Immature mayapplesMayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) is a common forest floor perennial that flowers in May, but does not actually produce fruit (“apples”) until later in the summer. Recently I was talking to a horticultural professor who was taking his class on a field trip to look for wildflowers. I mentioned to him that the mayapple was about to flower. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, sure, but you can find mayapple anywhere.” Fair enough. Mayapple is apparently the red-eyed vireo of forest wildflowers: it is so abundant that you forget how attractive and interesting it is.

One of the species' many nicknames is “umbrella plant,” which, as it turns out, refers only to the immature, infertile plants. Once established the mayapple spreads via rhizomes. For several years the only thing to emerge above ground is a foot-high stem that attaches to single, deeply lobed leaf. After the leaf is fully-open the plant looks like a parasol emerging from a patio table.

When the plant is mature enough to produce a flower, it sends up a stem that divides into two or three left petioles that support lobate leaves that resemble those on the immature plants, but the petiole is attached at the edge, not the center of the leaf. The flower stem (peduncle) emerges from the divide (axil) between the petioles and supports a single flower bud.

Mayapple flowerMayapple flowers are not dramatically beautiful. The 6 to 9 petals are white and waxy in texture. The stamens and pistil are yellow. The flowers have a pleasant scent and the period of bloom is about three weeks. If the flower is fertilized it produces a two-inch long fruit that contains several seeds. The fruit is edible, but the rest of the plant is poisonous.

P. peltatum is also called “mandrake” or “American mandrake,” but it is not related to the European Mandragora. The latter is a member of the nightshade family (Solanaceae), while Podophyllum is in the barberry family (Berberidaceae). Mandrake plants contain hallucingens like atropine. Mayapple is simply poisonous and produces only nausea and vomiting. Eventually inflammation of the intestinal tract can prove fatal. Even herbalists urge lay people not to experiment with any part of the plant other than the fruit. That said, the chemical constituents of the mayapple inhibit mitotic division of cells, so it has been examined as a possible treatment for cancer (runaway cell division). Etoposide, a semisynthetic derivative of one of the lignans, is currently used in the treatment of small-cell lung cancer and testicular cancer.

Unripe fruitNorth American tribal people apparently used the plant as an emetic and a laxative, to get rid of intestinal worms, warts and moles. The FDA, of course, frowns on all of this, but in the bad old days a decoction of mayapple was sold as a laxative called “Carter's Little Liver Pills.” Modern alternative medicine sources tend to say forget about his plant altogether or only use it topically.

Tribal people and a few 19^th century Americans also ate the fruit (the pulp is yellow when ripe), although it has been variously described as tasteless or syrupy. One maker of mayapple jam in Michigan, however, was quite fond of it and described it as “an exotic tropical aroma. described as mostly guava with hints of papaya and strawberry.” He noted that deer like to eat the ripe fruit and his strategy for gather enough that are ripe is wait until they begin to disappear (harvested by deer, generally toward the end of July) and then to move in and do his own gathering. I must say, though, his recipe includes an enormous amount of sugar.

Today (April 29) I took a walk along Taughannock Creek, one of the two main watercourses that pass through or near Trumansburg, where I live. I had noticed on the Google map that a narrow right-of-way extended from the creek, which is part of Taughannock Falls State Park, up to Rabbit Run. For some reason it lined up with the northern border of the fairgrounds, which made it relatively easy to locate. I parked my car on the road and bushwacked down through the bush honeysuckle to the gorge, where I found metal signs indicating the boundary of the park.

Some kind of spleenwortAs I made my way down the steep slope to the water I noticed ferns coming up everywhere in the loose mixture of shale fragments, leaf litter, and soil. I also remembered when this sort of scrambling was much less difficult. This had been how I got much of my exercise in my youth, and there is nothing like to doing the same activity in middle age as you did when you were young to gauge how very much you need to renew and increase the frequency of that activity. So returning to the field is important from both a mental and physical health point of view.

When we moved to Beacon, New York in 1971 my family bought an old Victorian house from an elderly couple. They were apparently downsizing radically and were therefore getting rid of a lot of their belongings. There was a big pile of discarded stuff on the lawn next to the back porch and at the edge of this midden was an old copy of Peterson Field Guide to Birds, an edition from the 1940s, the dust jacket long since lost. It was the discovery of that book at age 10 that started me on the road to becoming a field naturalist.

