Naming a Spot

Here is some guidance for how you name spots in Placekeeping.

Let’s start with the metaphor of house and home. A house is the structure you see from the street. A home is what is inside it: the rooms, and what’s inside them. After you’ve lived in a house for a year or two, you being to learn its parts; you can talk with contractors about crawlspaces, joists, trim, ducts. Over time you will have a working vocabulary for the place you live.

Most of us have no such vocabulary for land. We walk through a park or a preserve and see trees here and ferns there. We might encounter words like glade, fen, and hedgerow in a guide map, or more often in novels and poems, and we have to imagine what they look like.

Placekeeping asks you to look at a natural place the way you look at a home. The park or preserve is the house. The spots inside it are the rooms. A spot might be a grove, a wet meadow, a strip along a stream, or a garden bed beside a monument. Each one has its own character, and each one changes through the seasons.

Naming a spot is the first act of keeping it. A garden might already have a name; or it might not. Street address, which we commonly use for finding houses or business establishments, are of little use when we navigate through places like a a median in a parking lot or a spot on a trail.

The words below are a starting set. They are common English words, not a professional classification. Use them to name spots and to describe what you see. For a deeper vocabulary, Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney’s Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape collects more than 850 terms for land and water, and Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks gathers regional words for landscape.

Words for naming a spot

These name the kind of room. They are grouped by the spot’s Function.

Wild

Woodland. Ground covered mostly by trees.
Grove. A small group of trees with little growth beneath them.
Copse. A small, dense stand of trees or shrubs.
Thicket. Dense shrubs, hard to walk through.
Glade. An open, sunny gap in a woodland.
Meadow. Open ground of grasses and wildflowers.
Old field. A former farm field growing back on its own.
Outcrop. Bedrock showing at the surface.
Knoll. A small, rounded rise.
Hollow. A small low place, often damper and shadier than its surroundings.
Seep. A spot where groundwater oozes to the surface.
Marsh. A wetland of grasses, sedges, and reeds, with few trees.
Swamp. A wetland with trees or shrubs.
Bog. A wetland on peat, fed mostly by rain, usually acidic.
Fen. A wetland on peat, fed by groundwater.
Vernal pool. A pool that fills in spring and dries by summer. Important breeding ground for frogs and salamanders.

Edge

Verge. The grassy strip along a road or path.
Hedgerow. A line of shrubs and trees along a boundary.
Stone wall. A dry-laid wall, often an old field boundary, with growth along it.
Fence line. The strip of growth along a fence.
Woodland edge. The band where woods meet open ground.
Streambank. The strip of ground along a stream. Professionals call a planted one a riparian buffer.
Median. The planted or grassy strip between lanes of a road.
Ecotone. The professional term for any zone where two kinds of habitat meet.

Cultivated

Bed. A planted area with defined edges.
Border. A long bed along a wall, path, or lawn.
Lawn. Mowed grass.
Orchard. Planted fruit or nut trees.
Rain garden. A planted low spot that collects runoff.
Pollinator garden. A bed planted for bees, butterflies, and other pollinators.

Built

Plaza. An open paved public space.
Monument or memorial. A structure marking a person or event, with its surrounding ground.
Planter. A raised container bed in a paved setting.
Tree pit. The opening in pavement around a street tree.

Words for the shape of the ground

These describe the landform a spot sits in. They pair well with the words above: “the fern bowl,” “the hemlock ravine,” “the swale below the lawn.”

Bowl. A rounded depression, open to the sky, with sides rising all around.
Basin. A larger low area that water drains into.
Kettle. A bowl left by a melting block of glacial ice. Often wet at the bottom.
Dell. A small, sheltered, usually wooded valley.
Ravine. A narrow, steep-sided valley, usually cut by a stream.
Gully. A small channel worn by running water, often dry between rains.
Swale. A shallow, gently sloped low strip that carries or holds water.
Ridge. A long, narrow high line of ground.
Saddle. A low dip along a ridge between two higher points.
Bench. A flat step partway up a slope.
Slope. Ground on a steady incline. Note which way it faces, since a north slope is cooler and shadier than a south slope.
Erratic. A large boulder carried and dropped by a glacier, often unlike the rock around it.

Words for a single kind of plant

When one kind of plant fills a spot, these words name the collection. Pair them with the plant: “a stand of birch,” “a colony of mayapple.”

Stand. A group of trees of one kind. The standard forestry term.
Colony. A patch of one plant spreading from its own roots or runners. Mayapple, sumac, and many ferns grow this way.
Drift. A sweep of one kind of flower or grass. Common in garden design.
Carpet. A low, continuous cover of one plant across the ground.
Brake. An old word for a thicket of ferns, cane, or brush.
Reedbed. A wetland stand of reeds or cattails.
Fernery. A planted fern garden. In the wild, keepers might call a fern-filled area a fernscape.

A stand of one plant is not a problem in itself. Many healthy places are made of colonies. It becomes Overgrowth only when the plant is smothering what is around it.

Words for describing layers

These describe what is inside the room. Use them when choosing a Focus or noting what you see. They describe a layer within a spot, so they make poor spot names on their own.

Canopy. The top layer of tree crowns.
Understory. The shrubs and small trees beneath the canopy.
Shrub layer. Woody plants below head height.
Ground layer. Wildflowers, grasses, ferns, and seedlings at your feet.
Leaf litter. Fallen leaves and debris on the ground.

How these words fit the classification

A spot’s name and its classification work together. Marsh, swamp, bog, fen, seep, and vernal pool sit in a Wetland setting. Tree pit, median, and planter usually sit in an Urban setting. Most other spots sit in an Upland setting, which is the default.