A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.
Hal BorlandIn a painful time of my life I went often to a wooded hillside where May apples grew by the hundreds, and I thought the sourness of their fruit had a symbolism for me. Instead, I was to find both love and happiness soon thereafter. So to me [the May apple] is the mandrake, the love symbol, of the old dealers in plant restoratives.
Hal BorlandTo see a hillside white with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty, but to walk the gray Winter woods and find the buds which will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity.
Hal BorlandAutumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?
Hal BorlandThe hush comes with the deepening of Autumn; but it comes gradually. Our ears are attuned to it, day by quieter day. But even now, if one awakens in the deep darkness of the small hours, one can hear it, a foretaste of Winter silence. It’s a little painful now, and a little lonely because it is so strange.
Hal BorlandYou can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.
Hal BorlandYou 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.
Hal BorlandThe 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.
Hal BorlandConsider 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.
Hal BorlandIf the voice of the brook was not the first song of celebration, it must have been at least an obbligato for that event.
Hal BorlandTime after time ... today's crisis shrinks to next week's footnote to a newly headline disaster.
Hal BorlandA snowdrift is a beautiful thing - if it doesn't lie across the path you have to shovel or block the road that leads to your destination.
Hal BorlandEach new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.
Hal BorlandOctober is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.
Hal BorlandKnowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.
Hal BorlandHere and there one sees the blush of wild rose haws or the warmth of orange fruit on the bittersweet, and back in the woods is the occasional twinkle of partridgeberries. But they are the gem stones, the rare decorations which make the grays, the browns and the greens seem even more quiet, more completely at rest.
Hal BorlandNo Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.
Hal BorlandThe owl, that bird of onomatopoetic name, is a repetitious question wrapped in feathery insulation especially for Winter delivery.
Hal BorlandThe earth turns, and the seasons, and for all his pride and power man cannot temper the winds or change their course. They are the unseen tides that shape our days and our years.
Hal BorlandListen to it, and you are hearing the mighty currents of the air rushing down the latitudes of the earth, currents from the Mackenzie and the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan, and from the prairies and the white Tundra. It is a homeless wind, forever on the move.
Hal BorlandMan is not an aquatic animal, but from the time we stand in youthful wonder beside a Spring brook till we sit in old age and watch the endless roll of the sea, we feel a strong kinship with the waters of this world.
Hal BorlandThere 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.
Hal BorlandTwo sounds of autumn are unmistakable...the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street...by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.
Hal BorlandSome people are like ants. Give them a warm day and a piece of ground and they start digging. There the similarity ends. Ants keepon digging. Most people don't. They establish contact with the soil, absorb so much vernal vigor that they can't stay in one place, and desert the fork or spade to see how the rhubarb is coming and whether the asparagus is yet in sight.
Hal BorlandThere are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have but to touch the wind to know these things.
Hal BorlandThere are no idealists in the plant world and no compassion. The rose and the morning glory know no mercy. Bindweed, the morning glory, will quickly choke its competitors to death, and the fencerow rose will just as quietly crowd out any other plant that tried to share its roothold. Idealism and mercy are human terms and human concepts.
Hal BorlandIf you ever wondered why fishing is probably the most popular sport in this country, watch that boy beside on the water and you will learn. If you are really perceptive you will. For he already knows that fishing is only one part fish.
Hal BorlandWhen we talk of flood control, we usually think of dams and deeper river channels, to impound the waters or hurry their run-off. Yet neither is the ultimate solution, simply because floods are caused by the flow of water downhill. If the hills are wooded, that flow is checked. If there is a swamp at the foot of the hills, the swamp sponges up most of the excess water, restores some of it to the underground water supply and feeds the remainder slowly into the streams. Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.
Hal BorlandThe 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.
Hal BorlandMarch is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.
Hal BorlandHe who walks may see and understand. You can study all America from one hilltop, if your eyes are open and your mind is willing to reach. But first you must walk to that hill.
Hal BorlandYear's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
Hal BorlandStrip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.
Hal BorlandNature seems to look after her own only up to a certain point; beyond that they are supposed to fend for themselves.
Hal BorlandThe 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.
Hal BorlandSummer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.
Hal BorlandGreen, 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.
Hal BorlandTo know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.
Hal Borland