For a long time I walked through green as if green were a single material. Trees, bushes, that fernlike thing, that other fernlike thing. It was a kind of visual humming. Pleasant, and almost entirely without people in it, if you will allow plants to be people for the length of this sentence.
Then a friend, who is the sort of person who stops in the middle of a conversation to greet a shrub, started handing me names. Not as a quiz. As introductions. Jewelweed. Sweetfern, which is not a fern. Indian pipe, which looks like a ghost and has no chlorophyll, a fact that made me feel I had been inattentive my entire life.
I resisted at first. Naming felt like a colonial habit, a way of pinning the living to a card. Some of that suspicion is fair. Common names are a mess of history, including the ugly parts. Scientific names can sound like a locked door. And yet: without a name, I could not ask a question. I could not find out whether the ghost plant was parasitic or just shy. I could not tell a child, or myself, what we were looking at. The nameless trail stayed a blur.
Learning names did not make me an expert. It made me a beginner with a better flashlight. Once I knew jewelweed, I started seeing it in every damp ditch. The world had not filled up with jewelweed. I had. Attention is like that. It colonizes you back.
There is a humility that comes after the first dozen names, when you realize the remaining hundreds are not going to wait for you. I carry a small guide and I still get it wrong. I have greeted a look-alike with confidence and then been corrected by a leaf that refused the description. Being wrong in a field is a clean kind of wrong. The plant does not shame you. It just continues.
I care now about the politics of the names, too. Some of the old common names are a record of who got to do the naming. There are better names in other languages, including the ones that were here first. Learning a name can be a door into that history rather than a way to skip it. I try to learn more than one name when I can. The plant is not the English word. The word is a handle. Handles can be replaced.
What I did not expect was the social life of it. People who know plants recognize each other the way people who know birds do: a slight pause at a patch of shoulder-high weeds, a leaning in. I have had entire conversations that were just pointing. That, too, is a kind of literacy.
If you want to start, do not start with a forest. Start with the unglamorous strip you already pass: the alley, the parking-lot edge, the crack in the schoolyard. Learn three names there. Use them until they stick. The strip will become a neighborhood. You will have slightly more world than you did last week.
I still walk through green sometimes and let it be a hum. Not every hour has to be a field guide. But I like knowing that the hum is made of voices, and that I can, when I want to, say hello.
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