a month with hawthorn
Once ancient forest spread across Europe — the UK and Wales, Ireland, the vast forest in Brittany, which survives only as a fragment now and others that could make a long list.
It is the same everywhere. Rainforest is burned in Latin America, often for short-term profit at huge ecological cost. In the US, strips of forest along highways often hide the fact that the trees only extend as far as drivers can see through the canopy—the rest has been felled. And so it goes across the globe. And yet the trees that remain still hold out hope for this battered planet. Still offer us wisdom and cradle our dreams.
Listen, they whisper into the night, the faint rustle of leaves between the hoots of the owl.
We are kith to all life but in our busyness or the exhaustion of modern living, we become easily fragmented from our fellow creatures—human, animal, plant…
The forest called me to this place. In 2019, when I still had no idea where I was heading, we stayed in a hamlet in this forest and the sense of calling became disturbing and exhilarating.
The house in Wales was the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. I loved the wild, raw landscape of mountains and slate, the quirky house. I’d raised and home-educated four children there. But body and spirit yearned for this wooded landscape.
And so I listened.
And here we are, in a 200-year-old stone house, slowly evolving a sanctuary of connection with our kith — human and more than human. A place where we can forage and grow, make and create, where we can provide a space — both virtual and physical — around the forest table, at our hearth or around a fire in the orchard beside the river beneath the stars.
In the first two years of transition, largely lived through lockdowns, the trees continued to talk. Two in particular — an elder on the boundary of the garden, that this year has seeded offspring, and a hawthorn at the entrance to the track into the forest.
These two have seen me through grief, bereavement, family illness, the sorrow of not seeing family for long stretches of time and a million joys. They have solaced my horror of climate degradation, conflicts, genocide. They have nourished and mothered me.
I was born in May, and on each of my three birthdays in this still-new place, I have gathered hawthorn — blossom and leaves. I ask permission and leave a gift of honey. As I gather, sharp thorns stay concealed under the frothy blossom.
This year I spent the month of May with hawthorn — visiting the tree, taking drop doses of the tincture, drinking hawthorn tea. The scent of hawthorn’s flowers are sometimes described as deathly, and I’m aware of its associations with the plague, the smell of the dead compared to the blossom due to the presence of trimethylamine, a compound also produced by rotting flesh.
It’s certainly a distinctive scent — musky and sweet, as redolent of desire and love as of loss and death. A herb of the heart, hawthorn is traditionally a guardian tree — branches were once hung over house doors for protection, including from lightning. And in France there were a plethora of hawthorn spells for healing.
However the scent meets you, the fragile-looking flowers and bright leaves make a tea that is delicate and refreshing. There’s an astringent undertone, a hint of sweet nuttiness and a light, floral note.
Like so many of us, hawthorn is a complex character. She has her thorns, her strong boundaries, and there are warnings of dire consequences if she is cut or taken from without permission, and yet she also offers deep holding and healing. Always she asks:
How is your heart?
What does it take for you to listen to your heart?
Each month I am spending focussed time with one plant this year and it can be easier to dive deeply with those I don’t know so well. Familiarity can be a way not to see someone, it’s all too easy to see only what we expect in those we have formed a view of long ago. I’ve loved hawthorn since I was three-years old, carrying armfuls of blossom into my nanna’s kitchen, only to be told, vociferously, to take it out again. Get it out of the kitchen!
The folklore is part of the familiarity — hawthorn is associated with Christ‘s crown of thorns and with the famous Glastonbury Thorn, which flowers twice a year, reputed to have sprung from the staff of St Joseph of Arimathea. Hawthorn adorned the altar of Hymenaios in ancient Greece and was carried in wedding processions and has associations with Beltane fertility rituals and hand-fasting.
When I took the first drop doses — a tincture of flowers, leaves and berries — they went to the heart, of course. Always the heart with hawthorn. And slowly, though the first week, I felt hawthron at work in the gut, the kidneys, in the places I expected. In the first week of May, I journalled only what I already knew.
Hawthorn is a wonderful herb for the circulation, strengthening heart muscles and veins, balancing blood pressure. As a heart tonic, it’s a trophorestorative, a plant that fortifies an organ through nourishment. It lowers cholesterol, preventing atherosclerosis, assists with coronary insufficiency, reduces inflammation in the blood vessels and is also a peripheral vasodilator, helpful for Raynaud’s disease and for varicose veins. It can also help with anaemia and altitude sickness and is antioxidant. Beneficial for the digestive system, hawthorn calms diarrhoea and dyspepsia and, as a nutritive, helps to regulate metabolism.
