How to Speak Forest

To name something is to instate it in the family of things, to make it a node in the relational web we call reality. A word can be a pinhole, pinching a vista of complexity to a narrow point, but it can also be a magnifying glass for the invisible processes and nuances that tessellate that complexity. Few things in this world are more complex, more dazzling and dynamic, more irreducible and irrepressibly alive, and therefore more needful of proper naming, than a forest and its fractal, the tree.

In A Forest Language: Words That Illuminate the Astonishing World of Trees (public library), Hannah Fries — a poet of uncommon potency and a passionate naturalist who reverences the crossing point of science and spirit — rewilds the imagination with words you’ve never heard and words you know in different contexts, from nautical engineering to music theory, that mean something entirely different in the arboreal realm. Together, they constellate a lexicon of wonder that invites you to eavesdrop on ancient silent conversations with gravity, time, and light in the language of hormones and motor cells, revealing a universe of symmetries and deviations, mathematical yet sensual, full of its self-healing wounds and chemical whispers, resinous with metaphors for resilience and self-reliance, for belonging and love, for the art of letting go and the meaning of enough. Although recent research has opened up fascinating new realms of possibility regarding the embodied intelligence of the plant world, there is much we don’t know.

Trying to understand, we are tempted to compare their way of being to our own, but if we’re not careful, these comparisons can blind us to the mystery of never truly knowing another species. As humans, however, we apply language, our great meaning-making tool, to describe what we’ve learned of their world as best we can. How we do so often says as much or more about us than it does about that of which we speak.

At their heart, so many of these words and concepts seemed to reflect a blurring of the line between life and death, between the individual and the whole. Forest time operates on a scale indifferent to the rush of human time; it is slower and wider, riding the waves of geologic time, reaching toward spacetime. Always in flux — always already growing, dying, changing, and regenerating — the forest embodies the truth that impermanence is a constant state of being.

A glimpse into this other world requires a shift in thinking. With each glimpse, each shift, a wild ecology of wonder grew up around me. I believe we have to be open to these shifts — to seeing forests in a context that is thrillingly different from the one we are used to — if we are to be better stewards of these ecosystems in our uncertain future.

After all, in the end, we are all part of the same great unfolding mystery. Each of the sixty-one words comes alive in a essay with the feeling-tone of a prose poem, weaving together science and memoir, etymology and ecology, fact and poetic truth. Some of my favorites are samara (the winged seed of the maple), preforest (“the time and space between forest and forest,” when a devastation opens up the space for a rush of light that summons dormant seeds into new growth), rhizosphere (the subterranean ecosystem laced with rhizomes, “a world that hums, pulses, nearly glows with activity… both a microcosm and an intimate, specialized place unique to itself”), whorl (“a group of branches radiating from the same level on a conifer’s trunk, making a springy resting place for fresh snow”), lenticels (the pores through which bark breathes), gallery (the curly hieroglyphics made by the beetle larvae as they feed on the soft phloem between bark and wood), gemel (“when two separate trees become joined together in a process akin to natural grafting,” sharing a Latin root with gemini), and bud break (the moment when the first fragile leaves unfurl in the early spring light that “comes like a shiver of knowledge — that, yes, it’s worth it all, everything to come.”) What emerges from this lovely book is a reminder that wording is an instrument of worlding; that if “the word for world is forest,” as Ursula K.