Plant

Alder

Trees

Alder, a tree, is ruled by Mars in Culpeper's herbalism, hot, martial, and stimulating, a herb of heat and iron. The alder grows in the wet ground between water and land and seems to bleed, for its pale wood turns to blood-red where it is cut, and so it was held both uncanny and sacred; in Welsh myth it is the tree of Bran the Blessed, the giant guardian whose severed head kept watch over the land. Its water-proof timber, hardening under water, was driven as piles beneath bridges and whole cities, and it yielded red, brown, and green dyes for cloth. The bitter, astringent bark was used to stanch bleeding, to cool inflammation, and to bathe swellings. A tree of the threshold and of guardianship, sacred to Mars and to Bran.

Facts

Attributions

Ruling Planet

Mars 1Culpeper

Traditional Working

Alder timber hardens rather than rots underwater, and was traditionally driven as piles to found bridges and whole cities on wet or marshy ground; the wood also yielded red, brown and green dyes for cloth. 2

Ruling Deitythe subject's own account

Bran the Blessed: in Welsh myth the alder is the tree of Bran, the giant guardian-king whose severed, still-speaking head kept watch over the land after his death. 3Welsh mythology

Temperament

Hot, martial, and stimulating, a herb of heat and iron 1

Traditional Ailments

Bark used to stanch bleeding and cool inflammation 1

Origins

Botanical Identification

Alnus, family Betulaceae, the birch family 4

Origin of the Name

Old English alor, a Germanic tree-word. The d is intrusive, added in later English as in place-names, and no part of the original. 5

Origin Region

Temperate and boreal regions of the Northern Hemisphere, in wet ground between water and land 4

Meaning

Themes

Threshold and guardianship 1

Attestation

Meaning in the Attesting Source

The alder's pale wood turns blood-red where it is cut, a trait that led the tree to be held both uncanny and sacred in Welsh tradition. 6Welsh tradition

Classification

Part used

Leaf 7

Part used

Bark 7

Ruling planet (class)

Mars 6

Humoral temperament (class)

Hot 6

Learn More

The Tree That Bleeds

The alder, Alnus glutinosa, is a water-loving tree of riverbanks, marshes and wet ground, and it carries a striking natural feature that shaped its lore: when the pale wood is cut it slowly turns a deep orange-red, as though the tree were bleeding, which gave it an uncanny and sometimes ominous reputation. Set against that darkness is a genuine practical virtue, alder wood, worthless in the dry, is almost imperishable underwater, so that it was the timber of choice for piles, sluices and foundations sunk in water, and the city of Venice is said to stand on alder.

Alder has a genuine and ecologically important botanical trait behind its pioneering reputation: its roots host colonies of Frankia bacteria in small nodules, fixing nitrogen from the air and enriching poor, waterlogged or newly exposed soil, much as legumes do, which is why alder is often among the first trees to colonise riverbanks, spoil heaps and other disturbed ground and why foresters still plant it deliberately today to improve soil ahead of other species. This real capacity to improve barren ground sits alongside, and perhaps quietly explains, the tree's old reputation as a plant of transformation and of the boundary between waste and fertile land.

Bran, War and the Whistling Wood

In Celtic tradition the alder is linked to Bran the Blessed, the giant king of the Welsh tales, and it carried associations of war, prophecy and the crossing of water; its wood made whistles and pipes, and the letter Fearn of the ogham is the alder. Cutting an alder was in places thought unlucky, for its bleeding wood suggested it might feel the axe, and it was a tree of the fairy and the fringe of the human world. A tree of the watery margin whose wood bleeds when cut yet lasts forever beneath the flood, the alder gathers meanings of war and protection, of prophecy and of the uneasy boundary between the human world and the wild.

Alder bark and young shoots were also a valued source of dye in traditional textile work: boiled with different mordants the tree could yield green, brown or, combined with iron, a deep black dye, and Highland Scottish tradition used alder dye in the making of tartan and everyday cloth, a practical craft use resting on the same colour-changing sap that gave the tree its uncanny bleeding reputation in the first place. The three colours obtainable from a single tree made alder an unusually versatile dye source for a household that could not easily obtain imported dyestuffs, one more case of a tree's plain usefulness lying not far beneath its uncanny reputation.

Connections

Namesake Of

Alder (Fearn)

The Alder sign of the modern Celtic tree calendar is named for the alder; the calendar itself is a twentieth-century construction popularised from Robert Graves, as Hutton documents.

Source Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in BritainRonald Hutton

Fearn

Medieval tree-list attribution (Auraicept na nEces briatharogaim), distinct from the 1948 Graves tree-calendar reconstruction carried on the separate celtictreesign entities.

Source A Guide to OgamDamian McManus