Protecting, Nurturing and Beautifying Landscapes in the Hamptons Since 1980
Theodore Roosevelt, 1907 Arbor Day Message
It is well that you should celebrate your Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetime the nation’s need of trees will become serious. We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted.
OSHO
Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars… and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers – for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.
Joyce Kilmer, “Trees,” 1914
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies, 1928
“Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.”
William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”, 1803
“To me the meanest flower that blows can give. Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982
“Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?”
Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964
“A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.”
John Muir
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
Native American Proverb
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
Woody Allen
As the poet said, “only God can make a tree” – probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
Cree Indian Proverb
Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.
Anonymous
The best part of happiness is the pines.