Air with Terry Gross, NPR, September 20, 2011. Transcript here.
category: aging, beauty, maple, nature, tree
medium: Interview
“I think you would like the chestnut-tree I met in my walk. It hit my notice suddenly, and I thought the skies were in blossom.”
Emily Dickinson
more infosource: 1862 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894), 308.
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category: chestnut, nature, sky, tree
medium: Letter
“I cannot get enough alone to write a letter to a friend. I retreat & hide. I left the city, I hid myself in the pastures. When I bought a house, the first thing I did was to plant trees. I could not conceal myself enough. Set a hedge here, set pines there, trees & trees, set evergreens, above all, for they will keep my secret all year round.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
more infosource: July 1849 entry, Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 401–402.
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category: introvert, privacy, solitude, tree
medium: Journal
“Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light,—to see its perfect success.”
Henry David Thoreau
more infosource: The Maine Woods (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1864), 123–24.
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category: forest, nature, pine, tree
medium: nonfiction
“Older and less planned quarters of cities and towns are profoundly woodlike, and especially in this matter of the mode of their passage through us, the way they unreel, disorientate, open, close, surprise, please. The stupidest mistake of all the many stupid mistakes of twentieth-century architecture has been to forget this ancient model in the more grandiose town-planning. Geometric, linear cities make geometric, linear people; wood cities make human beings.”
John Fowles
more infosource: The Tree (New York: Ecco, 1983), 61.
category: architecture, city, geometry, human being, mistake, nature, tree, wood
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via: Kevin Lippert“One of my resolutions for the year is to learn how to identify more of the trees and flowers where I live. Of course, once you learn the names of trees and flowers, you want to know their personal histories as well—so I have a great pile of botanical guidebooks growing on my bedside table already.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
more infosource: “Inside the List,” by Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times, December 24, 2010.
category: flower, nature, resolution, tree
medium: newspaper article
“Falling leaves return to their roots.”
Adeline Yen Mah
more infosource: Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter (London: M. Joseph, 1997), 271.
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category: compost, cycle of life, environment, leaf, nature, proverb, root, tree
medium: memoir
via: Louise Buckley“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
more infosource: “Education,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1944), 57.
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category: city living, earth, elm, magic, New York City, transplant, tree, wonder
medium: essay
notes: White wrote this essay in March 1939.
“Halfway up the slope, guarded by a group of tall, slim cypress trees, nestled a small strawberry-pink villa, like some exotic fruit lying in the greenery. The cypress trees undulated gently in the breeze, as if they were busily painting the sky a still brighter blue for our arrival.”
Gerald Durrell
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