Hawthorn in the Royal Botanical Garden, Edinburgh. Find the 'cloots'.
Beware the shade of the Hawthorn tree, where faeries gather and good and bad magic can be made. Despite this warning, today I joined a group of poetry and tree lovers gathered under the tall hawthorn in the Royal Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh (to the side of the Andy Goldworthy drystone sculpture by Inverleith House)and wrote thorny poems inspired by Mandy Haggith's poetry workshop, part of A-B-Tree.
Reading a series of Hawthorn-inspired poems by Jane McKie, Willa Cather and Seigfried Sasoon, Mandy fed us slips of paper with information about its history, medical, folklore, as a springboard for our own work. I learnt that the hawthorn (or May) smells of sex and death, it is unlucky to bring the blossom into the house and it is used in Beltane festivals. It is a associated with Brigit and healing and sometimes known as a 'clootie' tree when people hang little cloths or rags onto it to represent wishes or prayers for health. 'This is still going on here,' said Mandy casually, pointing to tattered rags hanging in our tree. If you peer at the photo above you may make them out with difficulty since they are so green with mould they are almost lost in amongst the leaves.
It was a lovely day with blue haze over the panoramic view of Edinburgh from Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags, panning to the Castle and on to the various cathedral towers and spires. The splendid session ended just as it was getting cold and pink skies followed by the bright ball of the sun as red as the few haws left on our tree.
This event was the penultimate one of Mandy's journey to celebrate the 18 trees figured in the Celtic runic (ogham) Tree Alphabet which took her round Scotland through workshops in schools, community woodland groups and environmental organisations including the other Royal Botanical Gardens in the Borders, Argyll and Dumfries.
As Mandy said on her blog ‘I’ve been delighted so far by all the leafy words sprouting from participants’ pencils!’
To read more about the A-B-Tree project see: Mandy's blog for 24th October, 2011: http://cybercrofter.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive.html
1 comments:
Glad you enjoyed it Steph!
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