Any time you need to get out, get calm, and breathe, I recommend a visit with the Redwoods. They’re some of the earth’s oldest breathing citizens, who count time in decades and centuries instead of seconds.

This is a small tribute to the trees and caretakers of the Armstrong Redwoods near Guerneville, California.

 

Invest in the millennium.  Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit.   Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
–    Wendell Berry,
from Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
published in The Country of Marriage

 

 

Trees are the earth’s endless efforts to speak to the listening heaven.
– Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies

The greatest gift of a garden is the restoration of the five senses.
– Hanna Rion, Let’s Make a Flower Garden

 

Visitors were enchanted by crooked, gnarled trees I would previously have dismissed because of their low commercial value. Walking with my visitors, I learned to pay attention to more than just the quality of the trees’ trunks.
– Peter Wohlleben, from the introduction
to
The Hidden Life of Trees

 

 

 

Restoration ecology is experimental science…. In its attempts to reverse the processes of ecosystem degradation it runs exactly counter…to the whole cultural attitude of regarding the Earth as commodity rather than community.
–   Stephanie Mills 

 

…most individual trees of the same species growing in the same stand are connected to each other through their root systems. It appears that nutrient exchange and helping neighbors in times of need is the rule, and this leads to the conclusion that forests are superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies.
–  Peter Wohlleben,
The Hidden Life of Trees

 

 

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
–  Henry David Thoreau

 

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
– Mary Oliver, from When I Am Among the Trees from Thirst

 

In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks. –  John Muir

 

What did the tree learn from the earth
to be able to talk with the sky?
–  Pablo Neruda

 

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.
–  William Blake