mother tree

“So it is that this old mother tree with an apronful of children is forever growing down to the lawns and propagating young, so that when she eventually dies they will already have grown up and become a spinney.”

Simon & Schuster: Wildwood

“Each sapling begins life in the nursery as a set, a cutting from a tod, a four-foot pollard mother tree cultivated from stock of the noblest pedigree.”

Simon & Schuster: Wildwood

“Insensibly and little by little, I was led on to such follies as to believe that a fig tree wept when it was plucked and that the sap of the mother tree was tears.”

Confessions and Enchiridion, newly translated and edited by Albert C. Outler