Learning the Undivided Silence

Children love memorizing. It’s delightful to watch a proud child singing the alphabet or counting numbers. Not to mention watching the parents and grandparents thrill at the accomplishment.

Memory being the mystery that it is, I still remember the now mostly useless mnemonics of my school years, 70 years ago. “I before E except after C.” If exceptions prove the rule, consider this 100% proven. There was also the monkey wrench schoolboy fun of “30 days hath September, April, June, and November, all the rest have 31 — except my grandmother, and she rides a bicycle.” Too bad I couldn’t remember something useful, like what I was supposed to pick up yesterday at The Store Formerly Known as Walt’s.

What a pity that memorizing just gets harder the older you are. Lately, I’ve tried and failed to memorize more things than I can remember. The Alpha, Bravo, Charlie NATO alphabet and irregular Latin verb forms have defeated my earnest efforts. Except for russulas and waxy caps in the fall, I can’t remember the names of any of the mushrooms from the guidebook I studied a couple of years ago, maybe because there are so many look-alikes.

It’s annoying trying to get the cruelly misnamed customer service desk in Bangalore to spell my name correctly without the NATO alphabet.

A singsong voice on the phone says, “Let me repeat your name: P-L-O-U-S-E.”

“No! C! As in, uh, citrus. No, cat. I mean, Charlie.”

Annoying but inconsequential, not deadly like confusing foraged mushrooms.

Learning to identify local plants is a safer exercise for the creaky synapses of the aging prefrontal cortex.

If, like me, you’ve ever had the impulse to learn the names of our native flora, the American poet Howard Nemerov’s poem “Learning the Trees” will sound familiar:

Before you can learn the trees

You have to learn

The language of the trees

There follow all the new words in that foreign language: samara, drupe, pome, orbicular, cordate, cleft, reniform, palmate venation. And then the leaf tips: acute, truncate, and auriculate.

Here on the Key Peninsula, under bigleaf maples, alders, cedars, and hemlock, with our tree guide open, we learn the polysyllabic botanical names. Acer macrophyllum, Alnus rubra, Thuja plicata, and Tsuga heterophylla, pronouncing each syllable carefully in the Latin language of trees. (Kamryn Everett explained for readers of this award-winning paper why the double terms of scientific names are useful in “Whether Bluebells, Bluebottles, or Harebells, It’s All in the Name,” May 2025.)

Once you’ve learned some names, you’re eager to head outdoors where the real trees are:

To see how the chaos of experience

Answers to catalogue and category

The guidebook pictures and descriptions correspond only approximately to the trees out there. When you are trying to identify an uncertain specimen by leaf shape:

The leaves of a single tree

May differ among themselves more than they do

From other species, so you have to find

All blandly says the book, “an average leaf”

Averages are easy with numbers. But an average leaf? Hard.

So you step back and try looking at the tree’s silhouette, or squint at its bark up close. You examine the leaves, looking for that average leaf, as you struggle to get any one of them to match the illustrations in the book.

“Dreadful doubt!” as Nemerov says.

But if you keep at it, “Little by little, you do start to learn.”

You can recognize a willow and know it’s a salix, even if you are still dreadfully unsure whether it’s a Scouler’s, Hooker’s, Pacific, cracked, or Sitka.

You make headway identifying and naming, and then you may notice “what language does, and how it does it.” In dividing fir from hemlock, you cut up the world, and “not always at the joints.”

Names are our cleavers for slicing the forest into species. Distinguishing different trees — and for that matter, ferns, shrubs, and roadside wildflowers — feels like getting a handle on the wild things that used to be beyond our control.

Identifying becomes a way of “dividing up the world to conquer it.” But that’s the funny thing about our knowing.

You may succeed in learning many trees

And calling off their names as you go by

But their comprehensive silence stays the same

While trees don’t speak with words themselves, learning their names is one path to connect with the nature that surrounds us.

Sometimes, though, it’s good to leave the names indoors and, unarmed with words for slicing up experience, go out into the undivided silence that’s always there.

Dan Clouse lives in Lakebay.