Maple Tree Nature Quotes

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She sat very still, listening to a stream gurgling, the breeze soughing through upper branches, the melodious kloo-klack of ravens, the nyeep-nyeep of nuthatches - all sounds chokingly beautiful. She felt she could hear the cool clean breath of growing things - fern fronds, maple leaves, white trillium petals, tree trunks, each in its rightful place.
Susan Vreeland (The Forest Lover)
Do you think of them as decoration? Think again. Here are maples, flashing. And here are the oaks, holding on all winter to their dry leaves. And here are the pines, that will never fail, until death, the instructions to be green.
Mary Oliver (Evidence: Poems)
The light catches in the bare branches of the maple and clothes it in a fleeting dream of autumn, all pink and auburn and gold. The cardinal perched near the top of the tree bursts into radiance, into flame, and for that moment nothing matters at all—not the still soil nor the clattering branches nor the way this redbird will fall to the ground in time, a cold stone, and I too will grow cold, and all my line.
Margaret Renkl (Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss)
The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction-not just for Native peoples, but for everyone. Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion-until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into "natural resources." If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants)
Maple leaves in autumn do not suddenly transform into stained glass pendants...in order to satisfy a human longing for beauty. Their scarlet, ochre, and golden colors emerge as chlorophyll production shuts down, in preparation for sacrificing the leaves that are vulnerable to winter cold, and ensuring the survival of the tree. But the tree survives, WHILE our vision is ravished. The peacock's display attracts a hen, AND it nourishes the human eye. The flower's fragrance entices a pollinator, BUT IT ALSO intoxicates the gardener. In that "while," in that "and," in that "but it also," we find the giftedness of life.
Terryl L. Givens (The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life)
A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky’s stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off. At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin that it passes a faint pink light. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would hone me to such a pure slip of bone. But I’ll not go northing this year. I’ll stalk that floating pole and frigid air by waiting here. I wait on bridges; I wait, struck, on forest paths and meadow’s fringes, hilltops and banksides, day in and day out, and I receive a southing as a gift. The North washes down the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow’s seeded grasses and pokes it chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and the earthworms deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south by day, and at night wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter over Dead Man Mountain. Something is already here, and more is coming.
Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
Yes. I'm not unhappy about becoming old. I'm not unhappy about what must be. It makes me cry only when I see my friends go before me and life is emptied. I don't believe in an afterlife, but I still fully expect to see my brother again. And it's like a dream life. I am reading a biography of Samuel Palmer, which is written by a woman in England. I can't remember her name. And it's sort of how I feel now, when he was just beginning to gain his strength as a creative man and beginning to see nature. But he believed in God, you see, and in heaven, and he believed in hell. Goodness gracious, that must have made life much easier. It's harder for us nonbelievers. But, you know, there's something I'm finding out as I'm aging that I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they're beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music. You know, I don't think I'm rationalizing anything. I really don't. This is all inevitable and I have no control over it.
Maurice Sendak
The morning of September 1st met the citizen of the village shining with beautiful sunny weather. A refreshing breeze, enriched by acerb fragrances of maple, oak, and poplar tree leaves that already began changing their colors for autumn, blew from the lake.
Sahara Sanders (Gods’ Food (Indigo Diaries, #1))
When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.” If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants)
Swept away with the idea, he said it felt like an awakening to him. More like a remembering, I think. The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction—not just for Native peoples, but for everyone. Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants)
Many say autumn is by far the most spectacular season in Lanark County. During these brief few weeks Mother Nature paints our landscape with her most vivid palette, colouring our trees with broad strokes of the richest crimsons, fiery oranges, and the sunniest yellows, leaving no doubt in anyone's mind that these sugar maples are the crown jewels of our forests.
Arlene Stafford-Wilson (Lanark County Comfort)
Because it’s worth it. Worth the risk and the pain. Of all the glorious enchantments of this world—spring, snow, laughter, red roses, dogs, books—love is by far the best.” She released Harry and got down off the low stone wall. She took in the sugar maple, the wall, the forest. Hugged herself and smiled sorrowfully. “By its very nature, though, love is tragic. You can’t protect it. No matter how tightly you hold on to the one you love, they leave you or you leave them.
Jon Cohen (Harry's Trees)
Arthur Moore describes the results: “Whole forests of oak, beech, poplar, maple, and walnut, standing since Columbus, collapsed … from girdling and deadening with fire. There was in the heart of the new race no more consideration for the trees than for the game until the best of both were gone; steel conquered the West but chilled the soul of the conqueror. This assault on nature, than which few more frightful spectacles could be imagined, owed much to sheer need, but something also to a compelling desire to destroy conspicuous specimens of the fauna and flora of the wilderness. The origin of this mad destructiveness may be in doubt, but there is no question about its effect. The Ohio Valley today has neither trees nor animals to recall adequately the splendor of the garden of the Indian which the white man found and used so profligately.
