I am not offering any solution to VN’s “Signs and Symbols”, but would like to draw attention to a relevant and interesting passage from Thomas Hardy’s novel which I read a while ago:

The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon that wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been with

these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze.  They had been possessed of its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to read

its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the sights and sounds of night, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense boughs, which had to Grace

a touch of the uncanny, and even the supernatural, were simple occurrences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew.  They

had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and

symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet. From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces,

when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the

wind's murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its sort afar off.  They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, or

tainted with incipient decay, and by the state of its upper twigs, the stratum that had been reached by its roots. The artifices of the

seasons were seen by them from the conjuror's own point of view, and not from that of the spectator's.

Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, pp. 340-41 (Macmillan [1887] 1975, New Wessex Edition, ed. Furbank)

A. Bouazza