Soon I was spending the better part of as many days I could manage “in the field.” My interests broadened beyond birds to trees. (I acquired a Golden Guide to Trees.) Then to mammals and the rest of the vertebrates. For some reason I remained focused on these large subjects for the rest of adolescence, not becoming interested in shrubs, wildflowers, or invertebrates until much latter, when other people or coursework introduced these groups to me.

Early saxifrageBut it was being out of doors and paying attention to the identity of things around me that formed the core of my experience. I remember being appalled when my first girlfriend told me that she wasn't really interested in the names of natural objects. For her nature was a mystical experience; she was atttuned to its beauty but focused on forms, textures, colors, and their harmony. We had endless sophomoric arguments about this scientific versus artistic perspective on the natural world.

I did take away an enhanced aesthetic appreciation from this encounter. I did try to back off and to be less analytical, to take a more holistic view. But I did not stop learning the names of species and their habits

Walking in nature and taking it all in has always been a solitary pursuit for me. I never joined a birdwatching or botanical club. I suppose that walking out of doors was very much a meditation, and I have never found a companion who shared this Thoreauvian mixture of science and mysticism.

During the 25 years, while I have been either married or essentially so, I have not very often walked in nature as I did as an adolescent. On the occasions when I tried to share my peculiar passion I have ended up being embarrassed: I have never been uninterested in getting exercise or reaching a particular destination (“hiking”) nor felt particularly upset when I haven't been able to identify something (“field trip”).

As I scrambled down the slope of Taughannock Creek I was curious as to what species these ferns were, but I hadn't brought any sort of field guide with me. In late April ferns were coming up everywhere. The only ones I had a prayer of identifying were the spleenworts, which are relatively small ferns that tend to grow on rock outgrops. They are calciphiles, and the local bedrock has calcium carbonate in the cement that binds it together. I didn't know what they were below the genus level though.

Closer to the water there were also white wildflowers emerging everywhere from the outcrops. They looked vaguely familiar but I couldn't place them. I enumerated characteristics. Five petaled flowers about a centimeter across growing on branching stalks that were almost succulent and finely haired. These stalks lacked any leaves, but sprang from a basal rosette that consisted of oval, slightly flesh leaves with blunt teeth.

Virginia bluebellsWhen I returned home I cast about on the Internet (I don't have a wildflower guide anymore) without much luck until I decided to simply type all the descriptive words into the browser.

They turned out to be saxifrages. A little more digging revealed them to be early saxifrage (Saxifraga virginensis), not uncommon in the least, but I had only seen cultivated saxifrage before. They were growing exactly where they usually grow: on outcrops along streams.

I emerged from the gorge and reached a wetland area in an old oxbox that stretched away from the current creek course and was filled with what turned out to be Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica).

Again I took stock of salient characters, commited them to memory, and looked them up by the same method as the saxifrage. Pendant funnel-shaped (“salverform”) pale blue flowers dangling in loose bunches (“cymes”) from plants that appeared semi-succulent. The oval leaves held upright making an acute angle with the stem.

I had never seen either of these plants in flower before in 41 years of walking out of doors. This is perhaps because I haven't don't it enough in the last 25 and therefore haven't spent enough time in the field in central New York. That is about to change.



Palms grow throughout the tropics and in much of the subtropics, a few of them ranging up into temperate latitudes in both the northern and southern hemispheres. The genus Homo evolved in the tropics and developed agriculture there, building civilizations in the subtropics where not everyone was a farmer. Urban centers developed where people bought their food instead of growing it. So food became a commodity, something to be transported from the place where it was grown and harvested to the place where it was consumed. 

Palms are ubiquitous, growing in rainforests and deserts, in mountains and on the beach. There are approximately 2,600 species around the world, displaying an impressive amount of diversity. It is therefore not surprising that many species have been turned into resources.

Cocoanuts are the fruit of Cocos nucifera. But this is not just about eating cocoanuts. According James Duke of the horticulture department at Purdue University, “At any one time a coconut palm has 12 different crops of nuts on it, from opening flower to ripe nut.” They go on to describe the various ways that the flowers, buds, and nuts in various stages of ripeness can be transformed into something edible.

