Tom's Home Page | Birds of a Feather Peattie, Donald Culross
Donald Culross Peattie was a botanist and author, acclaimed by critics for his lyrical prose. Among his other published works are: Singing in the Wilderness: A Salute to John James Audubon (1935); Green Laurels: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Naturalists (1936); A Book of Hours (1937); his autobiography, The Road of a Naturalist (1941); Forward the Nation (19420; American Heartwood (1949); Sportsman's Country (1952); A Natural History of Western Texas (1953); Lives of Destiny (1954), and Parade with Banners (1957). He was born in 1898 and died in 1964.
I say that it touches a man that his blood is sea water and his tears are salt, that the seed of his loins is scarcely different from the same cells in a seaweed, and that of stuff like his bones are coral made. An Almanac for Moderns, 1935.
Life is adventure in experience, and when you are no longer greedy for the last drop of it, it means no more than that you have set your face, whether you know it or not, to the day when you shall depart without a backward look. Those who look back longingly to the end die young, at whatever age. Ibid.
In short, evolution is not so much progress as it is simply change. It does not leave all its primitive forms behind. It carries them over from age to age, well knowing that they are the precious base of the pyramid on which the more fantastic and costly experiments must be carried. Ibid.
Now this is the best of life, that a man should have children who promise fair, and a loving wife, and that he should know what his work is, and own a sense of Nature. Ibid.
You are ignorant of life if you do not love it or some portion of it, just as it is, a shaft of light from a nearby star, a flash of the blue salt water that curls around the five upthrust rocks of the continents, a net of green leaves spread to catch the light and use it, and you, walking under the trees. Ibid.
Now in the burning sunny fields, white with yarrow and bending Queen Anne's lace, the little field sparrow spills out his song&endash;the most tumbled, ecstatic rapture of the year. Ibid.
One can never hear the thrush without feeling an intense sense of solitude. Ibid.
The time to hear bird music is between four and six in the morning. Seven o'clock is not too late, but by eight the fine rapture is over, due, I suspect, to the contentment of the inner man that comes with breakfast; a poet should always be hungry or have lost a love. Ibid.
I am more and more convinced that the ant colony is not so much composed of separate individuals as that the colony is a sort of individual, and each ant like a loose cell in it. Ibid.
The summer world is the insect world. Like it or not, that is how it is. Ibid.
It is not explained why there is for us all but one life, but it is plain enough that all life is one. Flowering Earth, 1939., The Viking Press.
For the fates of living things are bound together, and a wise man can grow wiser, learning it. Ibid.
As the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leaves - the fern and the needled pine and the latticed frond and the seaweed ribbon - perceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. Ibid.
True that a plant may not think; neither will the profoundest of men ever put forth a flower. Ibid.
This serene sister life, this green society, was here before us; we are wholly dependent upon it; it reaches farther over and into our common earth and leaves a deeper imprint there than we do or our fellow creatures. Ibid.
Of our windows on the universe, science is set with the clearest pane; it is not warped or waved to make the images appear to support any dogma; the glass is not rose-tinted, neither is it leaded with a picture that shuts out the sun and, coming between the light of day and you, enforces the credence of the past upon the young present. Ibid.
One half, the green half, of all this living, gives no tongue save to the walking wind. It is that earthly paradise, that clean temple, where no wrong is ever done. Ibid.
The Green Kingdom embraces our restless one, is nurse to it and grave to it. Ibid.
A million million of springs, and many million more, have come as they promised to come. And gone again. On this day I first felt regret that spring must always go, and that when I am gone, it will forever return. Ibid.
But in the end our friends come and make us a last home out of a log, and plant a flowering tree by which to remember us as fairer than we were. Ibid.