The glory of the hedgerow
With fruits as brilliant as Zandra Rhodes’s hair and a reputation as a killer of goats and nits, our native spindle is rather an enigma. Mark Griffiths delves into the myths
In spring and summer, it’s well-nigh invisible, its small, greenish flowers and dull foliage lost amid the hedgerows, thickets and woodland fringes that it frequents. Come autumn and winter, however, it is one of the glories of the English countryside.
Its leaves pass through shades of plum and bronze before turning brilliant scarlet. After they’ve fallen, the fruits remain: fourlobed, fuchsia-pink capsules that split open to reveal glossy orange seeds. These deck the slim green twigs in a display that becomes brighter as the days grow darker.
Chanced upon during a wintry walk, such fluorescent flamboyance doesn’t seem to belong to nature, let alone to English nature, but it does. This is our native spindle tree or spindle berry, whose human history is almost as colourful as its fruit.
It received its scientific label, Euonymus europaeus, from the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus in 1753, but the roots of this name run far deeper and wider. Theophrastus, one of the founding greats of Western botany, described a tree that grew wild on Lesbos, the island where, in about 370bc, he was born. He noted that it was called Euonymos and that its foliage and fruit proved fatal to the goats that browsed on them unless their guts were so drastically affected as to be purged completely of the poison.
Theophrastus said nothing in this tree’s favour. Why, then, call it euonymos, a word that means ‘of good name’, as in good repute? Some lexicographers put it down to irony, as if the Lesbians were saying ‘tree of good name—not!’ A more convincing explanation may lie in the Ancient Greeks’ use of the term euonymos as a substitute for things too ill-omened to name outright. For example, they would say it instead of ‘lefthand’ and similar signifiers of bad luck. In a community that relied on goats, this tree might well have been regarded as unspeakably sinister and so euphemised as euonymos.
This offender proved to be, in fact, none other than Euonymus europaeus, the native British spindle tree, which also grows wild across Europe, Greece included. In the Middle Ages, it became known as Euonymus Theophrasti in learned medical parlance and its fruits were administered (very sparingly) to scour the system.
Its oldest-known English name is mentioned by Chaucer in The Nonnes Preestes Tale, composed in the 1390s. In it, the cock Chauntecleer dreams of the fox that will try to kill him. Pertelote, his favourite hen, diagnoses the cause of his troubled sleep as an excess of choler. She recommends a purge and names various herbal ‘laxatyves’ that would do the trick; these include ‘gaitrys beryis’.
Probably influenced by Theophrastus’s account, gaitrys beryis means ‘goat-bush berries’. As long as it contained the word ‘berries’, this name appears to have belonged exclusively to Euonymus, but very similar goat-bush names, minus the berries, were in use for other English shrubs. Chief among these was the spindle’s hedgerow neighbour Cornus sanguinea, which was widely known as gaitris, gaiter, gatter, gater tree, gadrise, gaten tree, gatteridge and many variations thereof.
With such homonymy, there was scope for confusing the toxic but medicinal Euonymus with the basically harmless and non-
In a community that relied on goats, this tree might well have been regarded as unspeakably sinister
Rods, dowels, pegs and toothpicks were among the purposes of this most useful of English natives
purgative Cornus, especially when the latter was bearing its berry-like fruit.
To avoid such muddles, Tudor herbalists published standard English plant names. They selected these from the thicket of home-grown aliases or invented or translated them from another language if nothing suitable could be found in English.
‘Spindle tree’ is a translation that was introduced by William Turner in his Names
of Herbes (1548) and which he later explained in his New Herball (1568): ‘I have sene this tree [Euonymus europaeus] oft tymes in England and in most plentye betwene Ware and Barkwaye [in Hertfordshire, where it still grows], yet for al that I coulde never learne an English name for it: the Duche men call it in Netherlande Spillboome that is Spindel tree, because they use to make Spindels out of it in that contrey and me thynke it may be so wel named in English.’
Of course, only the name was newly imported: by Turner’s time, the English had been spinning wool for centuries on spindles made from Euonymus. With slender, straight branches and hard, heavy wood, it was ideally suited to the purpose.
In A Niewe Herball (1578), Henry Lyte mentioned another name: Pricke timber. This, it seems, was genuinely English. The ‘pricke’ in question was a meat skewer or a skiver, as such items were also known. These, too, were made from Euonymus.
Clearly, good eating had trumped thrifty spinning when it came to our unschooled naming of this tree, and three cheers to that. Rods, dowels, pegs, pins, knitting needles and toothpicks were among the numerous other puposes to which we put this most useful of English natives.
In the second half of the 17th century, John Evelyn assigned yet more roles to it in his Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-trees, reporting that ‘bowls for viols’ were made from its wood; that ‘the inlayer uses it for its colour, and instrument-makers for toothing of organs, and virginal keys’; and that ‘the powder made of the berry, being baked, kills nits and cures scurfy heads’. This last use explains another name that was gaining currency: louse-berry.
Almost as assiduous a collector of dialect as he was of flora, the botanist John Ray recorded a version of the medieval name
gaitrys beryis that had survived in England’s southern and eastern counties: ‘Gatteridge-berries are the Fruit of Euonymus Theofrasti, i.e. Spindle-tree or Louseberry,’ he wrote in A Collection of English
Words Not Generally Used (1691). Over the next two centuries, rusticating scholars gathered a vivid assortment of other local names for it. These include catty-tree from Shropshire; bitchwood from Worcestershire; skiverwood from Dorset, where its fruits were called hot cross buns; and deathalder or pincushion shrub from Buckinghamshire, pincushions being a name for the fruit that was also reported from Gloucestershire and Warwickshire.
None of these names recognises the tree’s preternatural beauty (they were practical folk, our forebears), but we can as the year draws to an end, and increasingly so. The spindle is faring better these days than it has done in decades, thanks to the replanting of hedgerows, the conservation of woodland and the increase in coverts managed for game. The Midlands and southern counties are the best places to hunt for it, especially on chalk.
If, having found it, you long to have one in the garden, consider cultivars such as the refulgent E. europaeus Red Cascade.
For the Greeks, euonymos may have been ironic or euphemistic. For us, more than 2,300 years later, the name rings sincere: in autumn and winter, no denizen of our countryside is more deserving of glorious repute than our native spindle tree.