Ways of Looking at a Tree: What You See Depends on Why You Came
There are many ways of looking at a tree, and the one you use depends on why you walked out to it in the first place. I was reminded of that this week by a video from Michael Button, who thinks out loud about how civilizations shape the people who live in them.1 Partway through, he asks you to picture the same tree three times.
The first time, you come with a job to do. You need a beam for a roof, so you look at how straight the trunk is, how thick, and where you would cut. The second time, you come back with someone you love. You sit underneath it, the leaves come down around you, and you remember another afternoon in the same spot years ago. The timber is still there, but it isn’t the point anymore. The third time, a carpenter comes along and sees the grain, the weak places and the way the tree has grown, all things a casual visitor would walk right past.
It’s the same tree each time. What changes is the person looking.
The Trees Outside My Window
From my east window upstairs I look out over open sky and trees running off into the distance. On a busy morning I hardly see them. They’re “the view,” something I would point out to a visitor and then forget. On a slower morning, with the Saint-Martial bells ringing seven and the light coming up behind them, I start to notice which ones have already dropped their leaves and which are still holding on.
Nothing about the trees has changed between those two mornings. I’m the one who changed.
How an Herbalist Looks
Fifteen years of herbalism have given me another way of looking, and it is a lot like the carpenter’s. When I pass a linden (the tilleul the French dry for their evening tisane), I’m not only admiring it. I’m checking whether it has flowered yet, whether the pale bracts have come, and whether it stands too close to the road to gather from. A purpose sharpens the eye.
Michael makes this point too, and I think it’s the best one in his video. Practical knowledge doesn’t have to flatten a thing. It can make the encounter richer. The trouble starts when one purpose takes over so completely that you forget it is a purpose at all, and a tree becomes nothing but lumber, or nothing but a harvest.
Goethe’s “Delicate” Way of Seeing
The German poet Goethe spent years studying plants, and he described a way of looking he called zarte Empirie, delicate empiricism.2 He meant unhurried, close attention that lets the plant show you what it is before you decide what it is for. You look at one leaf, then the next leaf up the stem, and the next, until you can see the plant changing shape as it climbs. He wrote a small book about it in 1790, The Metamorphosis of Plants.3
I like that word “delicate.” It reminds me that attention can be gentle and still be careful and exact.
Attention as a Gift
In 1942 the French philosopher Simone Weil wrote to a friend who had been badly wounded in the First World War. She thanked him for reading her pages so closely and told him that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”4 She was talking about people. I think it holds just as well for a tree, a garden, a kitchen or a village.
Out back I have a little orchard in pots: a Gala and a Golden Delicious apple, a Conference pear and an old columnar cherry. When I give them five minutes of real looking instead of a glance on my way past, I see things I would otherwise miss. That kind of looking is a big part of why I let my garden mud my hands.
Jesus didn’t tell his listeners to glance at the lilies of the field. He told them to consider them, how they grow.5 The Greek word behind “consider” means to look closely and learn thoroughly. That’s delicate empiricism in one word, eighteen centuries before Goethe.
Try This With Your Own Tree
Next time you pass a tree you see every day, stop for a minute and look at it three ways.
First, look at it as if you needed something from it: wood, fruit, shade, or leaves for tea. Then look again as if you had come to sit under it with someone you love. Last, look at it as if you had never seen a tree before. Notice what each kind of looking shows you, and what it hides.
I would love to hear which tree you chose. Tell me in the comments or come tell me at the next live. And if you want to see where my own trees are going, I wrote about my plans in Out of the House.
If this work is useful to you, you can buy me a coffee — buymeacoffee.com/cskizer
Notes
1. Michael Button, “Something About Human Consciousness Doesn’t Make Sense,” YouTube video, accessed November 3, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU-aYZfU7NA.
2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988), 307.
3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (Gotha: Ettinger, 1790).
4. Simone Weil to Joë Bousquet, April 13, 1942, in Simone Weil and Joë Bousquet, Correspondance (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1982), 18.
5. Matthew 6:28.
