Tree Quotes, Wisdom, and Lore

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

ANONYMOUS

Trees outstrip most people in the extent and depth of their work for the public good.

SARA EBENRECK of AMERICAN FORESTS

In the battle to save the planet, trees are on the front lines.

LESTER R. BROWN, WORLDWATCH INSTITUTE

He who plants a tree plants hope.

LUCY LARCOM

I never before knew the full value of trees. Under them I breakfast, dine, write, read, and receive my company.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose. Plant it this afternoon!'

JOHN F. KENNEDY

The cultivation of trees is the cultivation of the good, the beautiful, and the ennobling in man.

J. STERLING MORTON

They are beautiful in their peace, they are wise in their silence. They will stand until after we are dust. They teach us, and we tend them.

GALAINIP ALTEIEM MACDUNELMOR

The woods are alive! The bustle of our man-made world is shut out. You sit motionless in the woods on some moss, under a friendly old tree, and feel like you are a million and one miles away from traffic snarls, shopping malls, newscasts, and junk mail.

SALLY WASOWSKI, REQUIEM FOR A LAWNMOWER, 1992.

To exist as a nation, to prosper as a state, and to live as a people, we must have trees.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make magnificent colonnades along its streets.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Planting a tree is a nice thing to do.

ANDY AND KATIE LIPKIS of TREEPEOPLE

Tree planting takes the simple act of an individual and elevates it, revealing the truth about where true power rests in the world. The result of a single person's planting can be monumental, and when individual acts are added up, the result is powerful evidence of what one can do for the world.

ANDY AND KATIE LIPKIS of TREEPEOPLE

Look around your neighborhood, wherever you live. If the trees are getting old and there are no youngsters to replace them, take action….There is a two-fold advantage in allowing your native trees to seed out. First, the costs are dramatically less than buying, planting, and watering nursery-grown trees. Second, instead of planting ill-adapted or environmentally harmful trees, you are preserving the very trees and gene pools that are tailor-made by Mother Nature for where you live.

SALLY WASOWSKI, REQUIEM FOR A LAWNMOWER, 1992.

You can gauge a country's wealth, its real wealth, by its tree cover.

RICHARD ST. BARBE BAKER

I never saw a disconcerted tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted, they travel about as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day.

JOHN MUIR

THE MAN WHO PLANTED HOPE AND GREW HAPPINESS

Jean Giono writes of a humble shepherd named Elzeard Bouffier who lived alone in a deserted and barren region of the southern French Alps in the early part of this century. It was his opinion that the land was dying for want of trees. Confessing to no pressing business of his own, he had resolved to remedy this state of affairs. Every day, while tending his sheep, he planted acorns. When the author met him, he was growing beech trees in a nursery near his cottage and was considering birches for the valleys. Ten years later, the oaks and birches had formed a young forest. Formerly dry streams now ran with water. The wind scattered seeds and, with the water, willows, rushes, meadows, gardens, and flowers reappeared. The transformation took place so gradually it caused no astonishment other than the delight of discovery by the local administration of what appeared to be a natural forest. Thirty years later, the earlier barren landscape was unrecognizable. Along with the forest and water came a changed climate, a healthy agriculture, and a new, energetic population. One unlearned peasant, armed with a greatness of spirit and the tenacity of benevolence, had completed a work worthy of God.

from TREEPEOPLE