Oil palm plantationIt isn't all about food either. “[The] nut has a husk, which is a mass of packed fibers called coir," Duke wrote, "which can be woven into strong twine or rope, and is used for padding mattresses, upholstery and life-preservers. Fiber resistant to sea water and is used for cables and rigging on ships, for making mats, rugs, bags, brooms, brushes, and olive oil filters in Italy and Greece ...”

Coconut oil is derived from the kernel of C. nucifera and palm oil is extracted from the fruit of Elaeis guineensis, the “oil palm.” These tropical oils made their way out of Africa and South America during the late colonial period. Non comestible uses for palm oil included machine lubrication and soap making (“That's Palmolive you're soaking in!”). Of course in the usual pattern of increasing demand caused by more and greater uses further afield from the point of origin, oil palm growing has expanded and is expanding at a rate that alarms environmentalists. Tropical forests are cut down and replaced with ecologically sterile palm plantations throughout the low latitudes.

Palm oil is highly saturated, which slows its oxidation, a desirable quality in the production of deep-fried and processed foods. It is also realtively cheap, another plus. Unfortunately saturated fats lead to the accumulation of both low-density and high-density cholesterols in human circulatory systems, promoting heart disease.

Rattan palmThe image of the palm tree is iconic: the tall limb-less truck with the thatchy mop of large leaves sprouting out of the top. But, in fact, palms (the family Arenaceae) have several growth habits. The diametrical opposite of the tree-like icon is the climbing palm. The vine-like plants grow on other plants. The rattans are a diverse tribe (Calameae) of climbers that is native to southeast Asia and widely cultivated there. Rattan furniture became fashionable in the Victorian Era and has remained so to this day.

While tropical forest is cleared for oil palm plantations, rattan is grown commercially within the existing forest. While this is an inherently sustainable practice, rattan growers still manage to over-harvest their crop in some places and injure the condition of the “host forest” in others.

Rattan produces poles that are similar to bamboo, but solid rather than hollow. The outer layer is thorny and must be removed before use. The second layer can be stripped off to create cane, which is then woven to make the matting that is strung between the structural framework built from the poles. Rattan is often lumped under the general rubric of "wicker," which encompasses all woven plant materials including those made from grasses, rushes and willow (the original wicker material).

Flag of South CarolinaPalms are also grown commercially and used in both private and public designed landscapes to create a classic tropical look. The strong idenfication of palms with the exotic tropics has led to palms being planted well outside their natural ranges with the Isles of Scilly off the southwest coast of England being perhaps one of the more famous, although they are also part of estate landscapes in Ireland as well. In both places the benevolent effects of the Gulf Stream allow the palms to live well north of their natural range.

In the southeastern United States the natural range of palmetto palms extends as far north as North Carolina. The silhouette of the saw palmetto is the symbol of the state of South Carolina. While most palms have pinnate leaves with leaflet attached to long central axes, it is the palmate leaved species (like the palmettos) that give the family its name. Palmate leaves lack the central axis and the leaves radiate outward like finger from a central region.

The leaves' resemblance to the palm of a hand are what give the trees their name. The Romans called that part of the hand palma and gave the trees the same name.

In July 1972 my family went on a camping trip to Virginia, a month after Hurricane Agnes passed through the state. We went up Skyline Drive onto the Blue Ridge. There were still American chestnut “ghost trees” standing in the forests. They were enormous, barkless and bleached bone white. The trees had died from a blight in the 1930s, but the famous durability of chestnut wood caused them to remain standing for decades afterward.

Rare mature American chestnutIn 1904 a bark fungus was introduced to the United States in imported Asian chestnuts that were brought to the New York Zoological Garden in the Bronx. The spores of the fungus Endothia parasitica are airborne and the pathogen spread like proverbial wildfire north and south along the Appalachian range of the most important hardwood in the eastern forests.

I therefore never saw a mature living American chestnut. I do however remember the American elm as a prominent landscape tree. It still lined streets in New England in the 1960s when I was a child. Dutch elm disease was introduced to North American in 1930 in a shipment of logs from Europe. The fungus Ceratocystis ulmi is carried from tree to tree by the European bark beetle, Scolytus multistriatus, and the native elm bark beetle, Hylurgopinus rufipes.

