Edge of the Hedge
Edge of the Hedge
The Holly Tree, Winter Solstice and a Mistle Thrush
In this episode, it's approaching December's Winter Solstice, in Lincolnshire in the east of the UK, where Hannah (herbalist, nature educator and host) lives. We take a crunchy walk through the frozen landscape after an unusually hard frost, before going to meet a striking, berry-laden Holly tree in the village graveyard, and we hear what could well be a Mistle Thrush...
Heralded as the start of astronomical winter, winter solstice is the 24 hour period when there are the shortest number of daylight hours, so is often referred to as the 'shortest day'. The world 'solstice' is derived from the Latin 'sun stands still', and is where the sun appears to stop, before changing direction. Even though nature can appear bare and stark at this time of year, evergreen plants and trees still stand bold and strong in the landscape. The Holly tree (Ilex aquifolium) is one such evergreen. A tree steeped in rich history and folklore, and one that provides essential nesting cover for birds, and remains a valuable winter food source for them. There's a striking bird alarm call, of what Hannah thinks is a Mistle Thrush, whilst recording by the tree. A bird on the UK Red List of engangered species, and one that feasts on holly berries, as well as mistletoe berries, which is how it came by its name.
For this episode, Hannah has created a Spotify playlist of songs and music that have accompanied the creation of this episode, and capture the feel of the season. Enjoy! As with previous episodes, there'll also be accompanying pictures of the landscape and holly tree, shared over the coming weeks, over at Edge of the Hedge's social media pages, on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you want to get in touch, to say hello, share your thoughts on anything in this episode, or make a suggestion for music to add to the playlist, please feel welcome to email me at edgeofthehedge@gmail.com
Edge of the Hedge is bourne out of a labour of love, of hoping to help people to find moments of peace, slow the walking pace, and look more deeply at the natural world that we share this planet with, with a hope that by looking more closer, and connecting more deeply with it, we'll take greater care of the planet, and share t
You can find augmented visual content relating to this episode, and other episodes, over at Edge of the Hedge's social media pages, on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you want to get in touch, to say hello or share your thoughts on aspects covered in this episode, please feel welcome to email me at edgeofthehedge@gmail.com
I always welcome Edge of the Hedge being tagged on social media, especially if you've been inspired to look closer at the landscape.
Edge of the Hedge podcast is entirely independent and self-funded, and if you've enjoyed it, and wish to 'buy me a coffee', I'm always grateful for your support. Thank you!
Edge of the Hedge is bourne out of a labour of love, of hoping to help people to find moments of peace, slow the walking pace, and look more deeply at the natural world that we share this planet with, with a hope that by looking more closer, and connecting more deeply with it, we'll take greater care of the planet, and share the stories we learn, to inspire others to connect more deeply.
If you want to read more about Hannah's wider work, as a Herbalist and Nature Educator, you can find her website here.
The winter solstice occurs in the Northern Hemisphere in December, usually around the 21st December. It is the 24 hour period when there is the shortest number of daylight hours, and so is often referred to as the shortest day (or longest night). Daylight hours vary, naturally, depending on exactly where you are situated, but in London, there’ll be 7 hours, 49 minutes and 42 seconds of daylight this year and the actual moment of the solstice will be 9.48pm on the 21st December. On this day, the sun takes its shortest path through the sky. With the earth being tilted on its axis, the winter solstice is the point of the year when the North Pole points furthest away from the sun, so that’s why the northern hemisphere is so cold.
My weather app tells me that where I live, the sun will rise at 8.14 in the morning, and set at 3.46 in the afternoon. This year, for the first time ever, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to take the day off work. I’d like to see the solstice sun rise, and set. When will the sun rise and set, where you are?
The word ‘solstice’ is derived from the Latin ‘solstitium’, which means ‘sun stands still’, and there’s another solstice in the summer, of course, in June. The solstice is where the path of the sun appears to stop, before changing direction. In the days following the winter solstice, daylight hours will gradually lengthen until the summer solstice, around the 21st June.
There’s two schools of thought as to when the winter season starts. Meteorological winter, using the Gregorian calendar, is used by meteorologists and climate scientists, with the thought that winter starts on the 1st of December, running through the full months of December, January and February. Then there’s astronomical winter, which starts at the winter solstice, and ends at the Spring Equinox, which this coming year is on the 20th March. With astrological winter, the dates aren’t fixed, because of the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun. And so they shift around a period of a couple of days. The notion of astronomical winter, with the flex of dates, sits a little better with me, especially given the later snaps of cold weather that we seem to have been having in recent decades, with colder and snowier weather reaching into March and sometimes April. I was always reminded by my parents that there was six inches of snow on the ground, when I was born in early April, in the late 1970s.
