In Gaelic lands many an old name has been dropped from common use, because thus associated with some shy and yet never-far divinity, and so too the Finn and the Esth ceased to call the woodpecker Pikker (a word so strangely like Picus) and thus it is that now the peasant knows him only as Tikka. With the Romans, Picus the god was figured with a woodpecker on his head, and all of us who have read Pliny will remember the great store laid by the auspices of Rome on the flight and direction and general procedure of this forest-traveller. Recently a sculptor, I know not of what nationality, exhibited in Paris a statue of the Unknown Pan, and on his shoulder perched a woodpecker. Was this a reminiscence, or ancestral memory, or the divining vision of the imagination? I have some fifty pages or more of MS. notes dealing with the folklore and legendary names and varying ways and habits of the fascinating woodlander, from his Greek appearance as Pelekas, the axe-hewer (Aristophanes calls him the oak-striker)—whence no doubt ‘Picus’ and ‘Pikker’ and ‘Peek’ and the rest—to Latin Tindareas, mortal father of Leda, to the White Woodpecker, the magic bird of mediæval legend, to ‘der olle Picker,’ the horrible laughing god of human sacrifice in ancient Prussia, to Pak-a-Pak, ‘the lost lover of the woman in the oak,’ in a strange tale I heard once in the woods of Argyll. But of all this I would recall to-day only that tradition of the woodpecker which describes her (she is a wise-woman in the folk-tales) as knowing where the spring-wurzel grows, that mysterious plant of Pan and the sun with which one may open the faces of cliffs with a breath, as did the deer-mother of Oisìn of the Songs, with which too one may find the secret ways of Venusberg and behold incalculable treasure.
For hark!... Pak-a-Pak, and the long cry of love! It is answered from the listening woods! Here must ‘the spring-wurzel’ grow ... here, for sure, are the green palaces of Venusberg, here, at very hand, are the incalculable treasures of the awakened Forest.
THE WILD APPLE
The foam of the White Tide of blossom has been flung across the land. It is already ebbing from the blackthorn hedges; the wild-cherry herself is no longer so immaculately snow-white. It drifts on the wind that has wooed the wild-apple. The plum is like a reef swept with surf. Has not the laurustinus long been as cream-dappled as, later, the elder will be in every hedgerow or green lane or cottage-garden? Not that all the tides of blossom are like fallen snow: is not the apple-bloom itself flushed with the hearts of roses? Think of the flowering almond, that cloud of shell-heart pink: of the delicate bloom of the peach that lives on the south wind: of the green-gold of the sallow catkins: of the blazing yellow of the gorse: of the homely flowering-currant, which even by mid-March had hung out her gay tangle of pinky blooms: of the purple-red of the deadnettle in the ditch, and of the ruddy-hued fallaways of the poplar overhead. I wonder if in most places the flowering-currant is no more than an ordinary shrub. Here, where I write, there are several small trees of it, taller than the general growth of the lilac, tall as the laburnum, though at the time of their unloosening the one had not revealed her delicate mauve and white, while the other was still a miser of the countless gold he will now soon be spreading upon the wind. The pink blooms, carmine-ended where the five or six unfolded blossoms hang like fruit, droop in a roseal shower, as innumerous as the golden drops of the laburnum-rain or the suspended snowflakes of the white lilac themselves. The brown bees have long discovered this flusht Eden; their drowsily sweet murmurous drone is as continuous as though these slow-swaying pastures were of linden-bloom and the hour the heart of summer.
Everywhere the largesse of Spring has followed her first penury in the scanty snow of the blackthorn on bare boughs. What, by the way, is the origin of the phrase ‘Blackthorn-sorrow’? I heard it again recently, as though to say that summer was safely at hand so that now there was no more fear of the blackthorn sorrow. However, as later I hope to deal with the complex folklore of the Thorn, I need not let the subject delay me now, except to say that in the North-West Highlands I have heard the blackthorn called Bròn Lochlannach, the Northman’s woe, literally Norse or Norland Sorrow or Mourning, ... a legendary designation to which there is, I believe, a North-German analogue. The idea here is that the blackthorn sprang from the blood of the slain Norse invaders, the ‘pagans from Lochlin’ of mediæval Gaelic story. In many parts of the kingdom it is looked on askance, and cut sprays of it brought into a house are considered as a menace of ill, as a death-token even; and it has been surmised that this is due to some confused memory of a druidical or other early symbolism of the commingling of winter and summer, in other words of life and death, in the blackthorn’s blossom-strewn leafless branches. It may be so, but does not seem to me likely, for by far the greater part of flower and tree folklore has little to do with such subtle conceptions. Too many of these are as vague and fantastical as that legend which says that one must not taste of the root of the peony if a woodpecker be in sight, or else the penalty may be blindness: a safe prognostication!
It is that other thorn which holds us now, that lovely torch of blossom which has taken to itself the name of the lovers’-month. Not that the hawthorn has unchallenged use of May as a name. In Devon the white lilac is often called the May, and elsewhere too the ‘laylock’ is spoken of as May-bloom. The laurustinus, again, is thus named in some parts of Somerset, and I have heard lilies-of-the-valley called May-blossoms. In Scotland I have often heard the hawthorn-in-bloom called Queen of the May and even Queen of the Meadow, though neither name properly belongs to it, and the latter is the inalienable title of the meadowsweet. But of all wild-blossom nothing surpasses in mass that of the hawthorn. It, truly, is the foam of the groves and hollows. From the south to the north it flows in a foaming tide. ‘Bride of the world’ I have heard it called in a Gaelic song, and long ago an ancient Celtic bard spoke of it lovingly ... ‘white is every green thorn, and honeysweet.’
But it is of the Apple I want to write just now, she whose coronal of blossom is surely loveliest of all fruitbearers: Bride of the Wind we may say—‘Persephone herself’ as a modern Italian poet calls her.
In the Highlands to-day the Apple (Ubhal), or the Wild-Apple or Crab-Apple (Ubhal-fiadhaich), is still common in woods and by stream-sides. The bitter juice of the fruit is still used for sprains and bruises, and to-day as of old the Gaelic poet has no more frequent comparison of his sweetheart’s charm than to the delicate-hued, sweet-smelling apple—e.g.,
“Iseabail òg
An òr-fhuilt bhuidhe—
Do ghruaidh mar ròs
’S do phòg mar ubhal,”
where the poet praises his Isabel of the yellow tresses and rose-flusht cheek and kissing-mouth sweet as an apple. Once the apple was far more common in Scotland than it is now. An old authority, Solinus, says that Moray and all the north-east abounded in the third century with fruit-bearing apple-trees, and Buchanan even speaks of Inverness-shire as being unsurpassed for the fruit. Visitors to Iona, to-day, who see it a sandy treeless isle, may hardly credit that it was once famous for its apple-orchards, and that too as late as the ninth century, till the monks of Iona were slain and the orchards destroyed by the ravaging vikings out of Norway. Beautiful Arran, too, was once lovelier still, so lovely with apple-blossom and ruddy yellow fruit that it was called Emhain Abhlach, the Avalon of the Gael.