“I love Mougouch [Gorky's wife]. What about papa Cézanne... I like the wheat fields the plough the apricots those flirts of the sun. And bread above all. My lever is such with the purple... About 194 feet away from our house [In Armenia] on the road to the spring my father had a little garden with a few apple trees which had retired from giving fruit... This garden was identified as the 'Garden of Wish Fulfillment' and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking their soft and dependable breasts in their hands to rub them on the rocks. Above all this stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun the rain the cold and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree..”

1942
Source: posthumous, Movements in art since 1945, p. 31: (in Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 28)

À partir de cet instant, je n’avais plus un seul pas à faire, le sol marchait pour moi dans ce jardin où depuis si longtemps mes actes avaient cessé d’être accompagnés d’attention volontaire: l’Habitude venait de me prendre dans ses bras et me portait jusqu’à mon lit comme un petit enfant.
"Combray"
In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol I: Swann's Way (1913)

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

Letter to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (29 December 1802)

"Letter to Joseph Priestley" in response to Priestley's "experiments on the restoration of air [by plants] made noxious by animals breathing it, or putrefying it..." read in Philosophical Transactions LXII 147-267 of the Royal Society (1772) and quoted in John Towill Rutt, Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley http://books.google.com/books?id=psMGAAAAQAAJ... Vol.1 (1831).
Context: That the vegetable creation should restore the air which is spoiled by the animal part of it, looks like a rational system, and seems to be of a piece with the rest. Thus fire purifies water all the world over. It purifies it by distillation, when it raises it in vapours, and lets it fall in rain; and farther still by filtration, when keeping it fluid, it suffers that rain to percolate the earth. We knew before that putrid animal substances were converted into sweet vegetables when mixed with the earth and applied as manure; and now, it seems, that the same putrid substances, mixed with the air, have a similar effect. The strong, thriving state of your mint, in putrid air, seems to show that the air is mended by taking something from it, and not by adding to it. I hope this will give some check to the rage of destroying trees that grow near houses, which has accompanied our late improvements in gardening, from an opinion of their being unwholesome. I am certain, from long observation, that there is nothing unhealthy in the air of woods; for we Americans have everywhere our country habitations in the midst of woods, and no people on earth enjoy better health or are more prolific.

"My Wardrobe", from Cautionary Tales for Dead Commuters (1985)