Willa

“In most U.S. counties, oaks, cherries, willows, birches, hickories, pines, and maples are producing the vast numbers and types of insects that support animal populations. These tree genera are keystone plants because they play the same support role that the keystone in a Roman arch plays.”
― Douglas W. Tallamy, The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees

“Keep in mind that birds don’t care two whits which tree they forage in as long as there is food there. They do, however, care about foraging efficiently. They cannot afford to waste time and energy searching for food where it doesn’t exist, so they stay in unproductive trees as long as you would shop in Acme if all the shelves were bare—only a few seconds.”
― Douglas W. Tallamy, The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees

“As we know more or less well how to deal with our individual mortality, so we will deal with the collapse of our civilization. It is not so different. And it’s certainly not the first time that this will have happened. The Maya and Cretans, among many others, already experienced this. We are born and die as the stars are born and die, both individually and collectively. This is our reality. Life is precious to us because it is ephemeral. And as Lucretius wrote: “our appetite for life is voracious, our thirst for life insatiable” (De rerum natura, bk. III, line 1084). But immersed in this nature that made us and that directs us, we are not homeless beings suspended between two worlds, parts of but only partly belonging to nature, with a longing for something else. No: we are home.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“The thick mat of leaf litter that characterizes forests with numerous oaks acts like a sponge when it rains and is most valuable when it rains hard (Sweeney and Blaine 2016). The water from a 2-inch downpour, for example—more than 54,000 gallons per acre—is captured almost entirely by an oak forest’s leaf litter and the organic humus it creates. Litter and humus don’t hold this water indefinitely, but they do corral it on-site just long enough for it to seep into the ground, replenishing the water table on which so many of us depend. In areas with no leaf litter, the same 2-inch rainstorm causes a flood.”
― Douglas W. Tallamy, The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees