There are few trees with more folklore attached to them than the widespread, and easily recognisable, hawthorn. It grows on open moorland, on motorway verges, in farmland hedges and in the middle of roundabouts.

Flowering between March and June, it garlands the hedgerows in white for both Beltane and the Summer Solstice. Mature trees can reach a height of fifteen metres, although in harsh climates and trimmed hedges they will spread out in a tangle closer to the ground. Hawthorn often grows alongside blackthorn, but can be distinguished by the fact that it grows leaves before flowering, whereas blackthorn flowers first. The flowers of hawthorn also have fuller, more rounded petals and carry a pungent aroma which can be particularly strong on summer evenings.

In the Medieval era it was said that hawthorn smelt of the Great Plague. Fascinatingly, modern botanists have discovered that the chemical trimethylamine in hawthorn blossom is also the first chemical which forms in decaying animal tissue. This smell may also partially explain the enduring belief that hawthorn should never be brought into the house, and that if it was illness and death would soon follow.

Across Britain and Ireland, hawthorn trees can be found growing over holy wells or as lone specimens on crossroads. An ability to adapt to a broad range of soils, including sand, clay and chalk, makes them successful and resilient in locations where other trees may not thrive. Their presence at sacred sites, such as close to cairn burials and barrows, has earned them a long standing association with the fae folk. Often called ‘faerie trees’ or ‘gentle bushes’, following the custom of not naming faeries out of respect, they command correct treatment to this day. A car plant in Ireland blamed financial difficulties on the disturbance of a faerie thorn as recently as 1982.

Although hawthorn has traditionally been valued by farmers for hedging, able to keep animals in with its dense growth and thorns, lone hawthorn trees are taboo to touch. These single faerie thorns, not planted by humans, appear in folklore as places where faeries gather for meetings and dances. Stories tell of foolish people who anger the faeries by intruding on their meeting place or damaging the tree that marks it, and retribution from the Otherworldly folk ranges from bad luck to death. In some Irish tales, even gathering naturally fallen hawthorn wood must be avoided.

Lone thorns on barrow mounds mark sites of liminality, where the veil between this world and the Otherworld is especially thin. They can be places of crossing and kidnap, where humans follow faerie music underground and are only seen many years later, or sometimes never again. Stories warn of children and young brides being taken and some local folk practice has evolved  precautions against this, including sewing iron filings into the hems of clothing and dressing very young boys as girls to make them less desirable to the fae.

However, the attitude to hawthorn around Beltane is often quite different. In some local traditions of Britain and Ireland a hawthorn branch was collected and taken back to the garden of a home, where it was dressed with ribbons and given offerings. Associated with the May Queen, the coming of spring and the fertile goddess, the hawthorn is a glorious symbol of abundance during the month of May. Even from a scientific stance, the tree is known as ‘promiscuous’ with the two to three hundred species within its genus being able to successfully cross breed and create even more variations.

The sight and smell of hawthorn is so entangled with the coming of spring that ‘May’ has become a common folk name for its flowers. The chemical trimethylamine which creates the smell of death around the flowers, and is used to attract pollinating insects which are drawn to the scent of rotting flesh, has also been likened to the musky smell of romance. The brazen fertility of hawthorn meant it was sometimes chosen to weave into wedding crowns, and its branches hung with clooties carrying wishes for marriage and abundance.

In the modern day, hawthorn is popularly used as a tonic for the heart and is useful in treating the early stages of cardio-vascular disease. Both the flowers and berries are used in medicine, having been found to assist the heart through the dual action of both dilating the blood vessels and stimulating the heart muscle itself. Blood pressure is lowered through the relaxing and enlarging of veins and arteries, while the gently stimulated heart increases the pulse rate and works more efficiently.

Young hawthorn leaves are edible and nutritious, leading to the nickname ‘bread and cheese’ plant. These are best picked from hedges and trees away from the road and, if you believe in the folklore, not from a hawthorn tree standing alone. The berries can be added to gin and used to make ‘haw gin’ as an alternative to sloe gin, or soaked in vodka to make a medicinal tincture. A walk in nature might become a pilgrimage to a local hawthorn, where libations of cider and biodegradable clooties (a strand of your own hair is a meaningful offering) are likely to be as warmly received now as ever.

Helen Bruce