Rowan is a tree of mystical symbolism for many of us. It shows up in many stories with a link to witchcraft, but rowan (Sorbus aucuparia) has long been seen in parts of Europe as a tree of protection, and the song The Rowan Tree by Lady Nairne celebrates that relationship through nostalgia for the tree planted outside her childhood home. That guise of threshold guardian has long been a defining role in the relationship between people and the rowan, with trees planted at the door providing protection for the house and the family inside. How did a tree of protection morph into a tree of witchcraft? It’s a twisted tale, but luckily, the older traditions still hold true among many cultures.
What we cover in this episode:
- The song The Rowan Tree by Lady Nairne
- Rowan as a tree of protection
- Margaret Barclay and how the witch trials turned rowan into a tree of witchcraft
- How rowan really does protect people
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Transcript:
Carolina walked to her desk in the morning room, presumably to write letters, but she had other things in mind this morning. Her husband, an assistant inspector general, had gone to his office, and her son was busy with his morning lessons. This was the time when she could write, but not just the letters her husband assumed were the long and short of what she penned.
As she had walked through the garden that morning, something about the light and the breeze and the scent that it brought had reminded her of childhood. More specifically, it brought back scenes of a specific tree and all that it had meant as it witnessed the life of her family. Carolina was a writer without her husband’s knowledge, and the song that she wrote that day would be published in the Scottish Minstrel in 1822.
That song is still known and loved, and its title is The Rowan Tree.
You’re listening to Plant Connection. Life today can feel overwhelming, like we’ve drifted away from its natural rhythm. This podcast is your space to slow down, breathe, and rediscover the peace and clarity that come from reconnecting with the natural world.
I’m your host, Lisa Cutshaw. Let’s reconnect, one plant at a time.
The rowan is a tree famous for all sorts of reasons, but the nostalgia enshrined in Carolina’s song comes from an age-old practice across Northern Europe, but especially in Scotland and Ireland, of planting a rowan tree by the front door of the house, or sometimes by the garden gate. Like her contemporary Robert Burns, Carolina wrote her songs in a Scottish vernacular, and don’t worry, I will spare you my lame attempt at reading the words as she wrote them, but I can summarize. She spoke directly to the rowan tree that stood outside her childhood home, remembering the people and the scenes that it had witnessed.
The song expresses how that rowan tree will always be dear to her, how its leaves were the first in the spring, its white flowers attended summer, and its red berries always came in the autumn. I couldn’t find any documentation of whether there really was a rowan tree planted at Carolina’s childhood home. The fact is, she was a member of the nobility, and though her father had lost his land due to supporting the Jacobites, he was able to buy some of it back before she was born.
Carolina’s father was the Laird of Gask, and her husband, the guy who worked for the army, was her second cousin, the 5th Lord of Nairne. Technically he wasn’t named that until 1824 when the government allowed the return of titles to those who had lost them in the Jacobite Revolution, so if you’re looking for information about Carolina, you’ll probably find her called Lady Nairne. Much of her work celebrated the culture of Scotland that seemed to have been lost, or partially so, when the Jacobites were defeated, so her celebration of the rowan tree may have been more of a reflection on what the average Scottish person would have experienced, rather than literal memories of her own life.
So why would people plant a rowan tree by their front door? It turns out there was a good reason for it. Rowan was believed to provide protection against all sorts of things. It would protect milk from going sour, protect a cow from losing its milk, protect butter from failing to clump together properly.
It protected people from the evil eye. In a broader sense, it protected against witchcraft and evil intentions, and this is where it gets difficult to talk about. You see, people didn’t just plant the tree for protection, they would also make charms with the twigs.
It could be as simple as tying some red thread around a twig and keeping the charm in your pocket, or hanging it in your window, or up in the eaves of your house or your barn. Supposedly, rowan wood would stop a witch in their tracks. Now it sounds like a handy thing to carry, until you get to the story of Margaret Barkley, a woman who lived in Irvine in Ayrshire, Scotland.
I was actually going to run with this as the main story of the episode until I got into it, and you’ll see why I decided not to. Her husband was a burgess of the town and a merchant, so you might think she’d be safe from accusations of witchcraft. Nope.
You see, a ship was lost in a storm that killed everyone on board, and she was accused of leading a witch’s coven that supposedly cursed the ship. Never mind that her own brother-in-law was one of the men who died on the ship. To get the evidence to accuse Margaret, two people were tortured into naming her as a witch and as the leader of the coven.
One of those people was Margaret’s own daughter. She and the other witness both died before Margaret’s trial, probably by suicide. I’m going to leave it there for the graphic details.
