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.

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

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

April is a promise that May is bound to keep.

Nature seems to look after her own only up to a certain point; beyond that they are supposed to fend for themselves.

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen.

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.