Unlike the chestnut, elm seeds are are dispersed by the wind and the species produces seeds at relatively young age. For these reasons among others Ulmus americana has not been wiped out as completely as Castanea dentata. There were still elm trees on Elm Street in West Springfield, Mass. when my grandparents moved there in the early 1970s. When I arrived at St. Lawrence University as a freshman in 1978 there were a few sick trees in the two double rows of elms that extended half a mile from campus to Route 68. Now in the 21^st century I still see healthy mature specimens of U. americana when I drive the back roads of Seneca County in upstate New York.

Vase-shaped American elmBut the plight of the American ash species seems poised to more resemble that of the chestnut than the elm. The elm and chestnut fell victim to fungi, but the ash are in the process of being eliminated by an insect, the emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipenni). The borer was first noticed in June 2002 in eastern Michigan. It is hypothesized that it arrived in wooden packing materials imported from Asia. The ash borer is native to eastern Russia, northern China, Japan, and Korea.

It is a very small insect – only half an inch long – and it moves from tree to tree on the wind. It prefers warmer mesoclimates and therefore begins eating the tree at the top of the canopy and then working its way downward, one major bole at a time. It feeds on the inner bark, effectively starving the tree by interrupting the flow of nutrients between the leaves and the roots. It takes several years for it to kill a healthy full grown ash tree.

There is only one species of Castanea native to North America, but there are several species of Ulmus. They are all susceptible to Dutch elm disease, but because of their vigor, none of them have been wiped out. The emerald ash borer enjoys eating all Fraxinus taxa. It has been predicted by plant epidemiologists and foresters that white, black, green, and pumpkin ash will all be entirely eliminated from the canopy of the eastern deciduous forest over the next couple of decades.

Emerald ash borerThe emerald ash borer is being spread around the country through the transportation of firewood by campers and seller of wood. Researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture research lab at Cornell were conducting research on the emerald ash borer in Michigan, driving back and forth frequently to do field work. They were returning from Michigan in the spring of 2009 when they noticed trees along Route 17 in the Southern Tier of New York damaged in exactly the same way as the trees they'd been studying in Michigan. They stopped to investigate and were stunned to discover ash borers present. It had skipped over a large part of Ohio and found its way into New York. Now, in 2012, it has been found at several places around the state, as far as east as the Hudson Valley.

"The prognosis is not good," said Newfield, New York resident Tom Gerow, the head of procurement for Wagner Hardwoods. "There's no way to stop it." Because the insect is exotic, Gerow explained, the North American ashes have no defense mechanisms against it. "Predators are known," said Gerow, "but they can't stop the spread of the insect. We've pretty much given up hope for the present population of ashes." Like the chestnut and the elm before them, ashes are going to nearly disappear from the northeastern North American forest.

My great great-grandfather, who was also called William Chaisson, was the master builder in the Tee Kay Kickham Shipyard, Souris West, Prince Edward Island. The Chaissons had been building boats since at least 1784. Through the 19^th century the business declined because the forests of Prince Edward Island were steadily depleted and importing wood became too expensive. My ancestors, like most 19^th century business people, did not employ sustainable business practices and they rather literally cut off the limb that they were sitting on.

Phillip Chaisson (1873-1918)This is, in fact, why I am an American and not a Canadian. My great-grandfather Philip Chaisson was born in 1873. He was trained as a builder, but he spent his rather short life designing and constructing buildings, not boats. He and every single one of his brothers (and he had several) emigrated from the island, going to either western Canada or down to New England.

The failure of the boat-building business may have been hastened by the Panic of 1893, which was the worst economic depression to hit the United States and Canada up to that time, and was long regarded as second only to the Great Depression. It was precipitated by the over-expansion of the railroads, which caused a number of bank failures. Another panic followed in 1907. Ten Farms Become a Town: A History of Souris, 1700-1920 notes that the Kickham shipyard would remain best known for the schooners it produced between 1891 and 1907.

In June 2011 Douglas Obey published a report called “Shipbuilding and the Forests of Prince Edward Island.” Obey is a research associate at the Institute of Island Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown. He examined 108 survey reports issued by Lloyd's Register of British and Foreign Shipping and saw marked changes in the types of wood used to build ships between 1836 and 1876. “The main woods used in the hulls of island-built ships (in the order of their frequency of recording in the Lloyd's survey-forms) were spruce, yellow birch, tamarack, beech, and pine, with the two hardwoods (yellow birch and beech) being used primarily in the parts of the hull below the waterline and the three softwoods above the line.”

