Ancient Hedges and Dogs Mercury

    A sunny afternoon in Shropshire. A bit annoying that, as I was battling through torrential rain not an hour ago, when I was out on my daily constitutional.

   The walk had begun in sunshine and I was noting that though the hedges I was passing were finally devoid of leaves, the Dogs Mercury growing at the base of some of them was still very evident.

   Dogs Mercury is the plant which, back in the mid 1970s, was part of a formula for dating hedges devised by Pollard, Hooper and Moore. The number of shrub species for a thirty yard length of hedge, multiplied by one hundred, gave the age of the hedge. If this resulted in a high number and Dogs Mercury was present, it indicated a very old woodland relic hedge.

   This was fine, of course, for dating hedges in Surrey, where the formula was devised and a lot of single species hedges were planted, but during the 1980s students at Wakeman School in Shrewsbury, in association with the University of Birmingham, pointed out that hedges in Shropshire were frequently planted with multiple species and for them the formula could only be applied if a hedge had been colonised by Hazel and Field Maple as well as Dogs Mercury. Especially those parts of it which had clearly been single species planting.

   The hedges along the main road through the village, as far as I have noticed, do not have a great deal of Dogs Mercury growing at the base of them, but there are odd pockets of it growing where what might be original lengths of hedge are surviving. Along the lanes beyond the river though, there is none at all.

     The hedges with the most Dogs Mercury that I’ve found during my ramblings are those along the lanes either side of the Roman Road, and those along the Roman Road itself, which is what you would expect as they have the potential to be the oldest hedges in the village. Along all of them, though, there are lengths of original hedgerow with Dogs Mercury growing under it, and other lengths where the hedge has been replanted at some time and is no longer original.

   In the garden, or perhaps looking over your hedge at it, because its presence isn’t really encouraged in modern gardens, growing along the base of a hedge near to the site of an old abandoned dwelling maybe, where some cottager used it for flavouring beer in the days before the introduction of hops, look out for the mildly aromatic, indented, mid-green leaves with silver undersides, of Artemisia vulgaris, Mugwort, also known as St John’s Plant, because a crown of its sprays was worn as a protection against evil forces on St John’s Eve.

                                                    

A bumper year for berries

     A wet day in Shropshire, and I’ve taken the hint from the weather and come indoors to write about the garden, rather than be out in it carrying out the seasonal tasks I’d intended doing.

     It certainly has been a bumper year for all sorts of fruits and berries. Surprising really if you think back to how late plants were in getting underway after that long, cold spring, which seemed to be going on forever. The yew berries have now continued that trend by not being quite ready for the birds, which prefer them as food above all other berries when they are available. Luckily for the birds, though not for the appearance of my garden, they’ve had pyracantha and rowan berries aplenty to tide them over whilst they’ve been waiting.

   Berries have always been an important part of decorations at Christmas time, though for a long time the Church, itself, didn’t encourage the use of evergreens such as holly, ivy, laurel and mistletoe for such a purpose, because of their association with pagan practices in this country which pre-dated Christianity by centuries.

     Nor might they have taken so readily to another pagan custom, this one brought to us from Sweden by the Vikings, which involved people cutting down two pine or fir trees, setting them up outside the entrances to their houses and decorating them with candles, fruit and ornaments to mark the passing of the shortest day, if Prince Albert, the German-born consort of Queen Victoria, who probably had Viking blood of his own coursing through his veins, hadn’t given the practice respectability by adopting it himself.

     In the garden, look out for the scarlet berries of  Ilex aquifolium ‘Pyramidalis’, a dense female holly tree which is one of the few hollies which doesn’t require both a male and female plant to be present to provide cross fertilization before it can bear berries. Most hollies are unisexual, so they do.

                                                                

Getting life back to normal

   A cloudy day in Shropshire, and I’ve been getting back to doing some work in the garden, something which the total hip replacement operation I had in February has prevented  me from doing to the full this summer.

   It isn’t until life obliges you to do everything with a crutch in either hand, that you realise just how impossible that makes even the most simple job in the garden. Improving enough eventually to be able to work with just one crutch in one hand brings some tasks back within the bounds of possibility, but it still doesn’t make carrying them out very easy.

   At least I’ve been able to make full use of the recycled whisky barrels I bought last year to put on the patio and grow my vegetables in. They were high enough to be quite easy to use once I’d got to the one crutch stage. And the raised bed I bought a couple of years ago, though lower than the barrels, was still relatively easy to make use of at a time when I was still unable to bend down low enough to be tending things at ground level.

   There is a web site called Thive, Carry on Gardening, which gives gardening advice to people with varying degrees of disablement, recommending tools and equipment to suit the particular physical problem you’ve ticked on the drop-down menu, be it temporary or permanent. It told me that for my particular problem a self-propelled mower, or a light electric one, both of which I have been using as it happens, are the best ones for me at the moment.

   The site is worth looking at if you’re finding gardening physically challenging for whatever reason, be it permanent because of age or infirmity, or temporary because of an injury of some sort, or because of having an operation as it was in my case.

   In the garden, even if you’re only there as an observer not a worker, look out for the large clusters of sky blue, star-faced  flowers borne by Plumbago capensis, flowering in a sheltered position of some sort.  Though it will grow outdoors all year round against the wall of  a villa in Spain, Cape Leadwort, which I first came upon when it was used as a summer bedding plant in the parks in London where I was an apprentice gardener, won’t survive the winter outdoors in Britain, except perhaps in the extreme southwest of England. If you bring it indoors once summer is over, however, and give it a position somewhere with warmth and plenty of light, it will reward you by continuing to flower for a while, and if you’re lucky, by starting to flower again next spring.

                                      

Paradise as a garden

         Belief in a better world from which mankind had originated and to which we would one day return, was paramount amongst the Middle Eastern societies which began to develop from around 4,000 BC. It was in the earliest known writing of mankind, that which originated in Mesopotamia during the proto-literate period, that first mention of a paradise was made: a divine garden which the gods had planted out with fruit trees, green fields and meadows.

       The English word paradise comes initially from the old Persian word 'paizidaeza' which Cyrus the Younger, ruler of the Persian empire around 500 B.C., used to describe his garden to the Spartan commander Lysander and which literally means 'walled around'. From this, the Greek `paradeisoi' became the Latin 'paradisus' and, in 1175, the middle English 'paradis', used in a Biblical passage: "God ha hive brohte into paradis". The idea of a garden in which men and women may transcend their frailty has become a concept shared by many societies which had little else in common, and has persisted despite the disappearance of many of the civilizations which adhered to it.
      The Sumerian - Babylonian Paradise, the Garden of the Gods, was an idyllic earthly garden of peace and plenty reserved solely for those who had achieved immortality. It corresponds exactly to the Homeric Elysian Fields where those favoured by the gods rested until eternity in a state of perfect bliss. The Egyptians believed that the first object to meet their eyes on entry to the world of the dead would be a beautiful and shady tree, from which a goddess would welcome them with food and water. They loved their gardens so much that a usual prayer was that after death they might return there to sit in the shade and eat the fruit of the trees they had planted.

       The Christian Garden of Eden was slightly different. It became identified with Heaven, remote and no longer obtainable since the summary ejection of Adam and Eve from it, and the doom pronounced on them that henceforth they must toil amongst thorns and thistles and eat the herbs of the field.

      The preference of mankind to rest in a beautiful garden for eternity rather than to work in it has led to repeated attempts to re-establish that paradisal situation lost at the dawn of time. The need seems universal, though not always for a single place of total bliss. Saint Paul wrote of a man caught up in the "third heaven" of paradise, whilst the paradise promised in the Koran consists of several terraces of gardens - each more splendid than the last. In the Islamic gardens of Persia and Mughal India, the terraces were often meant to correspond to the enclosures which made up the Garden of Paradise in the Koran.

        There is a Saxon version of the Latin poem 'De Phoenice' which describes paradise as an island in the east where there was no suffering and no night, where the trees bore their fruit throughout the year and where the air was filled with the sweetest of odours. In the seventh century it was reputed to be a region to the east of China, watered by the four great rivers mentioned in the scriptures. The Portuguese in Sri Lanka long considered that country to have been the original site of The Garden of Eden because of a tree which flourished there, called Tabernaemontana alternifolia, the divi-ladner, which bears poisonous fruit resembling an apple with a single bite removed, which they claimed was the Tree of Knowledge.

         Wherever paradise had been, if it ever really existed, there would have been water, there would have been shade and there would have been scented blossoms. An old Persian motto says of a garden pool: "If there is a heaven upon earth - it is here - it is here!" The Egyptians believed that gods were present in a garden because divine fragrance was manifest in the scent of flowers. They believed also, that in the cool of the day, spirits came out of their tombs to enjoy the shade and water of a beautiful garden. 

      One of the most beautiful tomb interiors of the Theban  necropolis is of a royal gardener, Senufer. The entire ceiling is painted to resemble a grape arbor, with stems, foliage and flowers climbing up the walls . Should he have been virtuous enough to have found his way to paradise, who knows but that he might have discovered it to look like that.

                                                           

If you want to know more, why not buy Gardens of the Gods, a hardback book by  Brian Taylor available on Amazon, or its e-book version Sacred Plants of the World from Neolithic Times Until the Present Day, available from Amazon Kindle.

Plants, Prophecy and Spiritual Awakening

My latest e-book, The Girl With The Dragon-Shaped Pendant, was inspired by the fact that there have been several instances over the past few years of people growing or manufacturing drugs for recreational use in the quiet village where I live. Though a little unexpected perhaps, to encounter such goings on in a rural backwater like the one where I live, people have always been very inventive in such matters, and have experimented with drugs of all kinds over the centuries. My earlier book, Gardens of the Gods, available from Amazon in  hardback, tells of numerous examples of plants used in this way.

Soma, for instance, was a sacred plant to the praise of which an entire book of one of the world’s most ancient scriptures was dedicated. The Rig-Veda, of which a literal translation would be, the veda (sacred knowledge) of stanzas of praise, was based on an oral tradition which dates back to the Aryan tribal displacement which swept into Northern India three thousand years ago, via the passes of the Hindu Kush.

It is said by some that, more than just a sacred plant affiliated by tradition to a particular religion, Soma was, in fact, in its own right a liturgical god, because of its origins as an outgrowth of an act of worship. Possessing a significance similar to the wine of the Christian Mass, it was deified through the intercession of an officiating priest. It was essential to the success of the sacrifice central to certain fire-worshipping ceremonies, just so long as the habitat from which it had been harvested was a properly designated sacred site.

The plant, ritually prepared, had to be carefully transported to the place of sacrifice, where it would be soaked with water drawn especially for the purpose before being squeezed between pressing stones. The resultant liquid was mixed with milk or honey, after first being poured through woollen strainers.

It was in this form that it was used to sprinkle the altar on which the sacrifice was to be made, as well as the place on the grass in front of it, where it was believed that attending gods would sit. It was also the form in which the sacred fluid would be imbibed by priests seeking elevation - in mind at least - to the same plane as the immortals. Ordinary members of the congregation were frequently obliged to await its passage through the sacerdotal body before they too could partake of its uplifting properties!

THE FLY AGARIC AS SOMA

The Persian prophet Zoroaster was strong in denouncing the practice ,when setting out to reform the religion of his people, but it was taken up by R. Gordon Wasson, when he set down his justification for the belief that the true identity of the sacred Soma, which had been lost over the centuries, was, in fact, Fly Agaric (Amanita Muscari).  The red-capped toadstool so beloved by Victorian illustrators of children’s literature.

With its white stem and absence of leaves, roots, fruits or flowers, it certainly seems to match those points of description contained within the Rig-Veda. Also, it mostly grows around Birch trees and sometimes under Pine and Fir which, in the latitudes ranged by those who composed the stanzas, would only grow on high mountains, as Soma is said to do.

Its reputation in Siberia for intoxicating properties, which retain their effect however many times the drink made from the fungus passes through the body of man or beast, only adds to the resemblance. Further proof is, perhaps, that the Aryans, rising from the Steppes of Russia, would not only have known of the Fly Agaric, but would almost certainly have had specimens of it with them - at first anyway.

They could have replenished this supply as they made their way deeper and deeper into India, until, on the Ganges Plain, they would have found themselves far from any region where the Fly Agaric grew. This absence, coming at a time when opinion was beginning to turn against the abnormalities of religious perceptions and feelings intensified by Soma, would have been more fortuitous than disastrous, however.

SUBSTITUTES FOR SOMA

For one thing, there were substitutes: the asclepiad Funastrum spp., a climbing plant with inconspicuous flowers and leafless stem which exuded a milky juice; Rhubarb (Rheum palmatum), the stems of which were adapted somewhat unexpectedly, since its main medical use in more recent times was as a purgative in bacillary dysentery; or Ephedra spp – probably either E. gerardiana or E. nebrodensis, both of which contain varying amounts of the alkaloid ephedrine, which is used medically to increase the blood pressure and excite the sympathetic nervous system - the pith of which is known still to be extracted and used by Zoroastrians in Northern India.

When mixed with purified water, the juice of crushed pomegranate twigs, milk and honey it becomes an offering to the sacred fire of Ahura Mazda, as well as sustenance to his followers.

This apart, though, there is little left of the divine presence which once was. Indo-Aryan religion was changing, gradually moving away from ritualism towards a more ascetic approach. Holy men were leaving the world and setting off into the forests to live a more simple existence, in which they could spend the greater part of their time discussing the meaning of life and the nature of reality with others of like mind. As Christopher Columbus was going to discover, it was with a more basic religious outlook that the future of prophetic fungi lay.

PROPHETIC DRUGS AT "THE END OF THE EAST"

Columbus, when he had completed the first of his four epic voyages with the aid of an inaccurate world map drawn up by the ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy, returned to Spain convinced that he had discovered “the end of the east”. His companions, judging by the accounts they wrote afterwards, may rather have believed themselves to have dropped out of their own world and into some kind of hell.

They had found a primitive people using a vast array of plant drugs: Cohoba (Piptadenia peregrine - the ground seeds of which are used as a narcotic snuff); Coca (Erythroxylum coca from which cocaine is extracted); Peyotl (Lophophora williamsii, the dried crowns of which were chewed by the Native Americans for the hallucinatory effect of the drug anhalonine; certain species of mushroom, Datura arborea, the leaves of which were smoked by priests who believed the plant to be divine; Datura candida, a decoction of the leaves of which was drunk during ancient religious rites to induce prolonged delirium; Ololiuqui (Rives corymbosa - the seeds of which are used as a hallucinatory drug); Caapi (Banisteriopsis caapi), which is cultivated for the leaves and young stems from which a hallucinatory beverage is obtained); and many others, of which Tobacco (Nicotiana rustics) was the most common.

