Learning the Names of Trees at Forty

5 points · October 2026 · isthmus-seed · 6 comments

I could not tell an oak from an ash until this year, and I want to describe what it has been like to learn, because nobody told me it would change the walk.

It started with an app, which I am slightly ashamed of, and which I stopped using after a week because it was too easy. Point, click, name. I learned nothing. The names went in and out. What worked was the opposite: a book with drawings, and the rule that I was not allowed to look anything up until I had already guessed.

The first month I was wrong about everything. Every tree was an oak, because oak was the word I had. Then there were two trees — oak and not-oak — and not-oak slowly divided, the way a blurry photograph resolves, into ash and beech and the one with the peeling bark whose name I forgot four times before it stayed.

Here is what changed. The walk to the station, which I have done for eleven years and could have done blind, became a different walk. It has eleven trees on it. I did not know that. I knew there were trees, in the way you know there is a sky, but I had not counted, because there was nothing to count. Now there are eleven, and I know six of them, and I greet the six, silently, like neighbours, and the five I do not know yet are a small standing question that I look forward to.

That is what a name does. It does not describe the thing. It makes the thing countable, and once it is countable you cannot uncount it, and the world is larger by exactly that number.

I was forty before I knew this. I do not know why nobody told me. Perhaps they did and I had not learned the word for it yet.