swamp laurel buds

“Thoreau was the ‘Patron Saint of Swamps’ because he enjoyed being in them and in writing about them he said, “my temple is the swamp… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum… I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place…far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.”              - Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings