The Names of Trees
What a gardener taught me about cultivating curiosity
Friends,
The other day at my local meditation center, I noticed the trees outside the window, fluttering in the morning light. What were they? I wanted more than just “tree”—I wanted a name for the organism that mesmerized me. John, a fellow meditator and gardener, had presented on trees at the center before, so I made sure to connect with him afterwards. John’s tall and lanky, like the trees he loves, and he’s always smiling and looking up and raising his hands while he talks.
I cornered John over coffee and asked if he knew the name, and that one question turned into a thirty minute tour of all the flora and fauna of the property (if you’ve read Still Life for long, you’ll know that field trips like this are my dream!). He told me about the purple cone flowers and sunflowers covered with healthy bees, how the shade tolerant sugar maples are some of the most common trees in Minnesota, how the American Elm are finally starting to grow again after surviving a plague in the 1970s, how the Burr Oak—“I like to call them the king of trees”—is covered with all kinds of beneficial bugs that feed the nearby wrens and robins. Oh, and those trees I saw through the window? Japanese White Spire Birch, a unique drought resistant birch tree that’s slowly replacing the Paper Birch that used to cover the Twin Cities.
In a single walk around the building, I learned more tree names and histories than I’ve learned in the almost four years of living in the Twin Cities. John had clearly spent years of life becoming intimate with the natural world around him, and it showed. Some knowledge only comes that way, through long stretches of time, through patience and persistent curiosity about life. Do I know anything with that same vigorous depth and intimacy? I’m not so sure.
I left our conversation feeling inspired to keep looking for what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls the “dearest freshness deep down things.” Turns out, this kind of intimacy requires real effort. It takes real patient effort to get anywhere wise and embodied and passionate in this life. It doesn’t just fall into our laps, but the effort is worth it. Otherwise, we’ll just skim across the surface of things, saying “tree” when we could say “Japanese White Spire Birch,” walking under nameless shade when we could know whole local histories of the places we inhabit. Or as the poet Dana Gioia wrote in his poem “Words”:
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.
To name is to know and remember, and I don’t know about you, but I feel my own capacity to name has been constricting the past few years. Spending work days online and home time on TV starts to fill the brain to the brim where there’s no room left to take in what’s around me. So full of memes and breaking news, it’s easy for me to lose track of the day of the week, the names of plants, the histories that give rise to the place I’m living.
The writer and naturalist Barry Lopez wrote about this, too. I’ve been reading his last book (he died in 2020) with a close friend, and there’s a few passages I can’t get out of my head. In one essay, he retraces histories in the Western landscape, heading back to places Georgia O’Keeffe painted and places where Indians were massacred during the centuries-long American march westward. By writing and naming and photographing, he’s trying to get intimate with the land, to bring history and place and embodiment closer together.
He calls it a kind of “empirical witness,” one that we’ve lost as we “preferred the imagination to the senses and took modernism’s mistrust of the past, its argument with Western tradition, a step further, finally coming to trust only the tradition of the self” (Lopez specifically points out this trend in American art history—think of the shift from early landscapes of Hudson River School to the loose brushwork of Georgia O’Keeffe to the “pure” abstraction of Jackson Pollock. There’s a loss of place just as much as there’s an increased emphasis on individual expression). In other words, as we became more interested in what we can imagine, we lose touch with what we can see and breathe and taste and feel. We lose touch with the land itself. Lopez suggests that art, as a “record of human concentration,” can help restore that dislocation:
The creation of a painting or museum-quality photographic print requires an analogous kind of concentration, unusual in our lives now. To consider this is to see how diminished the longer rhythms of human life have become in the cultural West, and to renew a perception of how art, itself a record of human concentration, can restore an awareness of those rhythms. We’ve become, it seems to me, a chronically distracted people, yearning to be relieved of the misgivings and anxiety we feel, thinking we no longer have time to go deep. We doubt the relief claimed for the manufactured products we’re told will help. In some basic way, we’ve come to doubt our culture.
So how do we address that sense of dislocation, that uneasy sense of skimming across a world-as-backdrop to our own egos? For Lopez, the answer is art and travel and learning the names of things. I’d add: friendship and conversation and asking others to share their passion. “Human concentration” isn’t a grim duty, and it’s not something we have to develop alone. For John, it’s come from a decades-long love of the land, and the conversation around the meditation center was the overflow.
So what is that for you? What do you want to name and know and remember? Whatever it is, I hope you pursue it with a fiery and unwavering curiosity. And I hope you stoke those fires and tend them well so, one day, we can warm ourselves by your passions, too.
Take care,
Michael
“The Grove” by Michael Kleber-Diggs Planted here as we are, see how we want to bow and sway with the motion of earth in sky. Feel how desire vibrates within us as our branches fan out, promised entanglements, rarely touch. Here, our sweet rustlings. If only we could know how twisted up our roots are, we might make vast shelter together – cooler places, verdant spaces, more sustaining air. But we are strange trees, reluctant in this forest – we oak and ash, we pine – the same the same, not different. All of us reach toward star and cloud, all of us want our share of light, just enough rainfall.
A journey from over-consumption, to overly-strict living, to “right livelihood”
Creative Time’s summit on art, social justice, and politics is this month
Breathing with the forest—an immersive website by Emergence Magazine
Creative Mornings is every month in cities around the world—see you in Minneapolis?
Rich rich rich! I will have to read this another two times at least! Some things I've halfway thought myself, but never gone deeper....thank you!
Love this. Over the past year I've also been really into learning the names of the plants in my life (though sometimes I feel a little weird doing so via the identifying feature in my iPhone's camera roll!). It's also a key theme in Richard Powers's The Overstory, which I'm reading now and loving!