None of the plants was known in Europe at the time, nor was the use to which they were most generally put - that of inducing a mild, trancelike state from which individuals would emerge to tell tales of having attended the councils of the gods. Divine substances were no longer a feature of the more advanced religions by this time. The people of Columbus' New World, however, took the concept seriously indeed.

DRUG INDUCED CONTACT WITH THE SPIRIT WORLD

Though the drugs in question might also be in daily use for recreational purposes, if what they were being taken for was their visionary qualities, then there were certain rules by which the user had to abide. For one thing, an intoxicant was only to be imbibed by, or under the direct supervision of, a medicine man and experienced interpreter of visions. These glimpses of a world which occupied a different plane of reality from our own were by courtesy of the spirits who inhabited them and had access to sources of information unavailable to man.

The chronicler Gonzalvo Fernando d'Oviedo y Valdez wrote of the Indians of Hispaniola (present day Haiti), that they had secret means of putting themselves in touch with spirits whenever they wished to predict the future. A priest from any one of a number of small desert communes would be summoned and arrive with two of his disciples, who would have in their possession a flask filled with a mysterious drink. Seating himself between the disciples, one of whom would constantly be ringing a small bell, the priest would partake of the drink, which would shortly send him into a convulsive and sharply painful ecstasy from which loss of consciousness would eventually free him. It was at this point that the querist would put the question, to which the spirit replied through the mouth of the inspired man.

SPANISH REACTION TO THE USE OF DRUGS

The Spanish chroniclers had no doubts at all concerning the accuracy of the information collected. They were quite prepared to believe that sorcerers (curanderos they called them) could surrender themselves to a state of second sight after eating the toadstools which they named Teonanactl (Panaeolus campanulatus var. sphinctrinus), or "Flesh of God". They had witnessed the utilisation of the process to discover items which had been lost or stolen, or even to successfully track down runaway wives. What worried them about it was the belief that such visions could only possibly occur as a result of diabolic possession, since God was hardly likely to have allowed the wielding of such a valuable power to rest solely in the hands of this heathen race.

Diego Duran, in his account of the coronation of Montezuma II in 1502, describes the outcome of woodland fungi being administered to the guests when, "some became so intoxicated that they lost their senses and committed suicide. Others had visions during which the future was revealed to them, the Devil speaking to them whilst they were in this drunken state”.

PREHISTORIC RITES

For just how many centuries this parlance with god or devil had been taking place no one is able to say for certain, even now, though it does seem to have been the practice in that part of the world for a very long time. Effigies of toadstools about 25cm tall found in Guatemala some years ago were thought at first to be phallic symbols, until the discovery of a connection with ancient rites involving hallucinogenic fungi caused that opinion to be revised. Below the stalks of the stone fungi are carved figures of men and animals and, on one of them, a toad. The statuettes have been dated to around 500 BC. That the practice had not rested in that ancient world was instantly apparent to Columbus and his peers. Nor was it eradicated during their era, despite the fierce, and often brutal opposition of the Christian Church to its continuation. There is an account of a ceremony which was witnessed in Mazatec country in quite modern times.

A MODERN DIVINATION CEREMONY

The fungi had been gathered early in the morning, when the air was fresh, at the time of the new moon, which is always favourite. There were fourteen pairs of Psilocybe mexicana which contains hallucinogenic and psychotropic drugs, together with three or four specimens of Stropharia cubensis, which is known as the Sacred Fungus of the Bulls Dung, and which contains the hallucinogen psilocybin. With them, on a cloth on the floor near to a simple altar, were arranged pieces of copal gum to serve as incense, seeds of cacao, grains of maize, powdered green tobacco, chickens eggs, eggs of the Mexican turkey, some feathers, and rolls of bark from a tree called “Amata”, which would either have been Ficus cotinifolia or Ficus involuta, both of which belong to that remarkable genus which includes the sacred figs as well as the Banyan and the Bo-tree.

The curandero (it could equally well have been the female equivalent or curandera) knelt on a folded gown and, in lip service to that Christian interference in his ancient rite, crossed himself as he invoked the Trinity and an assortment of saints. Then, taking a pair of the fungi, which he held above the glowing copal until they fumed unpleasantly, he began to chew and gradually consume them - a process which he repeated, a pair at a time. Next, he rubbed the finely-ground green tobacco over his lower arm and the nape of his neck and then finally extinguished the light with a flower head, to plunge the room into almost total darkness. At this point, the Shaman rose, wrapped himself in his cloak, and asked questions of his petitioners, whilst ceaselessly tossing the maize cobs into the air and catching them with both hands. The ceremony, as was always the case, lasted all night and, once started, no one was allowed to leave the room.

Not that anyone amongst the audience would have been likely to have wanted to relinquish their presence before it was all over; no more than they would have doubted any messages which the spirits gave. The drug-induced trance state was held in too much esteem by those who had witnessed it, even those explorers, naturalists and anthropologists from whom reports began flooding in during Victorian times.