Obey documented the decline first in the use of yellow birch, beech and pine, with a relative increase in the amount of tamarack used, and then tamarack declined after the 1860s as well as spruce use became dominant through the 1870s. Over the years the disappearance of the hardwoods led to soft wood being used below the waterline. According to Obey, the switch from emphasis on one wood over the other was due at least in part to Lloyd's rating of these woods. Spruce and tamarack built ships were given better “classifications,” so the builders deserted the hardwoods.

My family is from the northeastern corner of the island, which also happened to be one of the strongholds of the coniferous boreal forest on PEI. However, Obey goes on to write that depletion of these forests contributed to the decline in building. “By 1870 tamarack of the size and quality suitable for shipbuilding had been used up to the point where it could no longer contribute significantly to the industry anywhere.

Schooners in Souris harborMy great grandfather was down in Massachusetts by the turn of the 20^th century. My grandfather, whom he named his own father, was born in Haverhill in 1904 and his sister Adelaide (named for his mother), a year or two later. A search of online newspaper records and the search results of genealogists who have collected this newspaper data reveal that my great grandmother Celina Theriault Chaisson died of gasteroenteritis on May 6, 1908. She had been born in the Magdalen Islands in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I have no idea how she met her husband, except that there is a ferry that runs between Souris and the islands.

My great-grandfather may have been the last of the Francophone generations in eastern PEI. The Magdalene Islands are part of Quebec and would have been monolingual French in the latest 19^th century. Philip Chaisson came from a part of PEI where the Scots out-numbered the French, but he was perhaps still bilingual enough to understand his wife. After she died my grandfather was raised by his mother's brother in Cambridge, where French was his first language. Adelaide was raised by Philip's sister Alice in New Jersey, where she grew up with English as her first language.

Shipyard on the Hillsborough RiverMy great-grandfather returned to Canada. For many years I was told a family story about him dying in the Magdalens while building a church. Then I chanced upon a story about the 125^th anniversary of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) in Souris, written in 2008. The text included a photograph Phillip Chaisson, the first I've ever seen, and the information that he had been the architect of the 1913 bank building (now demolished) and had died in the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918.

So the decline of the shipping industry in PEI led my greatgrandfather to move to the United States. He left his children in the US, moved back to PEI, and died there, buried in the St. Alexis graveyard in Rollo Bay. I visited the island in 2000 and in addition to my great-grandfather's grave, saw an island that is once again forested.



It was probably when I was taking a course on vascular plants in my senior year of college that I learned that the gametophyte generation of ferns was a free-living multi-cellular organism. This revelation about the alternation of generations helped me to understand a crucial difference between plants and animals, clarified the relatedness among major phyla, and made meiosis and mitosis a lot less abstract.

Alternation of chromosome numberThe gametophyte (literally “gamete plant”) has only half the number of chromosomes (n; haploid) as the sporophyte generation of a given taxon. In ferns and what used to be called “lower plants” the sporophyte produces spores by meiosis, a process of cell division that creates cells with only one copy of each chromosome in them. In the ferns these spores undergo mitosis, a mode of cell division that preserves the number of chromosomes as each new cell is formed. The number of chromosomes is doubled just before the cell divides.

Gametophyte of Onclea sensiblis, a fernThe gametophyte fern is considerably smaller and less differentiated than the more familiar sporophyte plant. The gamete divides to create a prothallus, basically a single photosynthetic leaf. This multi-celled organism produces both male and female one-celled gametes (sperm and eggs) via mitosis. Like animal sperm this fern sperm is flagellated and motile; it fertiizes the eggs on the surface of the prothallus to produce a 2n (diploid) cell, which then begins to divide by mitosis to create the sporophyte plant.

The process of sexual reproduction is a bit different in animals. The gametes remain one-celled, never undergoing mitosis to produce a free-living haploid organism; there is no alternation of generations because there is no haploid generation. Also, the male and female gametes are derived from different organisms in animals rather than one.

In the mosses the gametophyte and sporophyte plants are of roughly the same size and complexity, while the liverworts actually have a dominant gametophyte stage and the sporophyte generation lives as part of the gametophyte rather than fully independent. That is, the complete inverse of the animal situation. All these variations on the relationship between the haploid and diploid stages of the life cycle illustrate the evolutionary pathways that were taken by different phyla.

