Here are some beautiful quotations from those we gathered for our book. It took many months to find appropriate quotes but often gave us so much pleasure just looking through them

For pines are gossip pines the wide world through
And full of runic tales to sigh or sing
James Elroy Flecker 1884-1915
Golden Journey to Samarkand

I think I shall never see
a poem as lovely as a tree
Joyce Kilmer 1914
Poem “trees”

Alvarez-Pereyre quotes National Poet Laureate Wally Mongane Serote’s famous poem “For Don M. – Banned”, published in his 1974 collection Tsetlo:
… it is a dry white season brother only the trees know the pain as they still stand erect dry like steel, their branches dry like wire, indeed, it is a dry white season but seasons come to pass. and asks “how many more will have to pass before Don Mattera is free?” (1980: 2-3)

Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough
In youth it sheltered me,
And I’ll protect it now
George Pope Morris 1830

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Hermann Hesse, Baume Betrachtungen und Gedichte

J'aime appuyer ma main  sur le tronc d'un arbre  devant lequel je passe,  non pour m'assurer de l'existence de l'arbre - dont je ne doute pas - mais de la mienne.    Christian Bobin

Trees
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
William Blake

It wasn’t the sunlight. It wasn’t one of my toys. It wasn’t the image of my mother nor that of my younger brother. My first image of the world on this planet is the silhouette of three umbrella pines that grew in front of the balcony of my childhood bedroom. They were there as riots from eternity. They were there between me and the horizon: they obscured the view giving another perception of the world as if they were guides and guardians. They were like three Titans responsible for the existence of everything. Like three gods destined to protect every one of my moves and to accompany mon regard.
Emanuele coccia

I have always had a great liking for trees, and for tree trunks in particular. I like the bare trees in winter more perhaps than summer trees in full leaf. The trunks of trees have, for me, a connection with the human body – their limbs branch out like arms and legs from the trunk of a figure. For me, too, trees have a definite affinity with sculpture. The immobility of a tree, rooted in the ground, has the kind of stability that I like in sculpture.”
From exhibition catalogue for Henry Moore: Drawings 1969 – 79
Wildenstein, New York (14 November 1979 – 18 January 1980) pg.18

When men disappear, the trees remain, immutable in the storm and the mad outfit of men. Let's respect them, and take the time to question them: they are wise old men who have so many anecdotes to whisper to us...
Richard Melloul

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”  

John Muir
*

“I’m always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.”
Gunter Grass

*The most beautiful gift of nature is that it gives one pleasure to look around and try to comprehend what we see.

Albert Einstein

“
The trees, though not fully clothed, were in that delightful state, when further beauty is known to be at hand, and when, while mu ch is actually given to the sight, more yet remains for the imagination.
Jane Austen

"Anyone who sees beauty and does not look at it Will soon be poor" --taken from a Yoruba poem
"Land really is the best art."

Andy Warhol, 1985