Of all the everyday plants of the earth, grass is the least pretentious and the most important to mankind. It clothes the earth is an unmistakable way. Directly or indirectly it provides the bulk of man's food, his meat, his bread, every scrap of his cereal diet. Without grass we would all starve, we and all our animals. And what a dismal place this world would be!

He 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.

If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.

In 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.

Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.

Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.

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.