But they had not thought so. To them the country was a unit--it
was theirs. They themselves were a unit, a conscious group;
they thought in terms of the community. As such, their
time-sense was not limited to the hopes and ambitions of an
individual life. Therefore, they habitually considered and carried
out plans for improvement which might cover centuries.
I had never seen, had scarcely imagined, human beings
undertaking such a work as the deliberate replanting of an entire
forest area with different kinds of trees. Yet this seemed to them
the simplest common sense, like a man's plowing up an inferior
lawn and reseeding it. Now every tree bore fruit--edible fruit,
that is. In the case of one tree, in which they took especial pride,
it had originally no fruit at all--that is, none humanly edible--
yet was so beautiful that they wished to keep it. For nine hundred
years they had experimented, and now showed us this particularly
lovely graceful tree, with a profuse crop of nutritious seeds.
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