Naming five trees properly
On the small project of learning to identify five trees on my street — and how the street has changed since.
I live on a street in the eleventh arrondissement that has, by my count, thirty-one trees on it, of perhaps eight different species. For the first ten years that I lived here I could not have told you what any of them were. They were trees. I noticed them in the way I noticed the lampposts: as part of the architecture, not as living things with names and habits and seasons.
Two years ago I made a small project. I would learn the names of five of them. Properly. Not just the common name but the species, the family, the leaf shape, the bark texture, the flowering time, the cones or seeds or fruit, the rough age of the individual tree if I could guess it. Five trees. That was the whole project. It took most of a year.
The five trees
A common lime, near the corner with the bakery. A horse chestnut, halfway up the street, the biggest of the trees and the only one with a small protective metal cage at the base. A London plane outside number 32, which I had always assumed was a sycamore. A small Japanese cherry near the school, which I had always known was a cherry but had not known was a Japanese variety with a particular spring flowering window. And an Indian bean tree, which I had walked past a thousand times without ever looking up.
The bean tree was the surprise. It has long bean-like seed pods that hang from it through autumn and into winter, very obviously bean-like once you know what you are looking at, and I had never noticed them. Once I saw them I could not unsee them. The pods are forty centimetres long. They are absolutely the most conspicuous thing about the tree and I had walked past them for a decade.
What changed after the naming
The street feels populated now. Not by people — it was always populated by people. By the trees. They are, individually, things I know. I notice when one of them is in leaf earlier than last year, or when the lime is full of small humming bees (which it is, every June), or when the chestnut sheds its conkers and the schoolchildren start filling their pockets.
I would recommend this as a small project to anyone who has lived on the same street for a long time. Five trees. Learn them properly. The street, which you had thought you knew, will rearrange itself into something you actually know.