The Trees Know Their Names
Every living thing is aware of its own life
A few days ago I walked out onto my porch in the early morning with my dog and my cup of coffee. Lydia had heard some commotion and asked to go out to investigate. I stepped to the porch rail and looked out on the machinery rolling into the property cattycorner to my yard.
The porch behind my house is one of my favorite places, overlooking a green yard and a patch of woods. Asheville sits in a bowl surrounded by mountains, so every street and every yard slants in one direction or another. For me that means that my porch sits high above a backyard that fades down to my neighbors behind me. I sipped my coffee and looked down on the construction equipment fifty yards away: trucks, backhoes, cranes.
As I watched, the workers began clearing away trees.
My heart began to break.
I want to be clear. I was standing on a porch at my own house where land had been cleared 20 years earlier. I had the visual high ground — but no real moral high ground. What I was witnessing had been done years ago in the very place I was standing so that my home could be built.
That was part of the heartbreak. My complicity. Now my yard is green and tended and surrounded by trees. But my grassy yard was once carved from the forest, just the same as what I was watching happen behind my home.
Black Walnut, Shagbark Hickories, Pignut Hickories, Sugar Maples, Flowering Dogwoods, a single White Oak, a single Southern Catalpa. All of these are in my yard.
Juglans niger, Carya ovata, Carya glabra, Acer saccharum, Cornus florida, Quercus alba, Catalpa bignonioides.
The Cherokee and other native tribes in these mountains have their own names for these trees.
Se-di, ge-hi-tsu-ni-s-di, wa-du-ya, tlv-wa-gi, ka-na-si-ta, ta-la, tsu-ga-lo-ga-sv-qua.
I have not capitalized these names because they are phonetic renderings from oral Cherokee traditions. If I have misrepresented anything, I apologize. My intent is pure.
There is also a cluster of three catkin-dangling trees that, to my embarrassment, I have not identified. The leaves and catkins and trunk shape give a birch look. But its bark does not have the shedding paper look of a birch.
A few of the larger trees have been enveloped by English Ivy. Some of the smaller ones are covered in Wisteria vines, which blossomed recently with pink and purple flowers.
Interestingly, there are none of the heath family of trees that the mountains of Western North Carolina are known for: Mountain Laurel, Flame Azalea, Catawba Rhododendron, Rosebay Rhododendron.
I did not inventory the patch of land that was being cleared. I suppose it was roughly the same as my yard. I am sad that I never knew their names.
But the trees know their own names.
Trees are not merely alive in some abstract conception of biological life. Trees experience life. Trees know each other. Trees relate to each other.
Trees know their own species and will cooperate with siblings to help each other survive. They communicate oncoming risks, such as parasitic or viral infestations. They know the other plants around them that are symbiotic to them, and they share nutrients back and forth. They know the species that are antagonistic to them and take sophisticated steps to combat them.
Do squirrels and birds know which trees are best for their homes through instinct and experience? Or do the trees welcome them with intent? Do the trees grow in ways that make them good hosts? Don’t answer too quickly. Trees themselves never answer quickly.
Trees learn. Trees retain knowledge. Trees nourish, sometimes giving of themselves to their fellows who are lacking in sugars or defense chemicals. We’ve lived too long with the idea that trees compete for the sun. In fact, trees with abundant canopies and wide access to sunlight will use their roots and mycorrhizal networks to send energy to their less fortunate siblings, sometimes even nourishing a stump.
The trees know their families, they know their neighbors. Yes, they know their competitors too. Trees know the risks they face. They know their life-giving sources. They know their sunlight, their water, their soil, their seasons.
Arborists from the NC Arboretum have dated a White Oak half a mile from my house at 350 years old. I am quite sure that tree knows itself.
Trees experience life. They experience duration.
Trees know their own silent names.
The plot of land behind my home was cleared in a day. I watched the activity periodically throughout the day, but could not watch for too long at any one time. It was too violent. Life was ripped from that quarter-acre of land with apparent disdain.
The trees were the most obvious casualties. But everything else was ripped away as well. Birds’ nests, ivy vines, shrubbery. Lichens, mosses, ferns. How many beetles were killed as the trees were sawn into chunks that were picked up with a claw and dropped into multi-ton trucks, presumably to be hauled to a mulching facility? Even the topsoil was stripped away, down to the red clay beneath. Rain came the next day, leaving ugly red puddles where life used to be. I love clay. I do. But this looked like nothing but death.
Later, I stood on my porch, my morning coffee replaced with an evening beer. I sipped my drink as I mourned. Again, I must stress, my own home and porch and yard would not be where it was unless some trees and life were stripped away 20 years ago to make room for me and my neighbors. I understand that.
But watching the killing was painful.
The trees in my yard are my friends. I know them, love them. They bring me joy. And I hope that my life around them brings something of value to them. I hope they view me as a symbiotic creature.
For now, the best I can do is be witness to their life and loveliness.
Forgive us, trees. I will try to do better. I will at least try to learn the name of the one clump of sibling trees I do not yet know. Box Elders, perhaps.
Will it help me to know the name? Well, yes, in as much as it helps me remember that tree’s affinities — for soil, for sun, for bugs, for birds.
But the trees know themselves without me.
