I have decided to choose Hawthorn as my plant ally of this year. I wanted to learn more about the rosaceae family and I didn’t actually know anything about hawthorn and never ID it, even though it’s one of the trees you hear about all the time. I also came across a poem about hawthorn in an old Polish herbarium I found in an antique shop. It is about someone who has moved out of Poland and is looking for connection to home and finds stability in the familiarity of a hawthorn. A fragment of the poem roughly translates like so:
“But those flowering hawthorns, they are like stray dogs,
And this heaven in a puddle, like a tin plate,
The wind that blows a dead note ten roads far away, full of sorrow,
The dews, the thorns,
They don’t just belong to this land.
They are mine, they are gypsy,
Gypsy-Polish…”
I am also very exited about the fact that hawthorn has a lot of uses and can be crafted into various different things. And its connection to the heart feels quite poetic. Ever since I picked hawthorn as my plant ally they also seem to pop up everywhere on my walks. I have yet to identify one which branches wouldn’t be cut short and from which I could forage.