Quotes About Trees

The last stretch of our walk was along a curving gravel path that wound through lawns, shrubs, trees, and different-shaped patches of bare earth. Living in the country would be more convenient if they would repeal the law against paths that go straight from one place to another place.

The quiet troubling of the river, and the clean, washed stones, and the green all about, and the trees trying to drown their shadows, and the mountain going up and up behind, there is beautiful it was.

All the way over the mountain, slag heaps were like the backs of buried animals rising as from the Pit. Living trees were buried in them, and in some, gorse was growing with its lamps alight, and grass was trying to be green wherever the wind would let it rest in peace. "Will there be any of the Valley left free of slag?" I said to my father.

Love for trees pours out of her—the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise. These slow, deliberate creatures with their elaborate vocabularies, each distinctive, shaping each other, breeding birds, sinking carbon, purifying water, filtering poisons from the ground, stabilizing the micro-climate. Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intentions.

Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics.

The fraction of an ounce of beechnut now weighs more than she does. But the soil weighs just what it did, minus an ounce or two. There's no other explanation: almost all the tree's mass has come from the very air.

Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.

The polite applause of aspens.

But hope and truth do nothing for humans without use. In the clumpy, clumsy fingerpaint of words, she searches for the use of Old Tjikko, up on that barren crest, endlessly dying and resurrecting in every change of climate. His use is to show that the world is not made for our utility. What use are we to trees?

Tagore said, Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we're near. . . . When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven't yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.

He covers his closed eyes with one hand and says, I'm sorry. No forgiveness comes, or ever will. But here's the thing about trees, the greatest thing: even when he can't see them, even when he can't get near, even when he can't remember how they go, he can climb, and they will hold him high above the ground and let him look out over the arc of the Earth.

So many substances in woodland pharmacies that no one has yet identified. Powerful molecules in bark, pith, and leaves whose effects have yet to be discovered. One family of distress hormones used by her trees—jasmonate—supplies the punch to all those feminine perfumes that play on mystery and intrigue. Sniff me, love me, I'm in trouble. And they are in trouble, all these trees.

The trees thicken like enchanted things. Chestnut is quick: By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser. Bend over to look at a sapling, and it'll put your eye out.

In the dark-paneled courtroom, her words come out of hiding. Love for trees pours out of her—the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise.

Easy Tree IDs.

She looks for the towering black locust, with its fragrant racemes and pea-pod seeds, the tree that stunned Muir into becoming a naturalist. But the world-changing locust was cut down twelve years before.

he's left in the insanity of denying the bedrock of human existence. Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.

But the spruces pour out messages in media of their own invention. They speak through their needles, trunks, and roots. They record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they've lived through.

He held up his hands to the moonlit mountain evidence. The wind-bent trees. The roar of the nearby river. The electrons tumbling down the staircase of their atoms in this singular atmosphere. His face, in the dark, struggled for accuracy. This rich. That's how rich.

People, God love 'em, must write all over beeches. But some people—some fathers—are written all over by trees.

Los viejos árboles son nuestros padres, acaso los padres de nuestros padres. Si aprendierais los secretos de la Naturaleza, derrocharíais más humanidad

Let other trees do the work of the world. Let the Beech stand, where still it holds its ground

The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell. Her maples are signaling. They're linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland. These brainless, stationary trunks are protecting each other.