TRIBAL INITIATION IN GUYANA

In Guyana during the 1870s, Everard Im Thum discovered that, in order for a youth to be initiated into a tribe at any time, he had first to cut himself off from it for a period of fasting, during which he consumed large draughts of tobacco juice mixed with water. Maddened by these and the terrors of his isolation, as well as excited by his own ravings, he could work himself at will into passions of excitement, during which he conversed with spirits and learned to control them.

THE USE OP PROPHETIC DRUGS IN AFRICA

Edward Evans-Pritchard, writing of his experiences in the Sudan during the 1920s, told of witch-doctors who, under the influence of drugs, "danced" the questions put to them by petitioners; speeding the passage of the substance through their bodies by gyrating until, as the Swiss psychologist Jung described it, the diviner instinct which allowed questions to be answered without need of consciousness was liberated.

A decade later, during the 1930s, M. J. Field concluded from long experience working in Ghana that there seemed no reason to doubt, "that utterances of a possessed person, concentrated on a narrowed field, may exceed in wisdom those he can achieve when exposed to all the distractions of normal consciousness".

It only served to confirm the turn of the century findings of David Leslie, a South African merchant, who had decided out of curiosity to test a local diviner by asking him for news of the eight native hunters whom Leslie had sent out in pursuit of elephants.

The diviner made eight fires and threw roots onto them, then he took a drug and fell into a convulsive trance. On regaining consciousness, he raked out the fires one by one, describing as he did so what was happening to each hunter, how some had been fortunate, others had done badly, and two had been killed. His account turned out to be accurate in n every detail.

It convinced Leslie of the powers of his diviner, although, as was only to be expected really, there were others who tried to explain it away as lucky guesswork or trickery of some kind; harking back, perhaps, to the tale, usually attributed to Marco Polo, about the Old Man of the Mountains.

THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS

Aloadin, as he was known, was a leader of the Ismaili Sect in Persia during the mid-thirteenth century who, so the story goes, had created the most beautiful garden ever known, in an enclosed valley between two mountains.

It was a garden which had everything: gilded palaces and pavilions filled with the most exquisite paintings; runnels flowing freely with wine and milk and honey and water; bushes and trees laden with every known fruit; women who danced and sang in the most appealing fashion. It was, in fact, and in every way, an exact reproduction of the description Mohammed gave of his Paradise. The Old Man was in the business of political assassination, and his success rate relied on the ploy of drugging new recruits with Cannabis sativa (Hashish - hence the word assassin) and having them placed in his garden where, on awakening, they would believe themselves to be in Paradise. Drugged again and brought out into the real world at some future time, they would be prepared to commit any number of murders, if to do so meant their return to the garden. The story is apparently apocryphal, but it does, nonetheless, serve to illustrate the way in which most Europeans tended to think of the notion of drug-induced transmigration of the soul. It was a view with which the people of ancient China did not concur.

LING CHIN

When news of the Soma plant first reached that country, the Emperor Shih-Huang-ti, who built the Great Wall during the Chin Dynasty (221 - 207 BC), sent his emissaries far and wide in search of one without success. A century or so later, however, during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, there appeared in an inner pavilion of the palace a hitherto unknown.

In the excitement of the moment, an amnesty was granted to all prisoners; food and wine were handed out gratis to the poor, and the Ling Chih became a symbol of good health, fortune and longevity, used in Chinese art and culture pretty much as the Lotus was being displayed in Egypt around the same period. The unfortunate thing from the point of view of the Chinese was that, though they didn't know it at the time, they may well have been offering their homage to the wrong plant. Modern Japanese mycologists think they have identified Ling Chih as Ganoderma lucidum, which is certainly beautiful, but poisonous and lacking in any hallucinogenic properties whatsoever. Its strange appearance, they decided, had most probably been due to the abnormal growing conditions, on wood which must already have been infected with it when used for construction purposes within the pavilion. Was this an illustration of the gullibility of men's belief? Perhaps. One wonders, though, given the nature of the use of Soma, how a poisonous fungus could have successfully taken its place. Call it, rather, an illustration of the supreme importance of Soma to the ancient world.

DRUGS AND YOGA. WHICH ONE CAME FIRST?

Despite what has sometimes been said on the subject of drug-induced trances - that they are a sign of decadence and an imitation of the state which the Shaman was no longer capable of obtaining otherwise - there are others who would argue that the drugs are, in fact, aiding the liberation of the clairvoyant faculty in certain individuals so that, with the help of their training, they can use it for the benefit of the tribe as a whole. In fact, to go even further, the Shaman does not take drugs in an attempt at artificial achievement of the exalted state of mind which achieve through yoga. The mystics, through yoga, have been trying to achieve that exalted state of mind which uses of sacred drugs formerly attained. In view of the likely antiquity of the practice it just might be so.

If you want to know more, Gardens of the Gods by Brian Taylor, a hardback book available from Amazon, and its e-book version,  Sacred Plants of the World from Neolithic Times Until the Present Day, available from Amazon Kindle, will tell you. 

