Hey friends,
There’s a poem pinned above my desk called More Than Enough, by Marge Piercy. It’s a paean to June, when the first flush of summer is bursting forth. I’ll keep it up there all season, in part because the language is so luscious it makes me want to burst forth, and in part as a reminder of the fine-grained details of what changes, and how, throughout the course of a summer.
The green will never again be so green, so purely and lushly new, she writes. Indeed - we’ve had a month of drought and the grasses are straw-colored now, the honey locusts in the park dropping crisped leaves along the paths. The gardens are stressed - delicate hydrangeas scorched at the edges, roses losing their foliage, dogwood trees curling their leaves in an effort to preserve whatever cellular moisture they can.
Humans get stressed by heat too, but unlike plants we can move around: to submerge our bodies in bodies of water, to drink cold liquids, to seek shade. Around these parts, a linden grove serves that last need with aplomb.
Lindens, also called American Basswood, are tall, fast growing trees native to the Eastern US. Often planted in urban areas, they can grow up to 50 feet high and 40 feet wide, with sprawling branches and profuse, broad leaves. Their shade is dense and lulling - when the wind moves through the leaves, is shushes you.
Shade isn’t their only gift. Throughout June and into July, lindens perfume the air with the most welcoming fragrance - honeyed musky vanilla mixed with clean laundry drying on the line and a hint of just-cut grass. It’s delightful, and because there are so many of these trees in the park across from my house, it’s the smell of home at a certain time of year.
Lindens are some of my favorite neighbors and while I’ve lived among them for years, I just learned their name as part of my slow-moving project to identify all of the trees in the Southwest Corridor park near my house. Attaching a name to the trees was like gaining access to a portal that let me see them in closer detail, and identify them in spots beyond my own neighborhood.
I first noticed their leaves: fat and glossy, heart-shaped with a rich, almost tropical green hue. Their heft weighs the branches down in an arc, creating a wide dome of dense shade to lie under. From below, the underside of the leaves are pale green, almost silvery. After they’ve flowered, lindens’s fruits hang in clusters of five or six, like tiny cream-colored cherries.
In time I’ll get to know other trees better - honey locusts, Eastern pitch pines, crab apples, field maples, Northern white oaks, tulip trees, others. This preoccupation came out of one of my new year’s intentions to deepen my connection with the natural world, not by leaving the city to “escape into nature,” (although I do crave more time in the woods) but by paying close attention to the living world I share space with in my daily life.
As I’ve been doing this, I’ve noticed my propensity to start with names. I annoy myself sometimes- can’t I look at a flowering tree and revel in its colors, its fragrance, the lovely curve of its leaves, the bees bobbing around its blooms - and just behold it with wonder? Be present? Isn’t that enough? What does knowing the name change? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
But names are the starting point for any relationship, plant or otherwise. And relationship = good. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes,
Names are the way we humans build relationships, not only with each other but with the living world. I’m trying to imagine what it would be like going through life not knowing the names of the plants and animals around you…I think it would be a little scary and disorienting - like being lost in a foreign city where you can’t read the street signs. Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection “species loneliness” - a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from our estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.
A few weeks ago I watched a tall woman with cropped white hair throw her arms around a massive old oak tree on the sidewalk. She stood there, embracing it, for a minute or two. She backed up, patted the tree, stared up toward its crown, her hand resting on the bark. I almost cried at her unselfconscious moment of open adoration and connection with a plant - I think because it’s such a rare thing to witness.
Maybe she knew it was an oak, maybe she didn’t - in that moment, it didn’t matter. She saw the tree - its thick, tall trunk busting through the chainlink fence bordering its yard, its canopy spread wide across the whole street - and took a minute to express her wonder and gratitude.
If we get to know plants (and people, too, since we’re talking about relationship-building) by leading with curiosity and wonder, we can get to know them better, understand what they need to thrive, and share their stories.
And maybe by doing this, we can get more people thinking differently, questioning actively, about what it means to be a human on this planet at this moment, what it looks like to be in right relationship with the living world, and what we owe our non-human kin.
So while a name might be a starting point, it’s just one pin in the mental map of the plants we know and love. More importantly, can we behold the linden (or the oak or the elder or the poplar) with wonder that they’ve kept showing up for eons, adapting to the changes of seasons, the stretches of time, and what humans have wrought; and with gratitude for what they offer us, despite, well, us.
As Kimmerer points out, “it’s not naming the source of wonder that matters, it’s wonder itself.”
Thanks for reading, especially in the depths of summer! Hope you’re squeezing the season for all it’s worth. I’ll keep submerging myself in various bodies of water til the bittersweet end. I’m grateful for you - catch you in a month-ish.
XO,
Leigh