Notable Irish Trees

And cut and peeled a hazel wand..

A while back, in autumn, a storm blew in earlier than I anticipated, probably because I hadn’t paid quite enough attention to the forecast. I was out in a small wood nearby, one largely surrounded by open fields and bog land and the trees hadn’t yet shed all of their leaves. The wind piled through…

Yew, the Tree of Artefacts

I have literally just stopped myself running down yet another rabbit hole of related things because “it might be important and I have to try to give a complete picture.” Nope, I don’t. In fact I physically can’t, there is far too much for one modest little, madly meandering blog post. So I have hauled…

Seeking a muse in an oak tree.

I’ve been meaning to return to the subject of the Oak, specifically notes on the notion of an oak in Irish culture, our beloved Dair, first and foremost of the airig fedo, protected to the maximum extent of Brehon law (as documented in the Bretha Comaithchesa). I have no ability with medieval Irish, alas, so…

St. Melruaen’s Tree

For reasons I will come back to shortly I’ve been looking for a fruiting walnut tree in Ireland for a while now. Ireland apparently can quite happily support them but they’re not common here at all, and certainly not native. I only found out very recently that the familiar brown nut actually grows encased in…