So that you must not attach any great botanical importance to the characters of contrasted aspects in leaves, which I wish you to express by the words "Apolline" and "Arethusan"; but their mythic importance is very great, and your careful observance of it will help you completely to understand the beautiful Greek fable of Apollo and Daphne. There are indeed several Daphnes, and the first root of the name is far away in another field of thought altogether, connected with the Gods of Light. But etymology, the best of servants, is an unreasonable master...Daphne chased by Apollo, may have perhaps-though I doubt even this much of consistence in the earlier myth-have meant the Dawn pursued by the Sun. ...
so Daphne of the leafy peace. She is, in her first life, the daughter of the mountain river, the mist of it filling the valley; the Sun, pursuing, and effacing it, from dell to dell, is, literally, Apollo pursuing Daphne...
And farther, the leaf, in its connection with the river, is typically expressive, not as the flower was, of human fading and passing away, but of the perpetual flow and renewal of the human mind and thought, rising "like the rivers that run among the hills";

-John Ruskin from Proserpina Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air Was Yet Pure -1888