Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
What This Quote Reveals
You stand at a window or in a park, not really thinking about anything, and you notice the same tree you’ve walked past a hundred times. It’s just there, season after season, slow, steady, unhurried. Near its roots, the grass is thin but stubborn, pushing through every crack, every year, no matter how many feet walk over it. This small, ordinary scene is exactly where these words live.
"Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence."
First: "Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience." You can picture a tree in front of you: a rough trunk, rings inside you will never see, branches that took years to reach out over the street. It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t demand instant results. A tree accepts seasons: the harshness of winter, the slow return of spring, the fullness of summer, the letting go of autumn. By watching that, you start to grasp what it is to allow your life to unfold over time instead of in a single moment.
These words suggest that when you really pay attention to trees, you begin to see that growth worth having is usually slow. You stop expecting your skills, relationships, or healing to change overnight. You learn to remain present through long stretches where nothing seems to be happening on the surface. In that way, a tree quietly teaches you to stay rooted when progress is invisible, to trust that your own rings are forming inside, even on uneventful days.
Then: "Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence." Here the picture shrinks, from towering branches to small blades under your feet. Grass is cut down, stepped on, covered by snow, dried by sun, and still it keeps coming back. It slips through sidewalk cracks, returns after being mowed flat, and spreads wherever it can find the slightest bit of soil and light. If a tree shows you how to wait, grass shows you how to keep trying.
These words point to the kind of effort that is not dramatic, but repeated. You send one more application. You have one more honest conversation. You return to a habit you abandoned last week instead of declaring yourself a failure. Grass doesn’t rise once and win; it rises a thousand times and refuses to disappear. That rhythm of "again, and again, and again" is the heart of persistence.
You might feel this on a small Tuesday evening: you’re tired, the room is quiet, the glow from your laptop is the only light, and you open the same difficult document you didn’t finish yesterday. That simple act of returning, of starting where you left off instead of quitting, is your version of grass pushing back through the soil.
One opinion I hold strongly: most people underestimate how much their life is shaped by this kind of quiet coming-back, much more than by any single breakthrough or burst of inspiration.
There is also a subtle structure in the quote: trees and grass, patience and persistence. Trees teach you to live with time; grass teaches you to move within time. One tells you to endure seasons; the other tells you to act again after every setback. You need both, or your effort becomes lopsided: patience without persistence can turn into passive waiting, while persistence without patience can feel like panicked scrambling.
Still, there are moments where these words don’t fully hold. Sometimes you can be as patient as a tree and as persistent as grass and a particular door still won’t open. Life isn’t a garden you fully control. But even then, this way of being changes you: you become steadier, less frantic, more willing to try, adjust, and keep your roots and your reach, whatever the outcome.
Behind These Words
Hal Borland wrote during a time when industrial growth, highways, and expanding cities were pulling many people away from daily contact with land and seasons. Born in the early 1900s in rural America, he lived through decades when machines, speed, and constant production were being praised almost everywhere. In that world, ideas like patience and persistence were often tied to output and efficiency, not to the quiet rhythms of nature.
He became known for his nature essays and his ability to look at simple outdoor scenes and find emotional truth in them. A tree was never just part of a landscape to him; it carried a way of living. Grass was not just ground cover; it was an example of how life continues despite interruption and damage. His era saw wars, economic depression, and massive social shifts, so the qualities of waiting through difficulty and continuing despite setback were not abstract—they were daily realities for many people.
These words make sense in that setting: they push back, gently, against a culture that glorified hurry and spectacle. By choosing trees and grass, Borland grounded big human challenges in small, everyday witnesses that anyone could see outside their door. The quote has been repeated widely in motivational and reflective writing, and while it is accurately attributed to him, it survives mostly because it speaks across time: no matter the decade, people still wrestle with how long real change takes and how often they must start again.
About Hal Borland
Hal Borland, who was born in 1900 and died in 1978, grew up in rural Nebraska and Colorado and carried those early impressions of open land and seasons throughout his life as a writer and journalist. He wrote novels, essays, and especially nature columns, many of them for the New York Times, where he invited readers in busy cities to pay close attention to the natural world around them. His work often focused on ordinary details—birds, river ice, wildflowers, trees—and used those details to explore how a person might live with more clarity and steadiness.
Borland is remembered for blending a simple, almost conversational style with careful observation. He did not write about nature as something distant or exotic; he wrote about it as a neighbor and teacher. In an age that was speeding up, with cars, planes, and new technologies, he reminded people that the land still moved at its own pace, and that there was wisdom in that slower rhythm.
The quote about trees, patience, grass, and persistence fits easily within his larger worldview. He saw character as something formed over time, in conversation with the world outside your window. By turning to trees and grass as examples, he suggested that the qualities you need most—steadiness, endurance, the courage to try again—are not invented by humans; they are already all around you, if you are willing to notice and learn.
