Eleri Denham | Issue 6, Spring 2025

The naming of things is a surprisingly contentious business. In fact, in the scientific realm, names are notoriously a source of tension and dissension. The language we use shifts and changes and so becomes nebulous, murky as a vernal pool with its layers of mud and silt. We subdivide, speak of cultivars and varietals, and yet despite this ever-increasing intricacy, our lexicon remains maddeningly imprecise when applied to the limitless diversity that exists in the world. 

Names are intended to clarify, but they can be deceptive, too. Jellyfish, cuttlefish, and starfish are not fish. A mountain chicken (Leptodactylus fallax) is not a chicken, nor even a bird, but a type of frog (which does not live only in the mountains). We have ended up with a vocabulary of species that is as full of contradictions as the natural world itself.

Our assignations come coded with positive and negative connotations, sometimes subtle, sometimes not. Consider two common names for Symplocarpus foetidus: “meadow cabbage” and “skunk cabbage.” Which would you choose to have in your garden?

The categories we create are subject to the limitations of our understanding. A great many taxa have been reorganized since western science first set about classifying the natural world, and many probably will be again. And, of course, our words for living things are profoundly reliant on context: an “elk” is a completely different animal depending on whether you’re in Europe (Alces alces) or North America (Cervus canadensis). Names, then, do not always illuminate; they can also muddle and confuse and exclude. 

The problem of names—their multifaceted complexity, their inherent slipperiness—is not confined to the ecological world. Humans are far from immune. We have titles and labels applied to us that do not align with what we know to be true. We may be fitted into a weaponized taxonomy, designed to excise us from the garden of mutual thriving. And out of the vast array of words available for us to choose for ourselves, so many of us will struggle to find one that feels like home.

We give names to nature with the best of intentions. But what nature gives to us is a freedom from names altogether. To sit under the canopy of tall trees, on a carpet of moss, breathing in the fresh green alive smell of the earth, is to find something that exists in defiant opposition to simple categorization. Our forests and mountains and wild coasts make no demands for the perfect word or all-encapsulating description, and instead reflect us back to ourselves: each of these environments is a thousand things and more, and so are we. 

Humans may be obsessed with classification, but nature is less concerned with such things. It will allow us the grace of being nameless. It provides a reprieve from the human world’s insistence that we identify ourselves, that we permit ourselves to be evaluated and labeled. Nature can provide a shelter from examination and distortion into some other image by the lens of someone else’s vision. 

Come as you are, the forest says. Leave all of your names, new and old, the ones you’ve outgrown, the ones you’re still growing into. Set them by the stream and reclaim them again when you leave. You have no obligation to them here. Here, in wild spaces, the only mandate is exuberant existence. And your place is waiting for you.