Advice on valuing leprechauns’ tree should be taken to heart
Last Tuesday’s blizzard was really not all that unusual for midMarch weather in our region. I can recall several similar events within the past 20 years or so.
The good news is that this snow will melt much quicker than a January event and the dissolved nitrogen in the snow will fertilize your lawn and allow for the grass to “green up” nicely in another month of so. This shot of nitrogen from late winter snow is referred to as “Poor Man’s Fertilizer,” and it does add a few pound of nitrogen per acre to the field and lawns at no cost or effort to you!
Since this is St. Patrick’s day week, I am using a timely column that was written by my friend Paul Heltzler. Paul’s essay begins by talking about leprechauns. He writes, “According to my relatives, you did not want these little guys endorsing your breakfast cereal. They might look cute, but if you pissed them off they were likely to kidnap you, steal your baby out of the crib, or worse. And one of the surest ways to incur their wrath was to cut down their tree, the hawthorn.
Native to Europe and northern Asia as well as to North America, it is a slow-growing, short-maturing (20-25 incjes) tree with prodigious thorns, which are tough enough to puncture tractor tires. Hawthorns cannot tolerate shade, and are often found in fencerows and pastures, where they may survive for a century or more.
It is these large, older, solitary hawthorn trees which have often been associated with “wee folk” in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, and other parts of Western Europe having Celtic heritage. Even today in many places, local laws protect hawthorn trees from being razed for road work or other development, and it is not hard to find people who still feel it is bad luck to cut down such a tree. None of Cornell’s fact sheets on hawthorn mention leprechauns or other little folk, so I do not know why they were so touchy about this tree. Perhaps they liked its fruit, or felt safe among its thorns, but I suspect it is because hawthorn protected them against heart disease, thus allowing them to live the unnaturally long lives they were reputed to enjoy.
A member of the rose
family, hawthorn is related to apples, Juneberries, and raspberries, so it is not surprising that its fruit is edible. Hawthorn berries, sometimes called thorn apples, haws, or haw apples, vary from tree to tree in terms of palatability.
Haws are good for making jelly, and, at times, have been an important food source for native peoples and pioneers. Its wood is very hard and rotresistant, and is prized for tool handles, fence posts and firewood.
Hawthorn blooms in May, when pastures and meadows are festooned with the brilliant white blossoms. These attractive flowers have a rich history — dating back possibly a thousand years — of medicinal use as cardiac
tonic. Today, hawthorn flowers, along with the leaves, are dried, powdered and made into capsules, and sometimes packaged as tea. (I make a tincture from the berries that I take every day BB.)
As Western culture supplanted, and in many cases obliterated, indigenous cultures, native wisdom was often discounted and ridiculed. While this trend has not yet reversed, it has certainly slowed these days, as more and more “folk remedies” are proven by science to be effective. Ginkgo, St. John’s Wort, quinine and digitalis are just a few examples of traditional medicine vindicated through research.
While hawthorn hasn’t yet been endorsed by the American Medical Association, studies have shown that it does have beneficial cardiac effects. An article in the July 2002 issue of the Journal of Cardiovascular
Nursing stated that hawthorn “… consistently demonstrates its ability to improve exercise tolerance and symptoms of mild to moderate heart failure.” Numerous other studies, including a largescale 2008 meta-review of past hawthorn research, have come to similar conclusions.
Fables can be tricky to interpret. In the same way that catastrophe befalling those who try to chase a leprechaun to the rainbow’s end to steal his gold, is a cautionary tale against get-rich- quick schemes, perhaps the warning against hawthorn removal is because they may be important to our health. On the other hand, maybe it is just to spare us from irate fairies and sharp thorns.”