Around the vegetable patch

Hermann Hesse, in The Song of the Trees, writes lines that seem to capture the spirit of this magnificent Taxodium distichum, one of the Park’s five monumental trees:
"To me, trees have always been the most persuasive preachers.
I revere them when they live in peoples and families, in groves and forests. I revere them even more when they stand alone. They are like solitary men—not like hermits, who have furtively withdrawn to escape weakness, but like great solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. The world rustles through their branches, their roots sink into infinity; yet they do not lose themselves in it but pursue with all their vital force a single purpose: to fulfill the law within them, to perfect their own form, to represent themselves. (…)
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, knows the truth. They do not preach doctrines or commandments; they preach, undeterred by the particulars, the ancient law of life.
Trees think long thoughts, serene and long-breathed, just as they live longer lives than ours. When we have learned to listen to trees, then the brevity, rapidity, and childlike hastiness of our thoughts gain an incomparable joy.
Whoever has learned to listen to trees no longer desires to be anything other than what they are."

Hermann Hesse, in The Song of the Trees, writes lines that seem to capture the spirit of this magnificent Taxodium distichum, one of the Park’s five monumental trees:
“To me, trees have always been the most persuasive preachers.
I revere them when they live in peoples and families, in groves and forests. I revere them even more when they stand alone. They are like solitary men—not like hermits, who have furtively withdrawn to escape weakness, but like great solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. The world rustles through their branches, their roots sink into infinity; yet they do not lose themselves in it but pursue with all their vital force a single purpose: to fulfill the law within them, to perfect their own form, to represent themselves. (…)
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, knows the truth. They do not preach doctrines or commandments; they preach, undeterred by the particulars, the ancient law of life.
Trees think long thoughts, serene and long-breathed, just as they live longer lives than ours. When we have learned to listen to trees, then the brevity, rapidity, and childlike hastiness of our thoughts gain an incomparable joy.
Whoever has learned to listen to trees no longer desires to be anything other than what they are.”