It gets really bad. One of the key pieces of evidence against Margaret? In her pocket, she carried a rowan twig with a piece of red thread tied around it. The same charm that anyone else in town might carry to protect themselves against witches.
And yet, that was supposed to be proof that she was a witch. There was no logic to it. And I have to admit, this episode in general, initially I thought Halloween would be the perfect time to talk about Rowan, but when the darkness of Margaret’s story became apparent, it became really difficult to tell.
I intentionally led with Lady Nairne’s song, because I think it’s more true to the real human connection to the tree. It’s not Rowan’s fault that people went crazy and started accusing others of being witches. The fact is, ever since becoming a mom, I have struggled to handle gratuitous violence and cruelty.
Before my son was born, I would watch things like the Game of Thrones, but as soon as he came, I could not watch stuff like that anymore. The effect has lessened over time, but I still find man’s cruelty against man incredibly difficult to fathom. So yeah, one thing you won’t find me doing this weekend is watching horror movies about serial killers.
Ugh. But I do think Margaret, and others like her, need to be remembered. I don’t want to sweep that under the rug.
That is a part of how Rowan has been used for ill. The legacy of the Rowan tree became twisted into something entirely different, associated with witchcraft, instead of with protection. In Old English, one of the common names of the Rowan was Quickbeam, which over time morphed into Wiccan, which became Witch Tree.
In Irish, it was called the Tree of the Druids. One of the books I reference on plant lore claims that more Rowans are found near Druid temples than any other tree. That book is called Plant Lore Legends and Lyrics, by Richard Folkard, and the second edition was published in 1892, so he was definitely speaking from a different understanding of the Druids than we might have today.
Still, I would love to know what he meant by a Druid’s temple. Were they standing stones? Did he mean an oak grove? I don’t know, but maybe it wouldn’t be the oak grove, because then oaks would be more associated with them than Rowan, right? Anyway, the word Rowan itself comes from a root word for red, presumably referring to the red berries. And those berries, and the tree itself, really have been protectors of people in practical ways that we couldn’t have explained until fairly recently.
Remember the beliefs that Rowan would keep milk from going bad, protect people from all sorts of unpleasant things? Well, it really could do those things. Rowan berries were often used as food, sometimes made into jam or used in wine or other dishes. Now, why does that matter? Eating the berries helped protect people against scurvy.
Medicinally, they were also used to treat things like sore throats and respiratory issues, as well as hypertension and gout. Now, keep in mind, in a very literal sense, the raw berries can make you sick, so you don’t want to go around eating a bunch of them. But modern research is supporting many of the traditional uses.
In fact, as far back as 1859, a chemist named A. W. von Hoffman isolated a crystalline acid from oil distilled from unripe Rowan berries. Let me restate that. He took unripe Rowan berries, distilled the oil, and then from that isolated a crystalline acid.
He named that acid sorbic acid, and it’s known to have antimicrobial properties. In fact, forms of its salts became the basis of some of the most widely used food preservatives today. So, Rowan is still protecting our food from going bad.
The specific tree commonly referred to as Rowan is Sorbus aucuparia. It’s native to most of Europe and parts of Asia and North Africa, and it is a beautiful little tree, anywhere from 15 feet up to as much as 50 feet tall. It tends to have multiple trunks visible at the bottom, leading up into the crown of foliage.
For any folks here in the U.S. who are familiar with crape myrtle trees, Rowan tends to have a similar overall form. In fact, we have a native species of the genus called Sorbus americana. The common name of that one is Mountain Ash, which isn’t super helpful, since that’s another common name for Rowan, too.
The Sorbus americana tends to grow in the higher elevations of the southern Appalachians. Now, my house isn’t quite that high in elevation, so I’ll have to keep a lookout on some hikes to see if I can find some. Rowan is certainly well-suited for planting in a garden, especially with its small size and ornamental nature.
Strangely, it’s not super common, at least around here, to see it in nurseries. You can find it online, though, and if you ask at a local nursery you trust, they can probably order it for you. I’m a fan of developing a relationship with a local nursery with knowledgeable growers.
Now, I’m not talking about big-box stores here. They will stock whatever sells. A local nursery person who cares will know what really does well in your location.
Now, I’m hoping we can shake off this cultural slime that attached to Rowan as a result of the witch trials and come back to our original relationship with the tree. It is, and always has been, a symbol of protection, in spite of human beings twisting it to harm others. It turns out, it can protect us from microbial contaminations in our food, but it can’t protect us from ourselves.
So let’s embrace the protection.
See you outside.
Thank you for joining me on this journey back to nature with Plant Connection.
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