Hawthorn Superstition

On our land grows a hawthorn tree on the lone sunny slope of an otherwise heavily treed acre. When we first began carving our home from this land, I wanted to plant fruit trees—an Asian pear, an apple, a sour plum—in this spot.

Cutting down trees is a grave business, but while building here I had to level a certain amount of pragmatism against my inherent disinclination. But this hawthorn—not yet shoulder high and growing dead center of my precious sunny patch—I felt reticent to touch. Something, somewhere along the way, whispered into my consciousness the warning that cutting down a hawthorn tree is bad luck. 

As a child I possessed an enchanted sensibility. I remember elbowing my way through a pair of fur coats hanging in the moth-ball scented basement closet of my grandparents’ Chicagoland rowhouse, listening for the crunch of snow underfoot, searching the back wall in the darkness for the warm glow of a lamp post and the smiling welcome of Mr. Tumnus. I was hopeful Narnia could be accessed through this wardrobe analog. 

“As we ‘grow up,’ we get sophisticated out of enchantment and become too smart about the things that cause children to wonder,” writes Thomas Moore in The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life. I arrived here by way of disappointment. I never broke through to Narnia. I looked for magic everywhere but found it nowhere and eventually decided I would be nobody’s fool and gave it all up as childish. 

As an adult, I’m wading back into an enchanted world. The nineteen-year-old me—the skeptic, the pragmatist, the atheist—would cringe at the woman twice her age who prays in her own way, who believes in things she can’t see, who heeds with all seriousness a vague premonition about cutting down a hawthorn.

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My friend Heather Wolf also dwells in an enchanted world and has made a lifelong study of plants and ancient botanical brewing practices. A fountain of knowledge on medicinal plants and their folklore specifically, she incorporates many of them into her small-batch crafted botanical elixirs. 

One of my favorite of Heather’s herbal concoctions features hawthorn. Knowing the importance she places on each plant featured in her brews, I knew Heather would know what lay behind my inkling concerning this tree. I asked her where I got this vague notion that I shouldn’t cut down my hawthorn.

“They say that fairies live in hawthorn trees and like to have their fairy trysts in their roots. Ooooo!” she replied. “They say that if you cut a hawthorn tree the fairies will curse you, so if you absolutely must cut one, you should first speak with the fairies, make offerings, and perhaps plant another haw in a suitable location.” In other words, she said, “Hawthorns are powerful magic.”

While Fiona Stafford, professor of English at Oxford and author of The Long, Long Lives of Trees, says nothing of fairy trysts in her chapter on hawthorn, she explores their magical lore: pots of gold, child-snatching fairies, and specific trees—at the center of centuries old strife between spiritual traditions—axed and nursed to life again by the anonymous faithful on opposing sides. 

Stafford notes how the hawthorn was celebrated across ancient European cultures. Hawthorn blooms around Beltane, the beginning of May, a thin time according to pagan spirituality. Their berries, or haws, ripen near Samhain—Halloween, Beltane’s annual counterpoint, also a thin time, according to many world traditions. 

Known also as the May tree with an eponymous holiday and month, the hawthorn’s blooms were central to many traditional May Day celebrations as omens of fertility and abundance. The May Queen was bedecked in them; homes were decorated with them; their musky scent was said to smell of sex. 

In her beautiful philosophical treatise on garden design, The Garden Awakening, Irish author and landscape designer Mary Reynolds briefly visits hawthorn in her exploration of building wishing and praying spaces into gardens. She writes of a pre-Celtic race, the Tuatha Dé Dannan, who tied their prayers and wishes in the forms of small bits of cloth rags to hawthorns growing on fairy mounds. They believed that so long as the rag remained tied to the bough the intention of the prayer or wish was held by the tree. 

