Foraging through Folklore

Nothing is lost

Ella Leith

My three-year-old niece recently learned about a long-dead historical figure, and asked her mother whether they could go to her house and meet her.

“I’m afraid she’s not around anymore,” my sister said.

“Oh.” The three-year-old looked downcast, then brightened. “Perhaps we could plant a tree for her.”

This column is a bit of a departure from my usual folkloric foraging. Rather than reaching for archive recordings and centuries-old tomes, I’m looking to the immediate and intimate past— to family lore and traditions. Family lore can seem a bit frivolous; after all, families are only tiny communities, and they all have idiosyncratic things they do or say or eat— a particular meal on a particular day; a nonsensical saying attached to a daily ritual. Family traditions are usually short-lived, lasting one or two generations at most before they are replaced with new ones. Compared to the traditional practices and beliefs of much larger communities, with their parallels across continents and continuity across centuries, what makes these small rituals special? Folklorist Henry Glassie gives an answer: ‘the big patterns are the yield of small acts’ (1995:409). An individual family’s lore draws on and feeds into their surrounding culture. While people can be dismissive of their quirky household customs (“Oh, that? We always do that. Don’t know why!”), they often carry derivatives of them into the new families they establish— because not to do so would feel wrong, somehow. And all that elevates a habit into a tradition is the sense that it matters, even if no one can really explain why, together with the ongoing intention to repeat it. A tradition means something because there are memories attached to it, and there is reverence attached to those memories.

Ten years ago this August, my father took his life. Each family member has had to find a path through the complicated feelings of the past decade; these paths intersect at particular times of year and in particular places and actions. The small traditions of commemoration that we’ve created are meeting points and way-markers in the passage of time, moving us from the scorched earth of immediate grief into something more generative. Most of our traditions centre on a tree: a young Field Maple (Acer campestre). We buried Dad at Sun Rising Natural Burial Ground and Nature Reserve, South Warwickshire, which nestles under part of the ridge of Edge Hill known as Sunrising Hill. In the fifteen years since it was established, swathes of young native woodland have grown amid wildflower meadows and open grassland. It has a pond, owl-boxes, bird-riddled hedgerows, and an open octagonal shelter called the Roundhouse. The ever expanding areas of woodland consist of ‘memorial trees’ planted on the graves, each one with a small slate name-plaque at its foot. Eventually the short wooden post bearing the name will rot away and the slate will sink into the ground, and as each memory-imbued sapling grows into a more mature tree, families are encouraged to see the whole woodland ‘as the memorial, trees growing, seeding and dying to allow new saplings space to grow’ (Sun Rising).

Tradition is ‘the creation of the future out of the past’ (Glassie, 1995:395), and this comes clearly into view at Sun Rising— especially as the grandchildren Dad never met begin to participate in our commemorations. We try to visit the Field Maple together on the anniversary of Dad’s death and again on his birthday. We toast his life and legacy with something (usually whisky, for those old enough); we sing a song; we lay some cuttings of Rosemary (Salvia rosmarinus), the herb of remembrance. These are our small acts, but they are part of a bigger pattern. Trees have been associated both with family and with the dead in many cultures throughout history. Claire Russell argues that the tree ‘is the kinship symbol par excellence’ (1979:228) which can ‘represent a whole kinship lineage of many people’ (1981:57). Guardian trees planted at Scandinavian, Germanic and Celtic homes were believed to preserve the luck of the family. In The Floral Issue (July, 2021), I described how a family’s ongoing care for theirs was an act of respect for their ancestors and their place of belonging (see Hulmes, 2009). Furthermore, ‘the cult of sacred trees is so widespread as to be virtually universal’, and has long been associated with graves— in Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, Celtic Britain, Catholic Europe, Algeria, Tahiti, China, Japan and elsewhere (Russell, 1979:223-224). Often, sacred trees are believed to contain the souls of dead ancestors; in the Philippines, ‘when the leaves of these trees rustle in the wind, the ancestors are believed to be speaking’ (Russell, 1981:57). I don’t think we see our Field Maple in quite this way, but we have started referring to it and other trees at Sun Rising by the name of the person they commemorate, and ascribing personalities based on their characteristics. “Oh, isn’t Gladys getting big!” we say of Dad’s neighbour, a sprawling Crab Apple (Malus sylvestris). “She’s giving him a hug!” As the tree gets bigger, its separateness from us becomes more apparent. It lives in a different dimension, and in a different community.

Exciting discoveries about the intricate ways in which trees communicate with their own and other species— using subterranean electrical signals, pheromonal scents and even sound — are still being made. We have learned that ‘mother trees recognise and talk with their kin, shaping future generations’ and that ‘injured trees pass their legacies to their neighbours, affecting gene regulation, defence chemistry, and resilience in the forest community’ (Simard, in Wohlleben, 2016:249). Trees are ‘even reluctant to abandon their dead’ (Wohlleben, 2016:4), and their vast interconnected root systems can keep felled tree stumps alive for years. Perhaps, as Tim Flannery says, we can’t fully understand trees because they ‘live on a different timescale to us’ (in Wohlleben, 2016:vii). Dad lived for sixty-three years; Field Maples can live up to three hundred and fifty. The oldest known trees are over 9,500 years old (Wohlleben, 2016:vii). Living in a different temporality, trees carry memory in their very fibres: each ring added to their growing trunk carries in its size and colour the imprint of the weather, water conditions, and details of injuries survived that year (Bridge, 2005). Time passes; painful memories become less raw; new memories put their roots down and interweave with the old. The misremembered words of Edith Sitwell’s poem form a family mantra:

Nothing is lost; nothing is lost / All in the end is harvest.

On a recent visit to Sun Rising, dark clouds hung ominously over the ridge above the burial ground. Optimistically, the small children, buggy and picnic were unpacked from the car and wellies and raincoats assembled, but almost as soon as we set off the skies opened, and rain lashed the wildflower meadow. In the negligible shelter of the windowless Roundhouse, the adults agreed it was time to cut our losses and go home.

“No, not yet,” said the three-year-old. “I want to visit the special tree.” And she pulled up her hood and led the way up the path.

Image: Reproduced with permission.

References: Bridge, M. (2005) ‘Dendrochronology’ in Encylopedia of Geology, Academic Press: Cambridge, MS Glassie, H. (1995) ‘Tradition’ in The Journal of American Folklore, 108:430, 395-412 Hulmes, D. F. (2009) ‘Sacred Trees of Norway And Sweden: A Friluftsliv Quest’, in Norwegian Journal of Friluftsliv, accessed via norwegianjournaloffriluftsliv.com Russell, C. (1979) The Tree as a Kinship Symbol, Folklore, 90:2, 217-233 Russell, C. (1981) The Life Tree and the Death Tree, Folklore, 92:1, 56-66 Sitwell, E. (1957) ‘Eurydice’, Collected Poems, Macmillan: London Wohlleben, P. (2016) The Hidden Life of Trees, William Collins: London

Sun Rising has produced an illustrated children’s book dealing honestly and unsentimentally with death, called 'So where are we going, exactly?' Find details on the website: Sun Rising Natural Burial Ground and Nature Reserve— www.sunrising.co.uk