Winthrop Packard, in “Wild Pastures,” describes the way in which
nature’s wild growths obliterate the marks of human labor:
Let but vigilance relax for a year, a spring month even, and
bramble and bayberry, sweet-fern and wild-rose, daring scouts
that they are, will have a foothold that they will yield only
with death. Close upon these will follow the birches, the light
infantry which rushes to the advance line as soon as the scouts
have found the foothold. These entrench and hold the field
desperately until pine and hickory, maple and oak, sturdy men
of the main line of battle, arrive, and almost before you know
it the farm is reclaimed. The wilderness has regained its lost
ground, and the cosmos of the wild has wiped out that curious
chaos which we call civilization.
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