THE laurel
In the UK woodland burials are now being conducted even in inner cities. There’s nothing new about this. In Greek mythology young women are always being turned into trees. One was a nymph called Daphne, who had committed herself to life-long virginity. When she was pursued by the god Apollo, she ran and ran to get away from him, and when she could run no more she cried out, ‘Oh please, let my terrible beauty be destroyed!’
“And at once she felt a heavy numbness seize her limbs. A thin bark closed over her breast, her hair turned into leaves, and her arms into waving branches. Her feet, so swift a moment ago, stuck fast in slow-growing roots, and her face was lost in the canopy. Only her shining beauty was left” (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.252-566).
She had become a laurel tree.
Daphne escapes the clutches of Apollo. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1744, The Louvre. Her fingers are already sprouting laurel leaves. Apollo looks surprised.
Daphne is the Greek word for laurel. In ancient Greece they used it to make crowns for athletes and poets. You can find many examples of this plant in Britain: outside restaurants it often takes the form of bay trees – the Laurus Nobilis, or sweet bay. Technically it’s an evergreen shrub, but if you leave it to its own devices it can grow up to 25 feet tall. So the next time you pop a bay leaf into a stew, spare a thought for Daphne, a young woman who was saved from a terrible fate, by a tree.
Daphne in my garden, 2024
green men and women
It was only when I was creating my own Daphne in my roof garden (from a redundant shop mannequin) that I realised Daphne could be classed as a Green Woman. In this plaque, by David Lawrence, the Woman is merged with an oak-tree, and has a couple of birds nesting in her hair.
Roof boss, one of several Green Men among the sculptures of Exeter Cathedral, 13th-14th centuries
He can leer, he can grin. Sometimes he looks as if he is screaming in pain
The Green Man is a motif in art and architecture in which a face is completely surrounded by leaves sprouting from its mouth, nostrils, cheeks and chin. It is also referred to as a foliate head, and has existed in many parts of the world at many different times. Green Women are much more rare, perhaps because facial hair is rare in women.
Green Man, Chapter House, Southwell Minster, 13th century. Or is this a Green Woman? It’s worth noting that Southwell is near Sherwood Forest
Like other ancient myths, the Green Man acquired most of its meanings quite recently – in this case, in the last 100 years. Between 1890 and 1915 the anthropologist James Frazer published The Golden Bough, his massive work about the relationship between ritual and myth. This was built around the speculative idea of a pagan ritual involving a Year King, a ruler or culture hero who had to be sacrificed on an annual basis. When a new presiding spirit was installed, life in general could be renewed. This theory, incorporating the theme of death and resurrection, was very influential among writers and artists. But many people saw it as devaluing the founding story of Christianity, and for this reason it was controversial.
Roof boss, Norwich Cathedral, 14th-15th century
Julia Somerset, Lady Raglan, was one of many writers influenced by Frazer. Though she published only one article, this had considerable impact on twentieth century mythology. ‘The Green Man in church architecture’ appeared in the journal Folklore in 1939. ‘The fact is,’ Raglan writes of the mediaeval period, ‘unofficial paganism subsisted side-by-side with the official religion …’ (p.56). Buried in rites involving Morris men and May processions, she believed, is the magical rite of the spring sacrifice discussed by Frazer.
Raglan wasn’t the first person to employ the expression ‘Green Man’, but her use of it came at the right time for British folklorists.
After the Second World War people in Britain were ready for some exploration, and for some contemplation of their islands’ stories and architecture. In 1951 the first of Nikolaus Pevsner’s series ‘The Buildings of England’ was published; and in his accounts of mediaeval architecture in the subsequent 46 volumes he used the expression ‘Green Man’ culled from Raglan’s article. In the years that followed the New Age movement, neo-paganism, and environmentalism saw to it that the Green Man did not go out of fashion. New images of him proliferate on the internet, and he is probably even more popular now than he was in the Middle Ages.
Lady Raglan in 1923. National Portrait Gallery, London
Although we can speculate, we don’t know for sure what the Green Man meant to people in the Middle Ages. But gods of vegetation and fertility can certainly be found in pagan Europe; and sometimes, especially when they are wearing wreathes, they can look very like Green Men. Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine, theatre, and transformation in general, is often represented with a crown of vine leaves and grapes. Here he is depicted in a Roman mosaic of the third century CE, from Paphos in Cyprus. He is the greenest of all the Greek and Roman gods.
The majesty oak, nonington
The Majesty Oak in Fredville Park, near Nonington, East Kent, is one of Britain’s largest ‘maiden’ oak trees – that is, an oak tree that has never been pollarded. It has probably been growing since at least the middle of the sixteenth century. Lillian Boys Behrens in her book Under thirty-seven kings; legends of Kent and records of the family of Boys, published in 1926, tells us that Fredville House once stood at the end of a long avenue of trees, but that in her day only a few oaks remained. Two of the largest, near to the house, were known to have been flourishing in 1554 and were at the time called The Ancient Bear and The King Fredville Oak. The latter may have been the tree now named The Majesty Oak. Today it has a girth of over 40 feet, and is 62 feet high.