The effects of the cold winter linger on

   A damp day in Shropshire, and I’ve been looking out of my upstairs windows at what is probably another example of the way the late spring we had is still affecting the plants in my garden.

    Out of the back windows of the house I can see a clump of Hemerocallis ‘Grumbly’, a yellow-flowered cultivar of the day lily, ablaze with just about every bloom it’s likely to have this summer – all out at once. Out of the front windows of the house I can see another clump of the same plant doing what day lilies are supposed to do – having one or two flowers a day over a period which can last from one to five weeks, depending on the cultivar.

                                                   

    The Hemerocallis is a native of Eurasia, China, Korea and Japan, and used to be classified amongst the true lilies, because of the close resemblance between the flowers of the two plants.

    The name Hemerocallis comes from the Greek words hemera, meaning day, and kalos, meaning beautiful.  The name alluding to the fact that most day lilies do have beautiful flowers, which last no more than one day, except, apparently, after exceptionally cold springs like the one we’ve just been suffering.

     In the garden, shrugging off the effects of that cold spring we hope, because it is supposed to be very hardy, look out for the glossy apple green foliage, sometimes turning yellow in autumn, of Calycanthus floridus, the Carolina Allspice. Deciduous, but looking like an evergreen, it has spicily aromatic foliage, and opulent purple-red flowers, which stand out against it. Enjoying a well-drained light soil, it will do well in full sun or partial shade, and flowers from May through to July in normal years.

                                                   

Season of the Pleiades

In the equatorial constellation of Taurus, beyond the bright red star Aldebaran, can be seen what at first sight might be taken to be no more than a faint mist.

This patch is a cluster of stars so youthful in astronomical terms that some are still surrounded by the nebula of their creation: the Pleiades. They are so far from Earth that only the minutest fraction of their number are actually visible to the naked eye: Atlas (father) and Pleione (mother) and their seven daughters, Alcyone, Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Merope, Asterope and Celaeno, arguably the most important stars of the ancient world.

Chaldean astronomers certainly thought so. They called the cluster Chimah, meaning a revolving pivot moving other bodies with it. This idea was given credence by 19th century, astronomers who believed Alcyone, the brightest of the stars, to be the centre of gravity of the Solar system around which Sun and planets moved through space.

Discredited as it was later of course, this was no worse for all that than the idea of the ancient Greeks that the sky was a concave mirror reflecting idealised impressions of humanity. In Hesiod's day c800 BC, Greek farmers reaped their corn when the Pleiades rose at Sunrise in May, and ploughed their fields when they set at Sunrise in November.

Seven Sisters they called them, from the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione who died of grief and were placed as stars in the heavens, unaccountably echoing the Seven Gods of the Sumerians, Seven Hathors of the Egyptians, Company of Maidens of the Florida Indians and Karatgioruk (Young Women) of the Australian Aborigines. Vergilae from ver, the spring, came later. The modern name is derived from pleein, to sail, in recognition of the calm seas heralded by the Pleiades' appearance.

It is little wonder then, considering their importance, that the Hecatompedon in Athens had been oriented to the Pleiades when, built around 1500 BC, or the Merrivale Avenue near Walkhampton in Devon similarly some 500 years later. This latter is so nearly parallel with the Cursus at Stonehenge that the idea has been mooted that each enjoyed a similar significance relating to the heliacal rising of the Pleiades at the beginning of the Beltane Fire Festival.

Appropriate really if it should be go; fire and Sun being inseparable in the Celtic mind and a heliacal rising referring to a star, or in this case a cluster of stars, making a first appearance in the dawn sky immediately prior to the Sunrise itself. The importance of this found an echo in some religious rites of ancient Mesoamerica.

Other rites also depend on the Pleiades. The Sherente of Brazil still reckon their years to begin when the Pleiades appear as the Sun makes its June exit from the constellation of Taurus. The Navajo associate the stars with Black God, creator of fire and light, a recognisable form of the group appearing on the face of any depiction of the deity.

The Maya called the cluster Tzab, the rattle (of the rattlesnake). In the Aztec Florentine Codex of Central Mexico the group, identified as Tianquiztli, the Market Place, ensured the survival of civilisation for a further 52-year cycle by transiting the zenith at midnight during the ceremony of The Binding of the Years.

Yet it was with an entirely different culture, a millenium earlier, that perhaps the greatest ever recognition of the Pleiades is to be found. Teotihuacan, largest and most influential of all the cities of ancient Mesoamerica, is the earliest example of what has become known as the `17° family of orientations' in reference to the angle at which their principal axes run East of due North.

Built around the beginning of the Christian era on a grid which, since the course of a nearby river was altered to suit the pattern, cannot be claimed to simply conform to local topography, the city possesses a major axis, defined by the Street of the Dead, skewed 15° to the East of North. This is the same direction in which at least three other main thoroughfares are known to have run and at right angles to a baseline lying within 1° of the line of setting of the Pleiades.

