Often the French common names of plants closely follow their Scientific or Latin names; no surprises there, it is a Latin language. But in the case of the three most abundant trees in The Forest, more ancient roots are found.
Deep inside the ancient slopes and hollow ways of the Sonian Forest stand three trees so familiar that we almost stop seeing them: Beech, Oak and Larch. They shape the canopy, define the soil, influence the wildlife, and carry our imaginations through the seasons. Yet beneath their bark and roots lies another, quieter story: their names do not follow the path of book-Latin and learned science, but the older roads of folk speech, mountains, and pre-Roman tongues.
Their French names — Hêtre, Chêne and Mélèze — are survivors from linguistic worlds older than modern French, older than Linnaeus and even older than the Romans.
Before taxonomy, before printed herbals, before royal forests and imperial forestry schools, there were spoken names, shaped by people who lived with these trees rather than studied them: charcoal burners, carpenters, monks, travellers, herders, resin-tappers, and children gathering sticks to swordfight in the dusk.
Those were the names that stayed.
𝐁𝐞𝐞𝐜𝐡 — 𝐅𝐚𝐠𝐮𝐬 𝐬𝐲𝐥𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚 — 𝐇𝐞̂𝐭𝐫𝐞
The beech dominates large areas of the Sonian Forest today, lifting its grey pillars like a living cloister. Its French name hêtre traces back through medieval French heistre and coetre, and beyond that to Gaulish, the language once spoken across much of this land.
The Latin word fagus hardly left a mark here. The spoken name remained local, familiar, and elemental, tied to food-gathering, mast-feeding livestock, and the soft, slow fall of its copper leaves.
𝐎𝐚𝐤 — 𝐐𝐮𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐮𝐬 𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐮𝐫 — 𝐂𝐡𝐞̂𝐧𝐞
The oak is found throughout the historic stands and boundary edges of the forest. The French chêne descends from ancient Gaulish cassanos, a root also found inside Breton and Cornish. This suggests that when people here named their oak, it was not because a Roman scholar described it, but because it sheltered their ancestors, armed their warriors, and warmed their winters.
The Latin quercus did survive in writing — but not in the day-to-day speech of those who walked beneath it.
𝐋𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 — 𝐋𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐱 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐝𝐮𝐚 — 𝐌𝐞́𝐥𝐞̀𝐳𝐞
Of the three, this is the most striking case of French walking a different path and calling the tree mélèze. This is a loan from northern Italian Alpine dialects, such as meléso, travelling across mountain passes through woodworkers, shepherds, and resin gatherers.
𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧
What binds these three trees is not only their place in the forest, but a single linguistic truth:
When people live long enough with a species, they do not wait for learned naming. They name it themselves. And those names, like the very roots, hold fast.
Illustration is Chat-GPT generated. I couldn't find the three trees conveniently grouped together in The Forest.