Not far from Waldershare is Fredville, the seat of John Plumptree, Esq.—in the park belonging to which are oak-trees, the most extraordinary for height and size in the kingdom … “Majesty”, the most wonderful of all these trees, has, eight feet from the ground, a circumference of twenty-eight feet four inches … It has one arm which contains sixty-eight feet eleven inches— another sixty-four feet two inches—a third, sixty feet nine inches, and several others of nearly equal dimensions.
Fredville House was enlarged in 1750 by the Plumptre family, and tourists like John Evans used to visit the place specially to see the ancient trees. In 1940 the House was badly damaged by fire and it was demolished in 1945. But The Majesty Oak remains.
For more detailed information on the tree and the locality, go to https://nonington.org.uk/the-trees-of-fredville-park-revised-23-5-2013/
RUDOLF steiner’s ‘PLANETARY’ WOODS
RUDOLF STEINER HOUSE, on Park Road in Marylebone, London, was built in 1926-37 as the home of the Anthroposophical Society of Great Britain. Steiner was an Austrian spiritual teacher whose commitment to ‘the science of humanity’ formed the base of his work on education, biodynamic horticulture, and a wide range therapies. The theatre on the ground floor was used for performances of a new dance form promoted by Steiner, Eurythmy,
Refurbishments to the building were carried out by architects Nic Pople and Helen Springthorpe in 2008 and 2020, and in 2022 the performance space re-opened as the Marylebone Theatre.
The new cafe created in 2008 has a central supporting pillar with inserts from seven different ‘planetary’ woods – ash/Sun; oak/Mars; sycamore, maple/Jupiter; hornbeam/Saturn; cherry/Moon; elm/Mercury; birch/Venus. This echoes the forms of the original Goetheanum, the headquarters of the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, Switzerland. .
For Steiner, ‘planetary’ wood refers to the idea that each planet exerts a specific influence on the growth of trees, and therefore on the wood they produce. For example, ‘Jupiter’ wood is seen as expansive and outgoing, while ‘Saturn’ wood is more grounded and stable.
This concept links into Steiner’s biodynamic farming practices, where planetary influences are taken into account when crops are planted and harvested.
the yew tree
In the churchyard of St. Mary and St. Gabriel in the parish of Stoke Gabriel, South Devon, there’s a yew tree which is over 1000 years old. Local legend makes visitors an offer:
Walk ye backward round about me,
7 times round for all to see,
Stumble not and then for certain
One true wish will come to thee.
A snip? I did one circuit in reverse, and realised it was going to take over half-an-hour to manage all seven. So I gave up.
Despite its great age, this particular tree could almost be considered a youngster. Yews are extraordinarily long-lived, and have to be about 900 years old before anyone calls them “ancient”. This compares with around 400 years for an oak tree.
Dating a tree isn’t easy unless you chop it down or have a record of its planting. But the Llangernyw yew belonging to St. Digain’s Church in Wales is sometimes credited with being about 4000 years old, which would make it one of the oldest in Britain. Its trunk is now split into two sections, so that it no longer looks like a single tree. In the 1990s the church’s oil tank was sited in the gap, but this has now been moved.
The association between the yew tree and immortality may have come about because of its evergreen foliage, or perhaps because of the yew’s amazing ability to renew itself. It can spring back to life when it seems to be almost dead. Yew trees were often planted in churchyards, and in England there are at least 500 locations where the yews are older than the churches themselves. The practice may have developed because of their connotations of immortality, or because yew trees were thought to purify the dead, many of whom might have died from plague. A third explanation may be that the powers-that-be wanted to stop ‘commoners’ from grazing their cattle on church land, and the yew is extremely poisonous to livestock; while a fourth theory maintains that public land was required for the growing of yews, since bows were made from their wood.
“All persons familiar with rural sights and scenes are aware that … the motives which induced our ancestors to foster yews (in churchyards) have been variously stated. The archer, always an enthusiast, always anxious to magnify the importance of his favourite hobby, stoutly maintains, at all times and in all places, that the extensive application of yew to making bows, at the period when most of our county churches were erected, renders any further explanation unnecessary.”
(George Hagar Hansard, The Book of Archery, 1841).
There is virtually no evidence to support this last idea, however: Mr.Hansard himself is totally sceptical. What is more certain is that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a great deal of yew was imported from Spain for the manufacture of British bows, either because of a shortage of the local material or because British yew wood was too knotty. This casts even more doubt over the ‘military need’ theory. From the 17th century onwards the invention of gunpowder meant that we didn’t need bows and arrows any longer.
POISONS Yew seeds, needles and bark do carry an alkaloid poison called taxine. According to one study, a dose of 100 grams of chopped leaves could kill an adult cow. The toxicity of yews was well known: the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth concoct a poisonous brew which includes ‘slips of yew silvered in the moon’s eclipse.’
The churchyard of St.Mary’s in Painswick, in the Cotswolds, has no fewer than 99 perfectly trimmed yew trees, planted in the 18th century
But the poison in yews is not always bad news. The Bathurst Estate in Cirencester has the largest yew hedge in the world, planted in 1720 and standing 12m (40ft) high and 45m (150ft) wide. It takes two gardeners around two weeks to trim it every August. The cuttings are used to help produce a chemotherapy drug used in the treatment of patients with ovarian, lung or breast cancer. The taxines stop new, unwanted cells from forming.