Although a singular enough reason for the angle of layout of any city, this was not the prime mover in this instance as investigation revealed. On the day of the first of the seasonal demarcations brought into being

by the two annual passages of the Sun across the zenith, the Pleiades underwent heliacal rising. They announced by their appearance the beginning of that most important of all days when the Sun at high noon cast no shadows.

Linked to the cult of the Diving Sun God, an inverted figure common to the friezes decorating so much which was sacred in Mesoamerica, this was an event of incredible significance. The descent of the god, drawing the noon shadows down with him, was invariably followed by rains caused by the heat of the vertical Solar rays. His death therefore promised life to his believers as deaths of gods throughout the world have done since time immemorial.

Ceremonial centres in the vicinity of Teotihuacan built over a period of 1500 years reflect the sacred orientation. So too do the more distant cities of Tenayuca, Tepozteco and Tula, as well as buildings at Chichon Itza over 900 miles away. The latter especially are an act of very great faith, considering the alien nature of the environment.

Whether anyone involved in the work had taken into account the movement of the Earth's pole of rotation among the stars before transforming belief into action is debatable.

However, by the time these copy-cat cities were springing up the Pleiades no longer set along the Teotihuacan East-West axis. Nor by the end of the 9th century did they continue to announce the zenith passage of the Sun.

The great civilisation of Mexico was declining, and though the priest rulers of the day still planned their centres of worship with an eye to the orientation of the holy city, it is doubtful that they retained the knowledge of the original purpose by which their predecessors had been inspired.

To paraphrase a passage from one of the tragedies by the Greek writer Euripedes, 'The Pleiades were passing.' Their light would never shine so bright again.

Butterflies, bees, and bad weather

   A sunny day in Shropshire, and the first butterfly I've seen this year - a brimstone - has just fluttered past. It says much about the poor spring we've been enduring this year that it's taken until the middle of April before the first butterfly has put in an appearance.
   Mind you, it was probably as well that it didn't appear any earlier, because there wouldn't have been  many flowers for it to settle on.
That was most likely why there were honey bees working the flowers of the Lungwort, (Pulmonaria officinalis) on the same day. They generally only work them when there is a shortage of pollen available from the more usual sources. The pollen tube at the bottom of which pollen is to be found in the flowers of Lungwort is difficult for honey bees to get down.
The college where I worked before coming to live in Shropshire had a bee garden laid out with plants such as Abelia grandiflora, Caryopteris clandonensis, and various Hebes, which the honey bees were supposed to find irresistible. But, though the local bumble bees seemed to make full use of the amenities on offer, I seldom ever saw a honey bee working them.
In the garden, now that the weather seems to be warming up at last, look out for a plant sometimes known as the Bee Plant, because honey bees are so partial to it. Limnanthes douglasii, the Poached Egg Plant, is a hardy annual with pale green ferny foliage, and yellow flowers with a distinct white edge that are borne from June to the beginning of October.

Time to be pruning your clematis

A sunny day in Shropshire, and the snowdrops are still giving of their best, despite disappearing under falls of real snow several times since they came into flower. The fault of a sunny 2nd February, perhaps. Sunshine at Candlemas, or Groundhog Day as they call it in other parts of the world, is supposed to signify a prolonged winter to follow, and that certainly seems to be the case this year.
Despite the cold weather, however, circumstances obliged me to prune my Clematis 'Etoile Violette' a little earlier than usual.
It belongs to the viticella group, a European species introduced to England during the sixteenth century and, along with the jackmanni type of clematis, and any late-flowering, large-flowering cultivars, which flower on new stems every year, is best served by cutting all the old top growth back to a point just above the previous season's stems, around 75cm above the ground, in late February or March.
Clematis fall within three groups as far as pruning is concerned. The mountain clematis such as the alpinas from the mountains of Europe, the macropetalas from the mountains of China, and the montanas from the Himalayas, produce their flowers directly from their old stems and, if pruned at all, it is only to remove dead and weak stems immediately after flowering. Large flowering early clematis such as 'Nelly Moser' (pictured below) or 'Dr Ruppel', or mid-season large flowerers such as 'Maureen', produce their flowers on the old, or previous season's stems, and should be pruned by removing any dead and weak stems, and shortening the rest back to about 15-25cm from mid-February to late March.
In the garden, look out for the pretty pink lantern-like flowers of Clematis macropetala 'Markham's Pink'. They appear in April, and are followed by attractive seed heads.

                                                                                            

Britains most haunted houses, villages and trees

   According to the Guinness Book of Records, the most haunted village in England is Pluckley in  Kent, where visitors may encounter a highwayman, a green man, a miller and a dog amongst the ghosts which frequent it.
   Tulloch Castle Hotel, Dingwall in Ross and Cromarty, has a ghost which rattles door handles, and a green lady, who is the ghost of someone who died falling down a spiral staircase.
   Ruthin Castle, Ruthin, Denbighshire,  has a grey lady who is the ghost of a woman who killed her lover with an axe.
    Raynham Hall in Norfolk had a brown lady, believed to be the ghost of Lady Dorothy Townsend, wife of Turnip Townsend, but she has never appeared again since the famous photograph of her, which appears below, was taken in the 1930s.