As the daylight hours reduce, autumn slides into winter, and temperatures cool, the plant world picks up these signals; growth slows, many plants and trees gradually shed leaves, die back, and return to root and soil, to remain dormant for the cooler, darker months, to protect themselves against the harsher conditions. They wait for the signals of warmth and light to start their new growth. Plants are clever. Perhaps we humans should take a leaf of inspiration from them, and take the time to slow and recuperate over the colder months. I wonder if our health would benefit from this?
Even though nature can appear bare and stark at this time of year, there are some plants and trees that still stand bold and strong. Evergreens. As the name suggests, they are ever-green - they retain their green foliage throughout all seasons.
I think for all of us, there’s plants that we associate with the winter season, yule, Christmas, however you choose to celebrate, or not. When you were younger, what did you used to draw to represent this time of year, or to decorate cards with? I know my default for drawing in the corner of envelopes at this time of year, was always a pair of spiky holly leaves, with round red berries between them. It’s one of the few plants, or leaves that most people can draw, if you ask them to. Even if they’re not remotely interested in nature. I like that. A plant so synonymous with this time of year, that it’s embedded into the very fabric of how we picture a season.
Holly is part of a botanical family called the Aquifoliaceae, which has about 400 species within it, of which most are Hollies, and their native distribution spans from northern Scandinavia right down to Algeria in North Africa, and from eastern regions of North America across to China, although there are parts of Scotland where it doesn’t grow. It doesn’t thrive so well in soils that are constantly waterlogged, or regions where there are long periods of frosts.
The English Holly, is known in Latin as Ilex aquifolium. ‘Ilex’ comes from an old name for the evergreen oak, or Holm Oak, a tree originally native to the Eastern Mediterranean and Holly was said to bear some resemblance to this tree. Curiously, whilst the other half of its latin name, ‘aquifolium’, makes you perhaps think of something to do with water, it actually is an old name that means ‘pointed leaves’. It’s those pointy leaves that really are synonymous with the holly leaf. They’re spiky! Holly usually holds onto its leaves for about three to four years.
When you see Holly growing as a tree, it can reach heights of usually 10m to 15m tall, and you’ll notice its quite smooth bark, and luscious deep dark, glossy green leaves, that are always pointed sharply at the top, and quite often will have the large pointy teeth around the edge of the leaf, the margin. However, they’re not always pointed around the edge. Some Spanish research published around 10 years ago, looked into why you can find a mix of spiky-edged leaves and smooth-edged leaves on the same Holly tree. This is botanically termed ‘heterophyllous’, essentially meaning different forms of leaves on the same plant. These scientists found that the spiny leaves grew significantly more on the lower branches, under 2.5m high, which was the reaching height of the red deer that grazed in the region, alongside goats and other herbivores. This correlated with other studies showing that plants genetically adapt themselves to cope with environmental changes, in this case, growing prickles and spines as a direct response to being eaten by herbivores, and to increase their survival. Plants are way more clever than we give them credit for!
The wood of holly is incredibly dense, and considered hardwood, and very resistant to impact. It’s used for wood turning and engraving, and is very pale in colour - which is probably why it’s very suitable for turning white chess pieces. People also say that it makes good firewood too, as it burns well regardless of whether it’s damp, or seasoned, which is probably because the wood contains a good deal of oil.
Holly is quite a slow growing tree, and it’s dioecious, meaning that there are male trees and female trees, with a fairly even split between the numbers of each. When a holly tree reaches about twenty years old, it starts to produce small white flowers in early summer, that are pollinated usually by bees, and it’s these flowers that gradually turn into the bright, polished, scarlet red berries that are so synonymous with winter. Whilst these berries are one of the many red berries that aren’t safe for human consumption - they cause vomiting and diarrhoea - they make incredibly valuable food for birds and other wildlife over the winter months, especially when they’re a little softer, after the first frosts. By eating these berries, birds play a really valuable role in the continuing life cycle of the Holly tree, as each berry contains 4 seeds, so after enjoying a tasty snack, the bird will poop out these seeds onto the land, dispersing the seed, and then some of those seeds will germinate into holly trees, which in time will create more berries for the birds. What an excellent symbiotic relationship!
That Mistle Thrush I heard in the churchyard, giving its striking alarm call, was likely alarmed at me, standing underneath its supper source; a curious looking human with big round things attached to their ears, wielding a furry stick close to their food tree (headphones and a field recorder, to you and I). I’ve heard this Mistle Thrush before, when I’ve been walking through the churchyard, but I’m yet to see it.
