dryad

His servants shrank from the sacrilege when he ordered them to fell it; whereupon he seized an ax himself and attacked the mighty trunk around which the dryads used to hold their dances.

The knockers— hardy mountain dwellers accustomed to the cold—carried those who would have otherwise frozen: some of the dryads, or the winged sylphs, whose bodies were limp in the wintry air.

He writes, “I have called this plant Dryas after the dryads, the nymphs that live in oaks, since the leaf has a certain likeness to the oak leaf.”

“I was at the other end of the park. The dryads had this great idea of passing me through the trees to get me here. They don’t understand height very well.”

I sat at the top of Half-Blood Hill and watched the dryads come and go, singing to the dying pine tree.