     Gwydir Castle in the Conwy Valley has a north wing which is haunted  by the ghost of a servant girl murdered after becoming pregnant. It also has a phantom dog and crying children.
     The Talbot Hotel, Oundle, has a staircase which was once part of Fotheringay Castle, and which Mary Queen of Scots still haunts as she re-enacts her walk down those stairs to her execution.
      The most haunted house in England, according to some ghost hunters, is Roos Hall, a mansion on the outskirts of Beccles in Suffolk, which has a hanging tree in its grounds - an oak tree which once served as a gibbet on which many local criminals ended their days.
     Hanging men are a common means by which trees are haunted. The shade of a man hung for stealing a branch from the laird's favourite tree at Careston Castle, Angus,  is often seen dangling from trees in  the neighbourhood.
     A man whose master killed two soldiers at the village mill at Fordill in Fife, and then fled to escape the consequences, was hung in his place, and now is sometimes to be seen hanging from trees in the neighbourhood, with his eyes bulging from their sockets.
   The ghost of a man who tried several times to hang himself on trees at Stoke Hall, Grindleford, Derbyshire, and then hung himself successfully from a beam in a barn, when the branches kept breaking under his weight, can be seen running around the trees searching for a suitable one again.
    One of the most haunted buildings in Wales, The Skirrid Inn at Llanfihange, has a beam on the staircase which once served as a gibbet, and on which over 180 people, some of whom still haunt the place, have been hanged over the years.
   The most haunted house on the National Trusts' list of their properties in Britain  is said to be Blickling Hall in Norfolk, which includes Ann Boleyn, her brother George, and Sir John Fastolfe among its impressive list of the ghosts who put in an appearance there.
    Not on the same day as Anne is haunting the Tower of London, of course, along with Henry IV, Thomas Beckett and the Countess of Salisbury, whose ghost is pursued and hacked to death by the ghost of the axe man who gave chase when she fled from the scaffold.
    Anne and her family didn't have their deaths foretold by trees in the grounds of the houses they owned, but some people do. A lime tree in the grounds of Cuckfield Park, at Cuckfield in Sussex, drops a branch whenever a member of the family in the nearby house dies, and a farm at Stalybridge in Lancashire is home to a tree with leaves which shake violently just prior to the death of any member of the family who lives there, regardless of wind or weather conditions.
   It probably isn't a yew tree, because they don't have the type of leaves to shake like that, but they do often have the reputation of being haunted in some way simply because of their appearance of antiquity.
    The yew grove at Cholderton in Wiltshire was sacred to the druids, and is still haunted by a sad and oppressive atmosphere because of the rites they once carried out there.
     The second yew tree on the right after entering the church yard at Nevern in Dyfed is known as the bleeding yew, because blood is said to drip from a stump where a branch was severed.
      Brockdish Hall, near Harleston in Norfolk, is haunted by a ghost with a connection to another of the druid's sacred plants. Known as the mistletoe bride, she is the ghost of a girl who, whilst playing hide and seek with her husband on their wedding night, hid herself in a chest which could only be opened from the outside. The riddle of her strange disappearance wasn't solved until fifty years later, when the chest was opened, and a skeleton wearing a bridal grown was found clasping a sprig of mistletoe.
    Harleston was where I used to spend my holidays as a child, and where there was an old house with a boarded up window in the upper story, behind which was a bedroom which the owners wouldn't use because it was so badly haunted. I was fascinated by that house and its boarded up window, and would stand looking at it for hours whenever I was staying in the village, hoping that the ghost would put in an appearance, but it never did.
    Nor did the ghost of one of the Bishops of London, who was supposed to come up behind unwary gardeners working at Fulham Palace and tap them on the shoulder if they weren't working hard enough. Of course, that might have because when I was there I was never idle enough to draw his attention.
     I have written three ghost stories now, and if you are interested in ghosts they ought to appeal to you.

Why Weeps the Willow - The north Norfolk coast in the autumn of 1917. A teenage girl tries to find her way through the pitfalls of her first love affair, a ruthless woman determines to hold on to her family's estates at any cost, a restless ghost searches for the means of experiencing physical love again, a soldier is invalided home from the battlefields of France suffering from amnesia. Add incest, espionage and murder, then try to answer the question posed on a suicide's grave. Why Weeps the Willow?

Let Sleeping Evils Lie – a midnight vigil in a churchyard by students trying to contact a ghost said to haunt it, and some impromptu dabbling with an Ouija board in a youth club a few days later, awaken a sleeping evil it would have been better to leave undisturbed.  

Murder out of Memory - A compelling tale of love and murder, told by the ghosts of the two people involved. Or were they ghosts?  Even after battling to put right the grave miscarriage of justice he’d discovered had followed the murder, Peter was still not completely sure about that.