Stephen E. Ambrose (Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors)
I still remember seeing a great, ancient maple send shudder after shudder through its trunk one year—for days on end. The entire tree was undulating; I’d never seen or felt anything like it before. Some dimension of the world that I had never encountered before was intruding itself into my experience. It literally felt like the underpinnings of my world view were crumbling. It seemed as if the tree were having an epileptic seizure, something far outside my experience of trees. Then, with a great crash one day, a single giant, diseased limb came hurtling down from the canopy, at which point the shudders ceased. In a flash of insight then, I understood that trees self-prune, that they self-caretake, that I had only the barest understanding of the plant world and finally grasped Einstein’s observation that “we still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
Young developing leaves on normal trees are often tinged red thanks to a kind of sun block in their delicate tissue. This is anthocyanin, which blocks ultraviolet rays to protect the little leaves. As the leaves grow, the anthocyanin is broken down with the help of an enzyme. A few beeches or maples deviate from the norm because they lack this enzyme. They cannot get rid of the red color, and they retain it even in their mature leaves. Therefore, their leaves strongly reflect red light and waste a considerable portion of the light’s energy. Of course, they still have the blue tones in the spectrum for photosynthesis, but they are not achieving the same levels of photosynthesis as their green-leaved relatives. These red trees keep appearing in Nature, but they never get established and always disappear again. Humans, however, love anything that is different, and so we seek out red varieties and propagate them. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure is one way to describe this behavior, which might stop if people knew more about the trees’ circumstances.
Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from A Secret World (The Mysteries of Nature Book 1))
And lifting water is just one of the many jobs that the phloem, xylem, and cambium perform. They also manufacture lignin and cellulose; regulate the storage and production of tannin, sap, gum, oils, and resins; dole out minerals and nutrients; convert starches into sugars for future growth (which is where maple syrup comes into the picture); and goodness knows what else. But because all this is happening in such a thin layer, it also leaves the tree terribly vulnerable to invasive organisms. To combat this, trees have formed elaborate defense mechanisms. The reason a rubber tree seeps latex when cut is that this is its way of saying to insects and other organisms, “Not tasty. Nothing here for you. Go away.” Trees can also deter destructive creatures like caterpillars by flooding their leaves with tannin, which makes the leaves less tasty and so inclines the caterpillars to look elsewhere. When infestations are particularly severe, some trees can even communicate the fact. Some species of oak release a chemical that tells other oaks in the vicinity that an attack is under way. In response, the neighboring oaks step up their tannin production the better to withstand the coming onslaught. By such means, of course, does nature tick along. The problem arises when a tree encounters an attacker for which evolution has left it unprepared, and seldom has a tree been more helpless against an invader than the American chestnut against Endothia parasitica. It enters a chestnut effortlessly, devours the cambium cells, and positions itself for attack on the next tree before the tree has the faintest idea,
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
The month of August was upon them already. Where did the time go? The leaves were turning that special red—not a bright red or burgundy, an in-between red-and-orange. Other leaves were turning a beautiful golden shade. There was a splash of yellow leaves threading through the branches. Different variations of green leaves remained. The array of colour was breathtaking. Maple trees do not grow in England. What a pity, it is such a beautiful tree.
V.A. Pearson (The Unknown)
I continue my search for the place of origin of the bonsaied white pine. The forest’s plants evoke in me a feeling that reality has slipped. All is familiar wind in Japanese oaks and maples sounds as it does in the Americas: coarse grained and deep voiced in oaks, sandy and light in the thin-leaved maples. Yet when I attend to a visual detail- the contour of a leaf, the runnels in bark, the hue of a fruit, I am unmoored by strangeness. My mind is foundering in the geographic manifestation of plant evolution’s deep history. The plants of east Asia, seemingly so far from eastern North America, are in fact close kin to the plants of the mountain slopes of Appalachia, closer kin by far than the plants of the northwestern US, or of Florida, or the arid lands of the Southwest. On Miyajima, I walk with sumac, maple, ash, juniper, fir, oak, persimmon, and rhododendron. A few Asian specialties spice this thoroughly Appalachian community, curiosities like Japanese cedar, snake vines, and umbrella pines. The cedars intermingle their soft, extended sighs with the more familiar sounds of oak and maple.
David George Haskell (The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors)
Right here is my favorite sanctuary in Tokyo," said Ryuu. "It's called Momijidani. It means 'autumn leaf valley.'" We'd reached an artificial ravine with a waterfall tumbling down from a high rock formation about three stories tall, surrounded by a variety of rocks, and maple trees with red autumn leaves. A stream ran below the waterfall, with a picturesque bridge path over it. The effect was spectacular, like being deep in a valley surrounded by mountains- serene, private, magical- but with Tokyo Tower looming over it, a reminder of the bustling city just beyond.
