24 ARBOR DAY 



"Who planted this old apple-tree?" 

 The children of that distant day 

 Thus to some aged man shall say; 

 And, gazing on its mossy stem, 

 The gray-haired man shall answer them: 



"A poet of the land was he, 

 Born in the rude but good old times; 

 'Tis said he made some quaint old rhymes 



On planting the apple-tree." 



TREE PLANTING 



BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 



(Extract from Letter) 



THE trees may outlive the memory of more than 

 one of those in whose honor they were planted. 

 But if it is something to make two blades of grass 

 grow where only one was growing, it is much more 

 to have been the occasion of the planting of an 

 oak which shall defy twenty scores of winters, or 

 of an elm which shall canopy with its green cloud of 

 foliage half as many generations of mortal immortal- 

 ities. I have written many verses, but the best 

 poems I have produced are the trees I planted on the 

 hillside which overlooks the broad meadows, 

 scalloped and rounded at their edges by loops of 

 the sinuous Housatonic. Nature finds rhymes 

 for them in the recurring measures of the seasons. 