Do I believe malevolent fairies are swinging from the pliant boughs of this sapling, ready to curse me should I cut this tree down? No, not at all. But a nod toward the pagan belief system that doubtlessly formed the spiritual foundation for many of my ancestors feels appropriate. Not to mention, I feel my soul’s “absolute, unforgiving need for regular excursions into enchantment,” as Thomas Moore names it. Whether there is anything here that the seven-year-old me would qualify as magic, something in me tingles as I reach backwards through centuries for a considered course of action where this little tree is concerned.

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Heather didn’t stop at haw lore though, and it’s what she said next that most intrigued me. “Hawthorn is one of the most important trees and medicines to me, personally. She aids in courage and a strong, healthy heart, physically and emotionally.” 

Hawthorn has been used in traditional medicine as a heart tonic for centuries and increasingly its heart-fortifying credentials are capturing the attention of western medicine. The New York City based medical conglomerate Mt. Sinai has a web-page devoted to the health benefits of hawthorn. In medicinal use since the first century, American doctors began using hawthorn to treat circulatory and respiratory illnesses in the early nineteenth century. 

Currently, research into the health benefits of hawthorn focuses on its array of antioxidants and their ability to stave off free radicals attacking the heart. “Hawthorn has been studied in people with heart failure,” notes the webpage. “A number of studies conclude that hawthorn significantly improved heart function.” 

Heather echoed this: “Hawthorn is heart tonifying. It’s effective at treating hypo- and hypertensive cardiac states. And it’s effective at treating the physical and emotional heart. Whatever medicine your heart needs.” 

I’d never thought of my heart as being particularly vulnerable ahead of this conversation, but then I considered my grandfather’s fatal heart failure as a shadow I might encounter one day, and I began to see my heart’s need for fortification in its physical form. 

I’m particularly interested in the way this plant is good for both the physical and emotional heart, though. I’m amazed at how the heart, conceived of as a single organ with an outsized task—keeping us alive—has this energetic shadow-puppet that holds emotions such as the courage Heather named. If the opposite of feeling courageous is feeling discouraged, I begin to see my heart’s need for fortification in its emotional form, too. I could use this medicine. 

There is magic in a plant’s ability to heal an animal’s heart in such a holistic way—powerful magic, indeed.

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In these first days of May my hawthorn’s new growth has unfurled its shapes against the sky: small, intricately lobed leaves in the most quintessential spring green. If chlorophyll has an exact hue, this is it. As yet, there are no buds in sight. This tree has yet to bloom and I don’t know which year will be its first. 

An evergreen huckleberry protects the young tree, its new growth flares vivid orange and red, and its clusters of tiny pink-white flowers are just beginning to open. The industrious hum of honey bees plying the few open blossoms they can find lays a melody atop the percussion of the rain.

I’ve always thought of superstition as the counterweight to reason, as opposite from fact as fiction. The word actually comes from the old French by way of Latin. Super- or “over,” and stare, “to stand.” To stand over, “as in awe,” notes Oxford Languages. 

Something—call it a curmudgeonly fairy if you like—kept me from cutting this tree down long enough for me to uncover a truly enchanting idea. A few years ago, when I first opened Mary Reynolds’ book, I was struck by a paragraph on nourishment that concluded, “If your bare skin makes contact with the earth as you walk or work, the land will have a better chance to know what you need through the intimacy of skin on skin.”

In my own way I’ve done this, sought intimacy with this land, walked it with bare feet, weeded it with bare hands, tended, cared, coaxed. Wordless prayers have streamed from my fingers and toes, finding their grounding in the earth. The very earth that some time before we started calling her ours, or us hers, began growing this hawthorn tree in just the right, sunny spot. 

It strikes me as nothing short of magic that this request to be cared for by this land for which I care in turn was answered before I asked in the form of a tree that will nourish my heart against hereditary weakness and discouragement alike. That this tree, holding heart medicine in its leaves and someday its flowers, happens to grow on the land I now happen to live on, on which I have no ancestral lineage, no roots beyond those established less than a decade ago, astounds me. 

And so I stand over the hawthorn, in the awe-struck sense of the word superstition, in the cold rain of spring, whispering my thanks to my place.