“In the shade I should have known the tree which gave it, without looking up,—not because the sharp little spicular leaves of the fir, miniatures of that sword Rome used to open the world, its oyster, would drop and plunge themselves into my eyes, or would insert their blades down my back and scarify,—but because there is an influence and sentiment in umbrages, and under every tree its own atmosphere. Elms refine and have a graceful elegiac effect upon those they shelter. Oaks drop robustness. Mimosas will presently make a sensitive-plant of him who hangs his hammock beneath their shade. Cocoa-palms will infect him with such tropical indolence that he will not stir until frowzy monkeys climb the tree and pelt him away to the next one. The shade of pine-trees, as anyone can prove by a journey in Maine, makes those who undergo it wiry, keen, trenchant, inexhaustible, and tough.”

Theodore Winthrop

The Canoe and the Saddle (1853)