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Orchard Quotes

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Orchard Quotes

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It'll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they'll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields... and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”

“How to choose an orchard plant from the nursery: Bring a stereo, play some Mozart, and whichever one dances the liveliest, that's the one you take back home to meet your ducks. You could play Beethoven, but he was deaf, so his music is a little too Helen Kelleresque for my taste.”

“A cold wind raced across the surrounding fields of wild grass, turning the land into a heaving dark-green ocean. It sighed up through the branches of cherry trees and rattled the thick leaves. Sometimes a cherry would break loose, tumble in the gale, fall and split, filling the night with its fragrance. The air was iron and loam and growth. He walked and tried to pull these things into his lungs, the silence and coolness of them. But someone was screaming, deep inside him. Someone was talking. ("Hunger")”

“A soaking rain had just stopped, and his boots sank deeply into the nitrogen-rich soil. The entire orchard smelled of wet wood and ripe fruit. It was a strong dizzying scent, and nothing else was quite like it- though his grandfather used to say this smell was identical to the limestone caves of Lower Normandy: cold and dripping, where cask upon cask of Calvados, the great fortified apple brandy of Norman lords, slept away the years.”

“My mother had a passion for all fruit except oranges, which she refused to allow in the house. She named each one of us, on a seeming whim, after a fruit and a recipe- Cassis, for her thick black-currant cake. Framboise, her raspberry liqueur, and Reinette after the reine-claude greengages that grew against the south wall of the house, thick as grapes, syrupy with wasps in midsummer. At one time we had over a hundred trees (apples, pears, plums, gages, cherries, quinces), not to mention the raspberry canes and the fields of strawberries, gooseberries, currants- the fruits of which were dried, stored, made into jams and liqueurs and wonderful cartwheel tarts on pâte brisée and crème pâtissière and almond paste. My memories are flavored with their scents, their colors, their names. My mother tended them as if they were her favorite children. Smudge pots against the frost, which we base every spring. And in summer, to keep the birds away, we would tie shapes cut out of silver paper onto the ends of the branches that would shiver and flick-flack in the wind, moose blowers of string drawn tightly across empty tin cans to make eerie bird-frightening sounds, windmills of colored paper that would spin wildly, so that the orchard was a carnival of baubles and shining ribbons and shrieking wires, like a Christmas party in midsummer. And the trees all had names. Belle Yvonne, my mother would say as she passed a gnarled pear tree. Rose d'Aquitane. Beurre du Roe Henry. Her voice at these times was soft, almost monotone. I could not tell whether she was speaking to me or to herself. Conference. Williams. Ghislane de Penthièvre. This sweetness.”

“Across the land a faint blue veil of mist Seems hung; the woods wear yet arrayment sober Till frost shall make them flame; silent and whist The drooping cherry orchards of October Like mournful pennons hang their shriveling leaves Russet and orange: all things now decay; Long since ye garnered in your autumn sheaves, And sad the robins pipe at set of day.”

“Is there any sign of spring quite so welcome as the glint of the first bluebird unless it is his softly whistled song? No wonder the bird has become the symbol for happiness. Before the farmer begins to plough the wet earth, often while snow is still on the ground, this hardy little minstrel is making himself very much at home in our orchards and gardens while waiting for a mate to arrive from the South.”

“Snowstorms may yet whiten fields and gardens, high winds may howl about the trees and chimneys, but the little blue heralds persistently proclaim from the orchard and the garden that the spring procession has begun to move.”

“No one lives on the top of the mountain. It's fine to go there occasionally -for inspiration, for new perspectives. But you have to come down. Life is lived in the valleys. That's where the farms and gardens and orchards are, and where the plowing and the work is done. That's where you apply the visions you may have glimpsed from the peaks.”

“Government protection should be thrown around every wild grove and forest on the mountains, as it is around every private orchard, and the trees in public parks. To say nothing of their value as fountains of timber, they are worth infinitely more than all the gardens and parks of towns.”

“Dull indeed would be the man that did not feel the thrill awakened by the first glimpse of brilliant color in the orchard, and the cheery warbling notes borne to our ears on the first gentle breath of spring!”

“Brambles, in particular, protect and nourish young fruit trees, and on farms bramble clumps (blackberry or one of its related cultivars) can be used to exclude deer and cattle from newly set trees. As the trees (apple, quince, plum, citrus, fig) age, and the brambles are shaded out, hoofed animals come to eat fallen fruit, and the mature trees (7 plus years old) are sufficiently hardy to withstand browsing. Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.”

“To build enormous palaces, to conquer or to mimic nature, to ransack the world in order to gratify the passions of a man, is not thought of, but to add a few yards of land to your field, to plant an orchard, or enlarge a dwelling, to always be making life more comfortable and convenient, to avoid trouble, and to satisfy the smallest wants without effort and almost without cost. These are small objects, but the soul clings to them; it dwells upon them closely and day by day, till they at last shut out the rest of the world and sometimes intervene between itself and heaven.”

“Surely it's better to live in the country, to live on a prairie by a drawing of rivers, in Iowa or Illinois or Indiana, say, than in any city, in any stinking fog of human beings, in any blooming orchard of machines. It ought to be.”

“The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,as if orchards were dying high in space.Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."And tonight the heavy earth is fallingaway from all other stars in the loneliness.We're all falling. This hand here is falling.And look at the other one. It's in them all.And yet there is Someone, whose handsinfinitely calm, holding up all this falling.”

“One particular spark was when I went back to my favorite spot in the mountains where my father always used to take us before my graduate studies in Canada and finding that the stream I had gone swimming in wasn’t there. The forest had been converted into an apple orchard with World Bank financing. The entire place, literally, had changed.”

“Utah is close to becoming the latest state to legalize medical marijuana.But one DEA agent raised the alarm in front of the Utah legislature. He warned them that rabbits might eat the weed. And then what would you have? You'd have a bunch of weed-crazed rabbits running around. They'd run rampant in the state's cornfields and taco orchards.”

“EVERYONE suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom, Winging wildly across the white Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight. Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted; And beauty came like the setting sun: My heart was shaken with tears; and horror Drifted away ... O, but Everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.”

“The snow lay thin and apologetic over the world. That wide grey sweep was the lawn, with the straggling trees of the orchard still dark beyond; the white squares were the roofs of the garage, the old barn, the rabbit hutches, the chicken coops. Further back there were only the flat fields of Dawson's farm, dimly white-striped. All the broad sky was grey, full of more snow that refused to fall. There was no colour anywhere.”

“...there was another, gorier parturition, when two nations incarnated out of one. A foreigner drew a magic line on a map and called it the new border; it became a river of blood upon the earth. And the orchards, fields, factories, businesses, all on the wrong side of that line, vanished with a wave of the pale conjuror's wand.”