Rachel Cohn (My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life)
That is the normal succession of things in this part of the world; you can see the various stages all over Scratch Flat. There is, for example, a small red maple swamp above my house on the northwest side of the drumlin. The swamp was probably a pond sixty years ago, but now in summer, unless you know your trees, you cannot distinguish it from the surrounding woodlands. It is only in spring, when the groundwater levels are high, that the remnant of the ice sheet makes itself apparent. Then the waters rise around the trunks of the red maple trees and, after reaching a critical level, run down across the small meadow to the north of my house.
John Hanson Mitchell (Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile)
counties, oaks, cherries, willows, birches, hickories, pines, and maples are producing the vast numbers and types of insects that support animal populations.
Douglas W. Tallamy (The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees)
Each year, as those first flakes of snow fall softly on our meadows, along the rolling farm pastures, and into the towns and villages, the outstretched branches of Lanark County’s sugar maples stand steadfast, coated in their winter white. Under a cold silent cloak our beloved maples rest, patiently waiting for Mother Nature’s signal, telling them the time has come once again to make the county’s finest liquid gold.
Arlene Stafford-Wilson (Lanark County Christmas)
The old sable house sat nestled in maple, oak, and sweet gum trees dripping with her Autumnal hues. Agatha might prefer black, but she claimed it was because her trees demanded all the luxurious brilliance. This time, her lips tipped up as the chill breeze brushed her cheek and the trees’ branches swayed in its caress. She had to admit, her little corner of the woods was more devoid of light than most, even in midday—like someone had taken a burnt amber brush and painted Agatha’s abyss in hues of warm gloom. But that was precisely how she liked it. The barest tendrils of smoke rose from her chimney—curious, considering the flames had been strong and of magical nature when she’d left. In her short absence, fog had also begun crawling in, curling up to her pumpkins and nestling amongst the leaves. Sister Autumn’s Season had truly arrived.
J.L. Vampa (Autumn of the Grimoire)
While he watched, a fresh breeze brushed against the big tulip trees, red oaks, sugar maples. Heavy branches rose and fell in slow motion, and a million leaves twisted on their stems, showing silver underneath. The forest was eerily animate, a gigantic green beast dreaming, its skin twitching and rippling. Not quite threatening, but powerful. Watchful.
James A. McLaughlin (Bearskin)
The powerful forces of nature, both kind and cruel, some nurturing, some destructive, live at the heart of any maple syrup operation.
Arlene Stafford-Wilson (Lanark County Kitchen: A Maple Legacy from Tree to Table)
The troutberry trees had already bloomed and gone; on the forest floor, delicate white petals of starflowers and goldthread and Carolina springbeauty sparkled when a stray beam of sunshine caught them. Wild onions were the only plant that had fully leafed out, brilliant bright green under maple and elm and birch and oak whose own leaves were still pregnant thoughts. All of nature was just waking up, fulling, becoming large and new.
Elizabeth Lim (A Twisted Tale Anthology)
One young man, Andy, splashing his feet in the clear water, asked the big question. “Wait a second,” he said as he wrapped his mind around this linguistic distinction, “doesn’t this mean that speaking English, thinking in English, somehow gives us permission to disrespect nature? By denying everyone else the right to be persons? Wouldn’t things be different if nothing was an it? ” Swept away with the idea, he said it felt like an awakening to him. More like a remembering, I think. The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction—not just for Native peoples, but for everyone. Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.” If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants)
The state of New Hampshire boasts a mere eighteen miles of Atlantic Ocean coastline. The Piscataqua River separates the state's southeastern corner from Maine and empties into the Atlantic. On the southwestern corner of this juncture of river and ocean is Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The smaller town of Kittery, Maine, is on the opposite side of the river. The port of Piscataqua is deep, and it never freezes in winter, making it an ideal location for maritime vocations such as fishing, sea trade, and shipbuilding. Four years before the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1603, Martin Pring of England first discovered the natural virtues of Piscataqua harbor. While on a scouting voyage in the ship Speedwell, Pring sailed approximately ten miles up the unexplored Piscataqua, where he discovered “goodly groves and woods replenished with tall oakes, beeches, pine-trees, firre-trees, hasels, and maples.”1 Following Pring, Samuel de Champlain, Captain John Smith, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges each sailed along the Maine-New Hampshire coastline and remarked on its abundance of timber and fish. The first account of Piscataqua harbor was given by Smith, that intrepid explorer, author, and cofounder of the Jamestown settlement, who assigned the name “New-England” to the northeast coastline in 1614. In May or June of that year, he landed near the Piscataqua, which he later described as “a safe harbour, with a rocky shore.”2 In 1623, three years after the Pilgrim founding of Plymouth, an English fishing and trading company headed by David Thomson established a saltworks and fishing station in what is now Rye, New Hampshire, just west of the Piscataqua River. English fishermen soon flocked to the Maine and New Hampshire coastline, eventually venturing inland to dry their nets, salt, and fish. They were particularly drawn to the large cod population around the Piscataqua, as in winter the cod-spawning grounds shifted from the cold offshore banks to the warmer waters along the coast.
Peter Kurtz (Bluejackets in the Blubber Room: A Biography of the William Badger, 1828-1865)