As most of the essays in this volume were written in a little bark-covered study that is surrounded on all sides by vineyards, the author thought it not inappropriate to go to the vine for a title for the collection. The "leaf" may stand very well for the nature sketches, and the "tendril" may symbolize those other papers in which he has groped his way in some of the great problems, seeking some law or truth to cling to. The tendril is blind, but it is sensitive and outreaching, and aided by the wind, never ceases to feel this way and that of support. Whatever it touches it clings to. One vine will cling to another, or one arm cling to another arm of the same vine. It has no power to select or discriminate - its one overmastering impulse is to cling, no matter to what. Where the tendril strikes the wire, or hooks that sensitive finger around it, how quickly it tightens its hold and winds itself round and round! In time it becomes almost as hard as the wire itself.
Burroughs' ruminations and philosophizing about The Art of Seeing, Human Traits in the Animals, The Divine Soil, nesting times of birds, ancestry of man, and more.
John Burroughs was one of the earliest and most articulate pioneers of the United States conservation movement, publishing twenty-eight books on the natural world during the height of the Industrial Revolution. As an author, teacher, and poet, he wrote with intimacy and feeling, illustrating verbal landscapes and providing philosophical insights about the environment.
People by the hundreds of thousands relished his writings. His friends included Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and John Muir. Burroughs was dedicated to studying the world and making nature come to life on the written page.
In the last decades of the 19th century, his prolific nature essays helped spawn the nature study movement and made him an international celebrity.
