When walking through a warm and lush forest setting one's thoughts can easily take flights of fancy. It is not difficult to shed the layers of modern life and find one's more subtle or primitive beginnings.  Somewhere from deep within the spirit and majesty of each single tree steps forth and at once one can find themselves transported to a world of shadow and shade.

Just think of the trees: they let the birds perch and fly, with no intention to call them when they come and no longing for their return when they fly away. If people's hearts can be like the trees, they will not be off the Way.

“The trees are coming into leaf
like something almost being said;
the recent buds relax and spread,
their greenness like a kind of grief.”

Philip Larkin “The Tree”

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 “He who plants a tree plants hope.”

 Lucy Larcom

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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets.
To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel.

Aldo Leopold

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"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

Aldo Leopold

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You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.

"The best friend of earth of man is the tree. When we use the tree respectfully and economically, we have one of the greatest resources on the earth."

"... the very process of the restoring the land to health is the process through which we become attuned to Nature and, through Nature, with ourselves. Restoration forestry, therefore, is both the means and the end, for as we learn how to restore the forest, we heal the forest, and as we heal the forest, we heal ourselves.

Poetry often introduces a mythological dimension, which reflects the close connections between the gods and commonly encountered trees. A passage from Vergil's Georgics, in which the poet enumerates grafted trees and miraculous growth, incorporates several such mythological references: myrtles, sacred to Venus; the poplar, crown of Hercules; and the acorns of Jupiter's symbolic oak, referring to his grove at Dodona.  The pine
was held sacred to Pan, the Roman Faunus, and in his Eclogues Vergil describes the pastoral god's home on Mt. Maenalus in Arcadia. Propertius stresses the god's fondness for the tree, and Horace, for his part, dedicates a pine to the goddess Diana in a famous ode.

The forests are the flags of nature.   They appeal to all and awaken inspiring universal feelings.  Enter the forest and the boundaries of nations are forgotten.  It may be that some time an immortal pine will be the flag of a united peaceful world.

Restoration ecology is experimental science, a science of love and altruism. In its attempts to reverse the processes of ecosystem degradation it runs exactly counter to the market system, to land speculation, to the whole cultural attitude of regarding the Earth as commodity rather than community.  It is a soft-souled science.

If a tree is treated as a living organism, with an understanding of its vital functions, it will be a constant source of profit and pleasure to men.

"One summer afternoon, you find some lonely trees. Persuade your mind to drowse. Then, as your eyelids close, and you still hover into those three stages of darkening doze, this side of the barrier of sleep, pause. In that last clear moment open quick your sight toward where the green is bright and thick. Be sure that everything you keep to dream with is made out of trees."

We must protect the forests for our children, grandchildren and children yet to be born. We must protect the forests for those who can't speak for themselves such as the birds, animals, fish and 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."