Aspen Leaf Quotes

Just because I loves you– That's de reason why Ma soul is full of color Like de wings of a butterfly. Just because I loves you That's de reason why Ma heart's a fluttering aspen leaf When you pass by.

Silence and twilight fell over the garden. Far away the sea was lapping gently and monotonously on the bar. The wind of evening in the poplars sounded like some sad, weird old rune-some broken dream of old memories. A slender, shapely young aspen rose up before them against the fine maize and emerald and paling rose of the western sky, which brought out every leaf and twig in dark, tremulous, elfin loveliness.

Those late August mornings smelt of autumn from day-break till the hour when the sun-baked earth allowed the cool sea breezes to drive back the then less heavy aroma of threshed wheat, open furrows, and reeking manure. A persistent dew clung sparkling to the skirts of the hedgerows, and if, about noon, Vinca came upon a fallen aspen leaf, the white underside of its still green surface would be damp and glistening. Moist mushrooms poked up through the earth and, now that the nights were chillier, garden spiders retired in the evenings to the shed where the playthings were kept, and there wisely took up their abode on the ceiling.

A red leaf danced from a branch like a dropping flame, down into the calm blue lake. A gust had broken it free. There was a cold bite in the wind. It was now deep autumn in the mountains.

We were in the woods, and not a parent or a friend on earth knew where. At this moment, we were untraceable, this notion an odd pleasure. A patch of fallen leaves glowed in a pool of golden sun, and the dim forest air smelled sweet, of young lilac, invisible sage.

Seamless like a fall leaf changing color, my will switched powerfully.

Just fancy! One can hear and see the grass growing,' thought Levin, as he noticed wet slate-coloured aspen leaf move close to the point of a blade of grass.

I buried her like a pagan. I put deer bones in with her, for her journey; a blanket, for warmth; flowers, cedar fronds, stones from places we’d been, grouse feathers, a tidbit of raw venison hamburger, and a swatch of my own hair. A headstone, a footstone. I planted an aspen tree above the headstone, to give her shade, and to someday provide leaf-music in the breeze. It took a long time before I was worth a damn again. How to measure the eleven years of magic she brought to us? How, now, to say thank you? Too late, as usual, for these sorts of things.

Greenery Juniper, Oracle Oak and Hop Tree, California Buckeye, and Elderberry. Pacific Dogwood and the pale green Eucalyptus, Quaking Aspen and Flannelbush. raw, sprouting, lush green love green with envy green with youth green with early spring olive, emerald, avocado, greenlight ready, set, GO! greenhouse, greenbelts, ocean kelp, cucumber, lizard, lime and forest green, spruce, teal, and putting green. green-eyed, verdant, grassy, immature green and leafy green half-formed tender, pleasant, alluring temperate freshly sawed vigorous not ripe yet promising greenbriar, greenbug, green dragon greenshanks running along the ocean's edge greenlings swimming greenlets singing greengage plums green thumbs greenhorns and greenflies- how on earth amid sage swells kelly hillsides and swirls of firs did I ever find that green of hers? holly, drake, and brewster green, pistachio, shamrock, serpentine terre verde, Brunswick, tourmaline, lotus, jade, and spinach green: start to finish lowlands to highs no field, no forest, no leaf, no blade can catch the light or trap the shade; no earthly tones will ever rise to match the green enchantment of her eyes.

The quaking aspen takes its name from its leaves, which react to the slightest breath of wind. And although we have sayings that associate this characteristic with fear (“to shake like a leaf”), quaking aspens don’t shake because they are afraid. Their leaves hang from flexible stems and flutter in the breeze, exposing first their upper and then their lower surfaces to the sun. This means both sides of the leaf can photosynthesize. This is in contrast to other species, where the underside is reserved for breathing. Thus, quaking aspens can generate more energy, and they can grow even faster than birches.

We are but little children weak nor born in any high estate, she could only shake like an aspen leaf with helpless laughter; Trivvie weak, and meek! She was as meek, and almost as helpless, as a full-grown Bengal tiger.

You know something? It was beautiful. So still you could hear one aspen leaf caressing another, the moon wide and white shining through the leaves, and just above the dark, somber spruce, bunched closely together, tall and still like a crowd of black-robed monks standing in prayer.

...we might be able to intellectually understand that the West has lost 18% of its trees over the last 20 years, and at the same time be overcome by the quaking of a single Aspen leaf.

when the fawning Radish presently reappeared, he addressed “You miserable hound!” so loudly and so severely, that Radish became an aspen leaf, and an obsequious Eastern slave, and the Serpent of Eden—”Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.” Radish closed his eyes and shrank upon the mire, trembling in every limb, waiting for the quietus.

Between the sky and the egg-shaped, egg-smooth granite boulder that floats out in the middle of the meadow’s widest field, everything has its own green: cattails, willow leaves, the flip side of an aspen leaf, the gray-green sage, the yellow-green native pasture, the loden timber, all circling around, with that boulder at the center, as if the meadow were a green ear held up to listen to the sky’s blue, and there is an axis drawn between the boulder and the sun. Elsewhere on the mountain, most of the green stays locked in pines, the prairie is scorched yellow. But Lyle’s meadow is a hemorrhage of green, and a green clockwork of waterways and grasses, held up to the sky in its ring of ridges, held up for the sky to listen, too. The granite boulder is only there to hold it down.

Orpheus, Gathering the Trees" The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Book X, Lines 86-110. When love died the second time, he sang at dawn in the empty field and the bees came to listen. A little song for the tag alder, the rue cherry the withe-willow— the simple-hearted ones that come quickly to loneliness. Then he sang for the mulberry with its purple fruit, for the cedar and the tamarack. He sang, bel canto. for the quaking aspen and the stave oak; something lovely for the white pine, the fever tree, the black ash. From the air, he called the sparrows and the varieties of wrens. Then he sang for a bit of pestilence— for the green caterpillars, for the leaf worms and bark beetles. Food to suit the flickers and the crows. So that, in the wood lot, there would always be empty places. So he would still know loss.

Last semester, when I asked my class, as I do each quarter, how many of them had ever spent a night sleeping in the wilderness the answer was zero, and I realized for the first time in my teaching life I might be standing in front of a room full of students for whom the words “elk” or “granite” or “bristlecone pine” conjured exactly nothing. I thought about the books that had shaped my sensibility as a young writer: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Silent Spring, A Sand County Almanac, Refuge, A River Runs Through It, In Patagonia and Desert Solitaire. Now, amid the most sweeping legislative attack on our environment in history, a colleague wondered aloud to me whether it was feasible, or even sane anymore, to teach books that celebrate nature unironically. This planet hadn’t even been mapped properly a couple of hundred years ago, and now none of it, above or below ground, remains unsullied by our need for extraction. As we hurtle toward the cliff, foot heavy on the throttle, to write a poem about the loveliness of a newly leafed out aspen grove or a hot August wind sweeping across prairie grass or the smell of the air after a three-day rain in the maple forest might be at best so unconscionably naïve, and at worst so much part of the problem, we might as well drive a Hummer and start voting Republican.