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

A 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.

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

If the voice of the brook was not the first song of celebration, it must have been at least an obbligato for that event.

There 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.

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!

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