You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

To 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.

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.

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

All man has to do is cooperate with the big forces, the sun, the rain, the growing urge. Seeds sprout, stems grow, leaves spread in the sunlight. Man plants, weeds, cultivates and harvests. It sounds simple, and it is simple, with the simplicity of great truths.

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

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