Anecdotal Evidence: `What They Have a Word For'

Anecdotal Evidence: `What They Have a Word For'
[Inspiring as usual!]
One hundred fifty-three years ago today, after reporting on the bird nests and eggs he found in Holden Swamp, and on the sound a pickerel makes striking the underside of a lily pad, Thoreau notes in his journal:

“Walking in the white pine woods there, I find that my shoes and, indeed, my hat are covered with the greenish-yellow pollen of the white pines, which is now being shed abundantly and covers like a fine meal all the plants and shrubs of the forest floor. I never noticed it in such abundance before. My shoes are green-yellow, or yellow-green, even the next day with it.”

Our chief pollen-shedder is the Western red cedar. ..
A typical woods or fringe of trees along a road here includes Western red cedar, Douglas fir, alder and big-leaf maple – a lovely bouquet of mixed colors, shapes and sizes. Thoreau writes later in the same June 20, 1858, passage:

“I see that the French have a convenient word, aunaie, also spelt aulnaie and aulnage, etc., signifying a grove of alders. It reminds me of their other convenient word used by Rasle, cabanage.”

I can’t think of a collective noun in English referring to groves of any specific species of tree, only generic words -- “grove,” “copse,” “spinney,” “orchard,” “stand,” “thicket.” Cabanage means hut, campsite or slave quarters. “Rasle” is Sébastien Rasles (1657-1724), a French Jesuit missionary who compiled a dictionary of the Abenaki language. In his journal for March 5, 1858, Thoreau writes:

“Father Rasle’s dictionary of the Abenaki language amounts to a very concentrated and trustworthy natural history of that people, though it was not completed. What they have a word for, they have a thing for. A traveller may tell us that he thinks they used a pavement, or built their cabins in a certain form, or soaked their seed corn in water, or had no beard, etc., etc.; but when one gives us the word for these things, the question is settled,--that is a clincher.”...