A journey with yew, hawthorn and hazel
I’ve been walking the maze in the garden here at Reagh with Adam. The maze is large and the deep hedges are of yew and hawthorn. At its centre a single hazel tree.
Trees are sanctuaries … They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach … ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. …A tree says: My strength is trust. When we are stricken … a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
Yew (Taxus baccata) stands at the threshold of transformation. There was a time when yew-may have been the only evergreen tree in Britain. Both Druids with their belief in reincarnation, and later Christians with their teaching of the resurrection, regarded it as a natural emblem of everlasting life. Individual trees live thousands of years and Irish lore saw it as one of the earth’s oldest beings. The fourteenth century Book of Lismore notes:
Three lifetimes of the yew for the world from its beginning to its end.
The yew’s longevity is due to the unique way they grow, branching down into the ground to form new stems around the central growth, becoming indistinguishable from the original tree. Ancient yews hollow from within yet continue living. Trunks split and re-root. What appears dead feeds new growth. Time behaves differently around yews. Yet yew is also often associated with death because they understand continuance through dissolution.Death and rebirth, the new from the old.
In Celtic lands, yews gather around burial grounds, ruined abbeys, standing stones, old graveyards — places where time is porous. Older sometimes than remembered history, they became keepers of continuity between worlds.
In Irish lore, the yew arrives from the Otherworld, one of the five sacred trees known as the Tree of Ross. In the Breton lore they are amongst the Seven Chieftain Trees, with heavy penalties for felling one. Druid Bards used staves of yew to record and memorise poems and incantations. And the staves were also used for carving Ohgam letters for rituals. In ‘The Wooing of Etaine’, Elaine is abducted and her husband, Eochaid, searches for her for a year and a day before asking the Druid, Dallahd, to help. Dallahd make four long yew staves inscribed with Ogam and so find Etaine in the sihd of Bri Leith, with the faery king, Midir.
Poisonous in every part except for the soft sweet fruit of the aril that contains a toxic, potentially fatal seed, they are now under threat from research into their strong anti-cancer properties. But we don’t always need to consume a plant to be affected by their presence.
Within the maze, yew is at home on a winding path that twists and alters perspective, that moves inward through uncertainty. Yew’s are not creatures of straight lines. Fertile and dark, yew asks the body to move through the maze with attention. Asks us, always:
Who is the ancestor you want to become?
Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) and yew intermingle in the maze’s hedge. Thorn of the Sídhe (Crann na Síoga) hawthorn is a tree of thresholds, a tree of edges. Her blessings mirror this: thorn and blossom intertwined, boundaries and tenderness inseparable. Hawthorn is complex. She has her thorns, her strong boundaries, warnings of dire consequences if she is cut or taken from without permission, and yet she offers healing. And always she asks:
How is your heart?
What does it take for you to listen to your heart?
Hawthorn is a herb of the heart — strengthening, promoting circulation, healing heartbreak, physical and emotional.
Hawthorn,
Thornapple,
Mayblossom
Mayberry
Maybush
Hawberry
Huath
Hedgethorn
Whitethorn
Hagthorn
Quickthorn
Ladies’ meat.
Her white blossom arrives in ecstatic abundance from Beltane, yet carries beneath its sweetness the scent of mortality — the taboo about brining her indoors is related to the scent of flowers which emit a chemical, trimethylamine, that is also released in sex and death.
I’ve loved her since I was a three-year-old, carrying armfuls of blossom into my Nanna G’s house, only to be told, vociferously, Get it out of the kitchen! You’ll bring in bad luck!
…hawthorn melt my edges, heart and body. Where do I end? Where does the owl hooting softly in the heart-filled night begin? The soft light in the bedroom greens, hums, mild warmth of the herb surging and singing in me, I am seeing with the unworn sides of the eyes, as Thoreau put it, dropping deeper and deeper into a heart suppled by hawthorn, my breath, her breath, our breath…
settle, open soften…… white blossoms weight the branches and then they are gone.
from At the Heart’s Farthest Edge
Life and death. Along the maze’s path there are no simple directions, only intuitions, encounter, enchantment.
We reach the hazel (Corylus avellana) at the maze’s centre. In Celtic stories wisdom is found at wells, beneath trees, beside running water. The nine hazels of Segais lean over the sacred spring, dropping their crimson nuts into dark water where the Salmon of Knowledge feeds. To taste hazel is to become permeable — in Irish lore it imparts imbás: the blaze of poetic knowing, the way the three drops of hot liquid that splashed onto Gwion’s hand from Ceridwen’s cauldron in Welsh legend, so that he was filled with Awen (inspiration and knowledge) and became the greater seer, Taliesin.
Hazel is a tree of wisdom across cultures. The Tree of Knowledge in Norse mythology; sacred to Mercury or Hermes in Romans and Greek myth, she is linked to quick and airy intelligence. Her name is from the Anglo Saxon ‘haesl’, a baton of authority.
She is a pioneer plant, one of the first to grow and spread after the Ice Age. She is not used a great deal in modern herbalism but traditionally her catkins were added to teas for colds and flu, the bark for fever. Her leaves are drying, helpful where astringency is needed as in diarrhoea. She treats cuts and boils and burns, stimulates circulation and bile.
Hazel’s catkins open while winter holds.She bends without breaking. Hazel understands flow: sap-rise, stream-current, inspiration — the invisibles beneath the surface. We find her through wrong turn after wrong turn, letting go of speed and control for attention and intuition.
Wisdom. Where do we find this in our challenging world? The Asora tribe of Papua New Guinea have a saying:
Knowledge is only a rumour until it lives in the muscle.
Inspiration in the body, in the earth, in the light between the leaves, in the food we share after we leave offerings around the hazel, retracing our steps back to the world, inspired.
I’d love you to join me in a space for those who identify as women, meeting monthly to walk along the herbal path together. Find out more, including how to join, on the triskelewell page