It’s a curious alarm call, that’s slightly reminiscent of a Magpie alarm in a way, a rattly, stuttered sound, but a bit harsher and kind of like one of those old style wooden ratchet rattles that people used to wave around at football matches. It certainly makes you prick up your ears and take notice!
I’m really glad to hear this bird’s call, as they’re endangered and on the Red list of the UK Bird of Conservation Concern. What this means is that essentially they have undergone a severe decline in population in the UK since 1800; in the last 25 years, breeding numbers have fallen by at least 50%, and they’re threatened with global extinction. They are, thankfully, like much of our endangered wildlife, protected by the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981.
I remember seeing both Song and Mistle Thrushes fairly regularly in my youth, when I was a keen birder in the 1980s, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I spotted one, until earlier this year, when I glimpsed one sitting on the wall of my neighbour’s house across the road, and then hearing this one. Speaking of spotting, it’s the spotty chest of the Song and Mistle Thrush that are often the first thing you notice. With Mistle Thrushes having black spots, and being larger in size. Back in my youthful birding days, I didn’t know that they actually get their name from the fact that Mistletoe is one of their favourite berries to eat (alongside insects of course). But they also love to eat Rowan berries and Holly berries. There is plenty of Rowan in this village, and there’s even a tree with some mistletoe growing in its upper branches, which I’d never seen in the wild before, until moving here, but I’m really glad there’s a plentiful supply of Holly berries for the Mistle Thrush. Feast well, little fierce one!
Perhaps not surprisingly, given its prominence in the landscape at this time of year, and year-round, there's a huge amount of folklore and tradition surrounding the Holly tree.
As well as being commonly known as ‘Holly’, here in Lincolnshire, it’s been known as Prick-Hollin and Prick Holly. It’s been called Prickly Christmas in Yorkshire, and just ‘Hollin’ or ‘Christmas’ across much of central England. Holme and Hulver are also names that pop up regularly through historical literature about this tree. With various places around the UK sharing the name of this ancient, tradition-laden tree. Hollybush in Hertfordshire and Hulver in Suffolk just to name a few.
The traditional Christmas carol, or folk song as it is also considered is also something that comes quickly to mind when speaking of this tree: ‘The Holly and the Ivy’, the usual tune of which was said to have been collected by a folk song collector, from a woman named Mary Clayton in Gloucestershire in the early 1900s. Henry the eighth wrote a song about it, and dating right back to the times of Pliny, Holly was considered to be a tree that was apotropaic, meaning that it had the power to avert bad luck or evil. In Hampshire, it was thought that children could be cured of whooping cough if they drank cow's milk from a bowl made from the wood of the Holly tree, and perhaps my favourite story is that of a farmer in Northern Ireland, who was left with a stone-throwing poltergeist, after having annoyed the fairies by sweeping his chimney with a holly branch. After all, this farmer should have known better, given that Holly was considered a gentle tree in Ireland, one that was very much liked by the fairy population. This mirrors the tradition that’s noted right across the UK, where right up until the early 1900s, it was considered highly unlucky for farmers to cut holly down, and they’d even cut their hedges around it to avoid doing so.
Romans sent boughs of holly to friends as gifts in December at Saturnalia, a tradition that is thought to have inspired the Christmas and Yuletide decorations of today. In the Druid tradition, it is regarded as one of the ‘noble trees of the wood’, assigned its own letter in the druid tree alphabet, the Ogham. And in the Christian tradition, holly was said to have grown from under Christ’s footsteps, with the red berries linked to the blood of Christ.
Perhaps though, given where we find ourselves in the calendar of the year, just before Christmas, you might also wish to consider the old Glamorgan tradition, that it’s unlucky to bring holly into the home before Christmas Eve, and equally unlucky to take it down before Twelfth Night. I think I’ll just leave mine woven into the wreath hung on my door, to protect my house, just in case!
Honestly, there’s enough material about holly and its folklore and traditions to fill several podcast episodes, but I hope this has whet your appetite a little, or might inspire a little conversation about it around the dining table this winter. How do your family view the holly tree? What are your traditions? How does it feature in your winter?
And next time you’re out walking, and you see those bright blood-red berries, take a moment to slow your pace, and spend a moment or two with the holly tree to appreciate it. Contemplate its place in our human history. Give a little thanks for its part in protecting wildlife, providing nesting space and food for birds. And for those reasons especially, maybe think twice before you chop one back and listen to what birds are protesting your proximity to it.