Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does. – George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, 1903

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

Any fool can destroy trees…. God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools… – John Muir, “The American Forests,” August 1897