A root, a stem, a leaf, some means of capturing sunlight and air and making food – in sum, a plant. The green substance of this earth, the chlorophyll, is all summed up in the plants. Without them we perish, all of us who are flesh and blood.
March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.
The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.
For all his learning or sophistication, man still instinctively reaches towards that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence, and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is.
There are some things, but not too many, toward which the countryman knows he must be properly respectful if he would avoid pain, sickness and injury. Nature is neither punitive nor solicitous, but she has thorns and fangs as wells as bowers and grassy banks.
A frontier is never a place; it is a time and a way of life.
The longer I live and the more I read, the more certain I become that the real poems about spring aren’t written on paper. They are written in the back pasture and the near meadow, and they are issued in a new revised edition every April.
Any river is really the summation of the whole valley. To think of it as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part.
As I stood and watched the mists slowly rising this morning I wondered what view was more beautiful than this.
You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.
Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.
Green, the color of growth, or surgent life, enwraps the land. New green, still as individual as the plants themselves. Cool green, which will merge as the weeks pass, the Summer comes, into a canopy of shade of busy chlorophyll.
For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year’s end.
For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England, there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.
The owl, that bird of onomatopoetic name, is a repetitious question wrapped in feathery insulation especially for Winter delivery.
The most unhappy thing about conservation is that it is never permanent. Save a priceless woodland or an irreplaceable mountain today, and tomorrow it is threatened from another quarter.
If the voice of the brook was not the first song of celebration, it must have been at least an obbligato for that event.
He who travels west travels not only with the sun but with history.
Consider the wheelbarrow. It may lack the grace of an airplane, the speed of an automobile, the initial capacity of a freight car, but its humble wheel marked out the path of what civilization we still have.
Nature seems to look after her own only up to a certain point; beyond that they are supposed to fend for themselves.
There it is, fog, atmospheric moisture still uncertain in destination, not quite weather and not altogether mood, yet partaking of both.