In the plants you can see a continuum from the mosses to the ferns to the “seed plants” of gradual dominance of the sporophyte generation as vascular structures appear in the transition from mosses to ferns and then grow more complex in the seed plants.

The liverworts would seem to be on an entirely different pathway, which is also suggested by their lack of certain introns in their mitochondrial DNA that are shared by other plants, even the mosses, which were formerly thought to be more closely related to liverworts.

Contemplation of the alternation of generations can lead to interesting exercises in developing “what if” scenarios for evolution. For example, consider how strange it would be to have free-living, multi-celled haploid generation animals running around. The actual path of evolution has left us with female diploid animals carrying around a finite number of haploid cells in their ovaries and male diploid animals producing millions of haploid cells in their testicles. These haploid cells have no independent existence. Consider the alternate scenario in which animals released haploid spores into the environment, which then proceeded to undergo mitosis and cell differentiation, and developed into separate haploid creatures.

Families would consist of two sets of organisms that would (if ferns are any indication) look quite different from one another. The diploid generation would never actually have to engage in sexual congress because it would be up to the haploid generation to produce haploid gametes that would fuse into a diploid animal.



Made with vegetable and animal fats since 1879After that I ran out of luck. The mice were able to lick the peanut butter off the treadle without tripping it. Every time I came into the kitchen to find the trap stripped clean and unsprung, I also noticed that a little more of the Ivory soap bar that I kept next to the sink had been gnawed away. Why were the mice eating the soap?

As it turns out Ivory soap, like a lot of commercial soaps, is made with a mixture of vegetable and animal fats. In the case of Ivory the animal is a cow and the vegetable is a palm tree (coconut palms, among others). In the simplest sense soap is made by mixing triglycerides (three fatty acid chains bonded to a glyceride) with a strong alkaline, usually lye (sodium hydroxide, historically derived from the ashes of hardwoods). The mixing the lye with the triglycerides strips the glyceride from the acids and puts it into solution as glycerine. The fatty acids in the soap are apparently an appealing source of calories for white-footed mice.

I placed the bar of soap in a high cabinet and baited the trap with a little piece of soap stuck fast to the treadle. In three days I caught (killed) four more mice. All of them were much smaller than the first one. I suspect that I wiped out a mother and her brood. So goes the war.  

All this got me thinking about soap making. It is an artisan practice in this area and the small batch locally made stuff is expensive. A little research revealed that historically both animal and vegetable fats were used to make soap with the Babylonians being the oldest reference, although their soap was apparently for treating wool not human hygiene. The Egyptians made soap to clean themselves, as did the Greeks and Romans.

After the fall of the Roman Empire soap manufacture seems to have become rather limited. The Crusaders are credited with reintroducing soap to Europe in the 10th century. They brought back a vegetable fat-based soap that came to be called “Aleppo soap” after its city of origin in Syria. It was (and is) made with a mixture of olive and laurel oils. Laurel oil proved difficult to find in medieval Europe (Laurus nobilis, the laurel tree, is found scattered throughout the Mediterranean region, but in small numbers) and a pure olive oil soap tradition evolved in both southern France and central Spain so that they became known as “Marseille” and “Castile” soaps, respectively.

Aleppo soap stacked for dryingFrom the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution the production of soap remained a small-scale regional industry, with higher quality, more expensive soaps being made entirely or largely from vegetable oils because they are milder to the skin, especially when “super-fatted” with supplementary oils during the saponification (soap forming) process.

Animal fat-based soaps tended to be those made at home by poorer people. Tallow (beef fat) and lard (pork fat) were both by-products of the butchering process, and by-products were not to be wasted. Before the advent of refrigeration it was advisable to use tallow and lard to make something before it “went off.” Mixing the fats with wood ashes produced a crude, harsh soap that was an effective cleanser, but left the skin raw.

The industrialization of soap production in the 18th century standardized the chemistry of saponification and was often carried out at higher temperatures, which sped up the process and cut down on the presence of residual lye. When meat packing became part of the industrial economy it increased the amount of animal fat by-products available and drove down the price of soap.