Hawthorn assists the kidneys due to a mild diuretic action, preventing fluid retention and helping to dissolve stones and gravel. A tea of her leaves and flowers makes an excellent gargle for sore throats. She is also supportive of the joint linings, synovial fluid, collagen, ligaments and vertebral discs, her antioxidant and anti-inflammatory actions healing connective tissue and supporting those with conditions like arthritis, gout and tendonitis.
Hawthorn is also a relaxant ally — relieving heartache, easing anxiety, promoting sleep. And she has an affinity with the female reproductive system — regulating blood flow, helpful with amenorrhoea or where there is threatened miscarriage. She boosts libido & fertility and, during menopause, is cooling for hot flushes and night sweats.
Hawthorn’s actions are not only physical, but emotional and spiritual — a herb of the heart tendering us into rest and ease in every sense, a herb that mothers us into the otherworld.
This year the blossom came and went quickly, but while it bloomed there it was a lavish froth of foaming sweetness, scent of sex and desire, uninhibited and mischievously impolite, a mass of brilliant white boldness, thrilling, glutted on joy, casting pearly petals to the breeze in a blaze of abundance.
Over the month, hawthorn entered my dreams, or was she dreaming me? I remembered an unfinished fragment of a poem written in my first year here (our local river that runs through the garden):
The river dreams me into flow, sings
Be fluid, be permeable, be strong
The elder dreams my sorrows, buried in her roots,`
dreams fierce crone protection over me.
The hawthorn dreams my heart is breaking,
opening a door to the unknown.
Hawthorn dreaming her nourishment into my heart, calling me to be faithful to this place, to hold open a space for the future.
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince
By the middle of May I was reaching beyond my expectations of hawthorn. A few drops of tincture softened my gaze, body and heart settling into peace, into another time… a childhood moment on an early summer day, sweet-scented and heady with May-blossom, a song from school assemblies running through me;
Sing a song of May-time,
Sing a song of Spring;
Flowers are in their beauty,
Birds are on the wing:May-time, play-time,
Earth has given the May-time;
Thank her for this gift of love—
Sing a song of Spring.
Blossom on the hedgerows,
Sunshine on the hills;
O, the happy May-timeAll my being fills.
This moment eliding into another… being a young mother with toddlers in a field surrounded by blossom trees, hawthorn petals drifting on the breeze as we sang rhymes — row, row, row your boat… May mothering, hawthorn singing me nursery songs and lullabies, rocking me to her rhythm.
On the tongue, the melding of bitter and sweet, strong and syrupy, tonic and heart warming… and I am held and mothered and sleepy, a snippet of song that played at junior school parties, the year we did exams to sort us for different secondary schools, a couple of months before my eleventh birthday…
I can see clearly now, the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright) sun-shiny day
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright) sun-shiny day
A song I have not thought of in decades and only ever knew this one verse from it. Hawthorn telling me the season is changing, within me as much as in the world around me, telling me that if I will look, I will see the way ahead. I’m reminded of a painting a friend did when my youngest child was born, flowers around a verse from the Song of Solomon:
See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come
On the forest track, white blossoms weight the branches and then they are gone. I will spend more time with this beloved plant in the autumn, collect haws for an elixir of the heart:
Hawthorn heart elixir
Gather enough haws to quarter fill a Kilner jar.
Freeze the haws, then defrost a few days later (this makes the haws’s nutrition more available)
Gently pound with a pestle and place in the jar.
Fill the next quarter with hawthorn leaves and flowers (dried is fine in the autumn)
Fill the jar with brandy to around three-quarters capacity, leaving and top quarter to fill with organic raw honey
Leave a small space for air and seal.
Shake daily for 8 weeks.
Strain and allow to mature (you can leave it for 6 months before drinking if you can manage this long).
But for now a tea for the summer —
Heartea:
This tea uses equal parts of the herbs and all but the berries can be either dried or fresh:
Dried hawthorn berries (crushed in a mortar)
mixed hawthorn leaves and flowers
linden blossom
yarrow flowers and leaves
hibiscus flowers
Infuse in boiling water for 5-7 minutes. You can add also slices of fresh ginger as an option.