Winter's Ending?

  Winter, which seemed to be slipping by quietly and peacefully, as if apologising for the bitter weather we've had to put up with for the last two years, has turned suddenly and unexpectedly to snow, as if to remind us that it is still only January as yet, and time for  a lot more wintery weather before spring eventually arrives.  

    Mind, turning as it has just before February 2nd, which is Candlemas, or Imbolc, depending on your beliefs, when nature begins to awaken from her winter's sleep, might be a good thing because, as the old rhyme tells us, if Candlemas brings snow and rain, winter is gone and won't come again. If Candlemas be clear and bright, winter will have another flight.

   A good thing I got on with digging compost into my garden whilst the weather still mild and dry enough to do it.

  Compost made from rotted down leaves and vegetable matter you've gathered in your garden is an example of what used to be known as bulky organic fertilizer when I was a young gardener. Farmyard manure or stable manure were the best if you could get them. Circus manure was better avoided, especially elephant dung. That was so acidic nothing would grow in it, and the mountain of the stuff we collected one winter from a circus appearing on a nearby common remained mouldering an unuseable in a corner of the yard for years.

     Plants need adequate amounts of sixteen essential elements if they are to flourish. All of the elements, apart from carbon and oxygen, have to be absorbed from the soil. In the days before compound fertilizers made everything much less hit and miss nitrogen could be added by digging in shoddy (a by-product of woollen and textile factories), bone meal or hoof and horn, all of which contained anything from 1% to 12% of the element though, in those days, the latter two sometimes also carried the threat of the user contracting anthrax from them as a bonus. Phosphorus could be added by digging in basic slag. Not the body of a low life character done away with in an episode of The Bill in the days when it was still on, but a by-product from the steel industry containing anything from 10% – 19% of phosphorus.

     In the garden, beyond the compost heap you hope won't wear its covering of snow for long, look out for Viburnum tinus (Laurustinus), a bushy evergreen shrub bearing flat heads of small, white flowers opening from pink buds during late winter and early spring.

Twelfth Night

    A pouring wet day in Shropshire, as the weather continues to make up for all those dry days in early autumn by raining incessantly from dawn to dusk. Despite that, however, I'm not sure the amount we've had so far has been enough to raise ground water levels to what they ought to be.

     It's certainly been a milder winter so far than last year's was. And no need yet to "look to your stored fruit" as The English Husbandman  advised its readers to do during frosty weather in 1635. Adding that, covering their apples all over with fine hay, barley chaff, or salt, would serve readers better than hanging the apples in nets in warm air, which would "render them dry and withered".  For myself, I find that wrapping apples in sheets of newspaper, and placing them in shallow trays, as the Royal Horticultural Society's Fruit Garden Displayed advices, keeps those I've harvested edible well into the New Year.

     The RHS, of course, confines itself to practical gardening, so doesn't give any advice on whether or not there is any point in wassailing your apple trees on Twelfth Night in order to increase their crop.

     It is a practice dating back at least to the Vikings, by way of the Saxons. Was Hail, in their language, meaning Good Health. Wishes which were directed at both the apple trees and the cider drinkers.

     Details of how the wassailing was actually carried out varied from region to region around the country, but it generally involved placing toast soaked in cider in the fork of each tree, pouring a libation of cider around its trunk, and directing a loud noise of some sort into the tree's branches by means of a gun, a firework, or banging on a can, to awaken the spirit of the tree from its winter slumber.

     In the garden, quietly, so as not to awaken the tree if you're doing it before Twelfth Night, look out for the showy scarlet fruit of Malus x robusta, one of the flowering Crab Apples, which has attractive pink and white blossom in April, and keeps its crabs dangling on long stalks until February and beyond.

                   Photograph Malus x robusta Red Sentinel  Rasbak at nl.wikipedia

Season of good will

    Picking apples a few weeks ago I noticed that an old cider apple tree, which invariably puts the other  trees in my garden to shame by the size of the crop it bears, was sprouting growths of mistletoe on some of its branches.

    When I was young having a sprig of mistletoe hanging up in your house at Christmas was as essential a part of the yuletide decorations as the tree itself, and although people don't really need a sprig of it hanging from the ceiling to give them the excuse to kiss friends, neighbours, colleagues, and anyone else they might not get away with kissing under any other circumstances anymore, it's still a big enough part of a lot of people's yuletide celebrations for there to be a market held in Worcestershire every year where they sell nothing but mistletoe.

     The ancient Celts called mistletoe All-heal,and believed that the leafy green growths and viscous white berries of clumps of mistletoe were potent symbols of fertility and everlasting life when seen in winter, growing on the naked branches of deciduous trees which had lost their own leaves in autumn. Especially if that tree was an oak tree.

    To the Celts mistletoe was symbolically related to male sperm by its colour and by the consistency of the juice of its berries. Being airborne for its entire life cycle - the seeds are lodged in cracks and crevices of the branches of potential hosts by birds cleaning their beaks of the tacky pulp after eating berries - the plant also symbolised a god not yet incarnate on earth. The harvesting of it representing the union between male and female principles as well as those of the sun and moon.

    They were not beliefs shared by the Germanic people the  Celts were frequently at war with. They regarded mistletoe in a much less favourable light. According to  norse mythology Frigg, wife of Odin, chief of the gods,  had been so fearful for the safety of her son, Balder, that she rendered him impervious to wounds by taking pledges from all the plants, trees and metals he might come into contact with that they wouldn't harm him if turned into weapons of war.

    One plant she had overlooked, however. Something which didn't go unnoticed by another god, Loki, who was always out to make trouble whenever he could. He fashioned a dart from a sprig of mistletoe, then suggested to Balder's brother, the blind god Holder, that he threw it at Balder in sport.

     The gods enjoyed throwing weapons at Balder because they knew he couldn't be harmed by them, but the mistletoe pieced Balder like a spear and he fell down dead.

     So if the person who's trying to kiss you under the mistletoe at the office party looks more as if their ancestors might have beenVikings than Celts, perhaps it would be best to give it a miss.

(Photograph - mistletoe in silver birch, taken by Andrew Dunn. Published by Wikipedia)