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The very first flowers of the Hawthorn are opening! Like yesterday's cow parsley, the May is a flower associated with very inauspicious events when brought indoors.
Susan Eberly argues that it appears regularly in medieval love allegories as a symbol of carnal, rather than spiritual love: "a May garden of delights without its grene hamhorne", she writes, "is as unlikely as a courtly lover who sleeps soundly and feels well."
Bringing the flowers indoors was associated with very bad luck, sickness and death. The smell of the May was said to be like the smell of plague. The scientific explanation may be that the flowers contain trimethylamine, which also forms in decaying tissue.
It's ok for the Queen to have it indoors, though. At Christmas, she has a sprig of hawthorn from a Glastonbury tree that is said to have grown miraculously during the visit of Joseph of Arimathea, the uncle of the Virgin Mary. The Glasto trees flower twice a year, in May and Dec
@notworknicola told you about the association of hawthorn, fertility, and the fae. It's picked up in Willa Cather's The Hawthorn Tree
Across the shimmering meadows
--Ah, when he came to me!
In the spring-time,
In the night-time,
In the starlight,
Beneath the hawthorn tree.
Across the shimmering meadows
--Ah, when he came to me!
In the spring-time,
In the night-time,
In the starlight,
Beneath the hawthorn tree.
And it's mentioned so frequently in the poetry of Burns that Murray Pittock wrote a paper on it. He argues that, while hawthorn might seem to have a "love in the fields" resonance to it in poems like Highland Mary...
(How sweetly bloom'd the gay, green birk,
How rich the hawthorn's blossom;
As underneath their fragrant shade,
I clasp'd her to my bosom!
The golden Hours, on angel wings,
Flew o'er me and my Dearie;
For dear to me as light and life
Was my sweet Highland Mary)
How rich the hawthorn's blossom;
As underneath their fragrant shade,
I clasp'd her to my bosom!
The golden Hours, on angel wings,
Flew o'er me and my Dearie;
For dear to me as light and life
Was my sweet Highland Mary)
... hawthorn was also being used extensively in the enclosure of land and dispossession of the rural poor, which also colours a persistent association of the tree with absence and loss in his work.
Thou'll break my heart, thou warbling bird,
That wantons thro' the flowering thorn:
Thou minds me o' departed joys,
Departed never to return.
(The Banks o Doon)
That wantons thro' the flowering thorn:
Thou minds me o' departed joys,
Departed never to return.
(The Banks o Doon)
It seems like such a sad disenchantment to me that the tree that was once the threshold to the scary Otherworld of the fae became the exclusionary boundary of agricultural modernity.
But I'd love to know your own memories and associations with hawthorn! Let me know in your replies!
(I have to admit, too, that I rather like the smell of the May! Does that make me weird?)
(I have to admit, too, that I rather like the smell of the May! Does that make me weird?)
Someone just pointed me to this moving poem by Jane Mckie, called 'The Hawthorn Queen'. It channels the grief & loss so many of us are experiencing right now with what is happening to the natural world, but with a final note of hope. Open image for full poem.
Right now, we need more Hawthorn Queens!