Dr. Bronner's is made with olive oilCastile soap, however, never quite went away, and with the rise of vegetarianism and animal rights consciousness has increased in popularity over the last 30 years or so. Dr. Bronner's Castile soap is well known to earthy-crunchy types everywhere as the potent liquid soap in the containers with all the tiny, cryptic printing on them. It has been manufactured in this country since 1929. The industrialization of cattle raising has made even non-vegetarians concerned about residual growth hormones and other chemicals stored in the animal fat that is then made into soap, and vegetable fat-based soap popularity continues to grow. 

Joseph's hawthorn staff sprouts branches and flowersThere are many examples of pagan beliefs being grafted onto the Christian story. Joseph of Arimathea is mentioned in the Gospels (four of them) as the wealthy man who had the crucified messiah buried in his own family tomb. But by the Middle Ages his role had been expanded and he was given credit for introducing Christianity to Great Britain before the coming of the Romans in 43 A.D.

When I was child we had an illustrated book of Christmas stories, including the legend of Joseph and his staff. Four decades later I can still see in my mind's eye the picture of the white-beared old man dressed in the robes of the Middle East incongruous in a temperate setting. He stands before a staff thrust into the ground with small branches growing from it; the branches are covered with white flowers. Baffled Britons in furs hover in the distance, if anything more amazed than Joseph at the transformation of his hawthorn staff into a flowering tree.

The “Glastonbury thorn” is a variety of Craetagus monogyne called 'Biflora' because it blooms in mid-winter on the previous growing season's “new wood” and then again in late spring on “old wood.” This mutation is apparently somatic because all plants grown from the seed of the original Glastonbury trees prove to be normal spring flowering specimens. All existing “Glastonbury thorns” are cut from the original trees and grown as grafts, often on blackthorn (Prunus spinosa). A cursory survey of references suggests that while this is not a difficult thing to do with hawthorns, it is not trivial either.

The legend of Joseph of Arimathea and his sprouting staff is compelling in part because most people who have done some gardening or simply worked outside will have had the experience of cutting down sapling of fast growing trees like sumac, ailanthus or Norway maple (to simply cite my own experience) and driving them into the ground as tomato stakes or the fencing around a compost pile and having them sprout leaves after a few days. In the legend of Joseph his staff is either the staff of Christ himself or made from the wood of the Cross. Either way, a bit different from a freshly cut sapling. Not to mention the detail that Joseph's staff sprouted flowering branches over night.

Crataegus monogyna

To some extent the hawthorn staff seems to represent Jesus in the sense that both are made dead then come to life again. In the broader sense this is an incursion of the pagan focus on dead-rebirth cycles into the more linear sense of history going from genesis to apocalypse that one associates with Middle Eastern religions. That the story of Joseph involves a Middle Eastern personage traveling to northwest Europe essentially standing in for the export of Christianity itself in that direction.

In Scots tradition the hawthorn tree was said to stand the entrance to the netherworld inhabited by the fairies. It's association with the fairies translated into its being very bad luck to cut down a hawthorn unless it was in bloom. In early December 2010 the Glastonbury thorn on Wearyall Hill in Glastonbury was pruned back aggressively by vandals.

The press suggested that the attack was anti-Christian, although it is possible that it could have been the work of Christian fundamentalists insulted by the pagan-Christian melding that the worship of the tree exemplifies. During Oliver Cromwell's Puritan overthrow of the Stuart monarchy the thorn at Glastonbury abbey was cut down (and the abbott was lynched) because the importance given to the tree was seen (accurately) as idolatrous. Whose to say whether or not the same sentiments weren't at work in 2010?

Glastonbury thorn before radical pruning

In a heart-warming and very pagan follow-up the mangled old thorn tree began pushing out new growth the following March. There was never a danger that the Glastonbury thorn would become extinct however. There are numerous specimens in gardens, churchyards, and public places throughout the region, all derived from grafts from the original tree.

Each year a cutting is taken from the thorn at the Church of St. John and delivered to Buckingham Palace in order that it may grace the royal family's Christmas table. This is interesting in the sense that before the reform of the calendar in 1752, Christmas was celebrated on January 5 (Advent) in England. The Glastonbury thorn is more likely to be in bloom by that date than by December 25. Perhaps the flowers were forced in years when they hadn't bloomed on the tree by Christmas.

According to the Daily Western Press forcing won't be necessary this year. The Glastonbury thorn began blooming in at least one man's garden in Somerset on Christmas Eve.