Blackthorn

The blackthorn, Prunus spinosa, is a dense, viciously spined shrub of European hedgerows, its bare black twigs whitening with blossom very early in spring before the leaves, and bearing in autumn the sloes, small bitter blue-black plums used to flavour gin. Set against the white-blossomed hawthorn of May, the blackthorn was read as its dark twin: a tree of winter, hardship and the waning year, associated in Celtic folk tradition with the Cailleach, the old woman of winter, who was said to strike the ground with a blackthorn staff.

The Tyrolean Iceman Otzi, whose 5,300-year-old body was found preserved in an Alpine glacier in 1991, was carrying a sloe among his possessions and had eaten blackthorn fruit not long before he died, physical evidence that people were gathering the tart little fruit as food in the Alps in the Copper Age, millennia before any of the tree's later folklore was written down. English country tradition also names a specific cold snap after the tree: a blackthorn winter is the spell of cold, often bitter weather that reliably arrives just as the blackthorn comes into flower each March or April, a weather pattern noted in print at least since the 1820s and still spoken of by country gardeners today.

The blackthorn had a strong reputation as a tree of witchcraft and cursing: the black rod or blackthorn staff, the shillelagh of Irish tradition, was both a formidable cudgel and, in the darker lore, the wand with which a witch was said to blast and curse, its long hard thorns used to pierce images in ill-wishing. Its thorns cause wounds that fester, which lent the tree a genuine air of menace. Yet the same hedge-thorn gave the protective, impenetrable field-boundary and the loved sloe of the countryside. Winter, hardship, cursing and protection gather to the black-barked, white-flowered, cruelly spined shrub, the dark counterpart of the gentle hawthorn.

In some regional Christian folk tradition, blackthorn rather than hawthorn was named as the wood of Christ's crown of thorns, one of several thorny plants, including also the boxthorn and the Christ's-thorn jujube of the Near East, proposed at different times and places for the crown, a case where popular piety attached a specific real plant to a detail the Gospels themselves leave unspecified. Whichever thorn is meant, the association added a further, specifically Christian layer of suffering to a shrub already carrying an older reputation for winter, hardship and the uncanny.