A tree that has come up in the world in recent years is the rowan. It's connected in our minds, often, with rocky mountainsides or desolate corners, but now it has been urbanised in a big way. You see it in parks, in clusters, in gardens. And it is used as a street tree. You may remember your first encounter with those brilliant clusters of berries.
"Bite into it, but don't swallow "your father or someone else who knew, would say. And you bit, and likely enough spat it out immediately. Quinine.
Such a bitter taste. Birds do go for them, but just now there is much else to entice them. A French book on trees tells us that bird catchers used to, and maybe still do, spread nets around the tops of the fruiting rowans. Which reminds one that jelly made from the berries and apples (half and half) is said to go well with game or lamb.
It's tough, this tree, as regards climate. The French book says that you will find it within the polar circle, in Asia Minor, in Siberia and on from the Urals. But it not only endures the cold it can get along in any kind of soil, and up to a height of 1,600 metres. Where forests have been cleared, this is said to be a pioneer tree. By scattering the seeds of the rowan, birds start off the rewooding of the area very quickly. Does this happen in Ireland? Or has France more rowans than ourselves?
The late A.T. Lucas, that learned man, had a splendid article on The Sacred Trees of Ireland in the Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society some years ago. It was used around the farm and house, hung up to "prevent fire charming, used to keep the dead from rising and tied as a collar on a hound to increase his speed. "But, more seriously it was regarded as the sovereign protector of milk and its products against super national evils kept in the byre to safeguard the cows put in the pail and around the churn to ensure that the profit of the milk was not stolen.
Dr Lucas thought this magical virtue of the rowan was learned from Norse settlers, being "all the more efficacious, coming as they did, from the mysterious land of Lochlann beyond the seas."
The Latin name of the tree is sorbus aucuparia.