Oak Trees, Louisiana

Thanks for your puzzle post! These trees are so wonderful, with those horizontal branches as big as trunks, and the moss and all. I wish they could grow up here, but they can't.

Thats beautiful David

Beautiful, haunting picture and wonderful quote. Thank you fiddlepeeps and david0

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the
branches;
Without any companion it grew there, uttering joyous
leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think
of myself;
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves,
standing alone there, without its friend, its
lover near?for I knew I could not;
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of
leaves upon it, and twined around it a little
moss,
And brought it away?and I have placed it in sight in
my room;
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear
friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of
them;)
Yet it remains to me a curious token?it makes me
think of manly love;
?For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there
in Louisiana, solitary, in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life, without a friend, a
lover, near,
I know very well I could not.

Walt Whitman

(These are Live-Oak Trees, Quercus virginiana)