A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
aspen
A poplar whose leaves hang from flattened stalks, so they pivot and rattle in next to no wind at all. Aspen spreads mostly by root suckers rather than seed, which means a stand is often a single organism — one clone, every stem genetically identical, turning color together on the same day while the clone next to it stays green. White bark that photosynthesizes through its surface, and black scars where elk and deer have reached up to strip it.
Etymology
Old English æspe, from Proto-Germanic *aspō, from a root shared with Lithuanian epušė, Latvian apsa, and Russian osina — a northern European tree word that may predate Indo-European in the region altogether. The modern English form is really the old adjective: aspen leaf, aspen bark, made-of-asp, and eventually the adjective swallowed the noun it described. The tree’s trembling was proverbial by the early 1400s. Old English also had a blunter name for it — cwicbeam, quick-tree, using quick in its older sense of living, the sense that survives in the quick and the dead.
Notes
Pando, a single aspen clone in Fishlake National Forest, Utah, covers around 43 hectares with roughly 47,000 stems and is among the largest living organisms known by mass. The individual stems are ordinary trees a few decades old. What is ancient is the root system underneath them.