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? – Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982

Exhalation of moss, mycelium, black mould; wafted savor of a thousand earthly growths, damp, clinging, redolent; aroma of mighty roots, of invisible spawn and seed—all the vast stirring of the earth’s desire. – Virginia Garland, “The Rain,” Out West: A Magazine of the Old Pacifi

I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them. – James Russell Lowell