All the golden green

Gorse for this months Writing Down the Weeds

February in Ireland. We’ve had snow and sleet and storms, but today as I write the sun is shining and there is heat in it, and outside it smells like stirring soil and spring. It smells like relief. Fresh hope on the breeze. It will not be dark again before dinner time for another eight months. The light is rising with the sap. The catkins are on the hazel in the garden, crocus and daffodil shoots soon to bud. The birds are nesting, singing at all hours, they wait by the door, too used to food from my hands now. We’ve been wandering the woods. My boy and I. Staying in the garden long past dusk. He’s determined to be there when the bats wake from their winter sleep. I promise him campfires and beds on the trampoline under the stars before we move from here, to street-lamps and neighbours close by, and I wonder what I’ve done. Is it worth the trade-off to be able to walk to school and beach and shop? A mothers’ second guessing herself is never done…

My insomnia is back, nightly I sit, the house long grown cold with the dark. I weep and I rage. I talk to other mothers also awake too late, their rage too as hot as their tears. I read poems by Aja Monet, from her collection My Mother was a Freedom Fighter. And I think of my grandmother, I think of her determination. I think of her walking straight into lines of armed men, her head held high past their guns and colonial intent. An army of women breaking a curfew imposed on their community, prams filled with supplies for mothers under siege in their own homes^[1]. I think of her mother imprisoned as she refused to live with an occupation flag outside her house. She shimmied up a lamppost to remove it^[2]. I think of her mother who defiantly spoke Gaeilge and nothing else, who carried on the old rites, older than the imperial church, older than the state she was living under^[3]. I think of my own mother who took on a soldier aiming a gun at her unarmed brothers head with nothing but a bin-lid in her teenage hands. And I wonder if I have the same grit in my blood. I watch my son play; he tells me how someday he’s going to break all the guns. He tells me he is a forest protector. An ocean protector. A world protector. And I think this is revolution. To raise a humanist, a pacifist, a guardian of the land, who knows his heritage and can stand fully in it, this is revolution. This is how we move forward. This is how we change the world. This too a lifetimes work. This and hurling the little streets upon the great until they stop, until they are forced to hear us. Our holy howls of love and of freedom. We have work to do, and it will take us all. The circle can, and will, hold if we weave it with community and creativity and love. Outwards, ever outwards, the earth herself standing at our backs.      

 My eye is drawn back to the garden, past the flicker-flame of the candle I write by, to the sky outside. Dulled now after a bright morning, and all is grey. But beyond the hedgerow, high in the field the gorse stands green and blooming. Bright yellow petals even in the doldrums of winter, or now in such sodden early spring. Soon it will smell of tropical coconut as it warms. The new moon as we now call it fell late on Friday night here, she will appear early in the week. And so, it is time for February’s Writing Down the Weeds, today of course it must be Gorse. Prickly and golden, fertile, and green. Below is the folklore, it will be followed on Valentine’s Day later in the week by flash fiction inspired by Gorse’s most famous maxim; “When the gorse is in bloom, kissing is in season.” The joke is of course that it is always in bloom, and kissing is always in season.

Gorse

Aiteann

Ulex europaeus

Here, in the countryside of County Antrim, we call it Whin, or Whun in the vernacular accent, whilst my Belfast family call it Gorse and in other areas of Ireland, particularly Dublin and also in England it is known as Furze (Although Furze appears to be the plural and firr the singular). Its Irish name Aiteann which comes from two words combined each meaning sharp and lacerating, and anyone who has had a run in with this bush can attest to the accuracy of that name. It was used as boundary hedging for just this reason.

Gorse has strong associations with the sun, wealth, and fertility. Indeed, an old saying recounts “Gold under furze, silver under rushes and famine under heather”, and old Irish laws held that the presence of furze on land made it profitable. This may be because it prefers rich soil or that its ash makes an excellent fertiliser and its young shoots, appearing after it is burnt or cut back make good fodder for livestock.

There are many tales linking the other crowd to gorse, often involving their gift of gold coins which revert to gorse petals once the magic is spent. Sometimes the way to the otherworld is thought to be under a whin bush but they were much more often used to create temporary shelter for livestock in far flung fields.

Gorse petals make a strong yellow dye and in parts of Ulster this was more recently used to dye easter eggs whilst before it was used throughout Ireland to dye wool. The new green shoots can similarly be used to create green dye.

The petals were once used to flavour mead and can be eaten, in salads like pea shoots but wait until late in the spring when the heat will release their full flavour. Scattered on the floor they will deter fleas and a concoction of milk infused with the petals was used to treat jaundice and worms. The bush itself has been known to make an excellent washing line, its sharp spikes securing linens in place and it Cornwall (and areas of costal Ireland) a large branch of gorse was tied to a sea rock and dropped down a chimney to sweep it.

The wood of gorse is strong enough that it has been used to make hurleys, and it is such an oily wood its roots burn better than coal, producing a hot, clean flame. It is perhaps for this reason that whin was most used to light the Bealtaine fires.

A sprig of flowering gorse was often brought in on May Day to “bring in the summer”, and its scent in full bloom certainly does that, however it seems this was the only day it, like hawthorn, was permitted indoors for fear of bad luck following. Its petals were often strewn across doorways or around milk for protection on Bealtaine eve whilst to wear a sprig of gorse at any time would ensure the wearer never stumbled.

It's connections to wealth and fertility meant women would carry a sprig in their bridal bouquet and connected it with sovereignty goddesses of Ireland, kingship, and profitable reigns.

Whilst it is said “when gorse is out of bloom, kissing is out of fashion”, meaning it is always in bloom somewhere, Ulex europaeus, the most common species, flowers in winter and spring and western gorse and dwarf gorse flower typically in the summer and on into autumn, so this saying regards all three species.

On Valentine’s Day, mid-week, I will bring you some flash fiction inspired by this phrase and all gorse’s golden greening. Be sure to subscribe to get the fiction straight to your inbox. Thank you for being here, as always, your support means so much.

Happy New Moon, may all your loves grow with the light. Xx

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^[1] For more information on this moment see The Falls Curfew, 1970.

^[2] It was “tradition” here for Union Jacks to be hung on lampposts as a threat, an intimidation, outside Irish/Nationalist homes. Now they are used as territory markers. As is the Irish Tricolour. My great grandmother was living with an English man, my great grandfather, and was having none of it. The same great grandmother who was injured as a teenager in the Weaver Street massacre. See Some Mothers Son.

^[3] My great-great grandmother moved to Belfast from Cork before Ireland was partitioned with the creation of Northern Ireland.