Editor T. W. Higginson comments in the preface: "In many cases these verses will seem to the reader like poetry torn up by the roots, with rain and dew and earth still clinging to them, giving a freshness and a fragrance not otherwise to be conveyed."

"There is a part of Cheyenne Mountain which I and one other have come to call 'our garden.' The possessive pronoun has no legal title behind it; it is an audacious assumption not backed by any squatter sovereignty, nor even by any contribution towards the cultivation of the soil; but ever since we found out the place, it has been mysteriously worked 'on shares' for our benefit; and as long as we live we shall call it our garden."

Daughter of James, Susan Fennimore Cooper was very concerned about the preference for European names over American for plants and places. She questions in the June 23 entry, "What has a dead language to do on every-day occasions, with the living blossoms of the hour? Why should a strange tongue sputter its uncouth, compound syllable upon the simple weeds by the wayside?"

"To American poets only I am indebted for these verses, and to the woods of Maryland for the studies."

Mary Austin's Land of Little Rain is Owens Valley in California: "If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in the loneliest land that ever came out of God's hands, what they do there and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there. None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have the lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it."