Vaughn - Hawthorn : the tree that has nourished, healed, and inspired through the ages

The Tree That Has Nourished, Healed, and Inspired Through the Ages

Bill Vaughn

Copyright 2015 by Bill Vaughn.

All rights reserved.

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Set in Bulmer type by Integrated Publishing Solutions, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vaughn, Bill, 1948

Hawthorn : the tree that has nourished, healed, and inspired through the ages / Bill Vaughn.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-20349-3 (alk. paper)

1. Hawthorns.2. TreesMontana.I. Title.

QK495.R78V38 2015

583.73dc23

2014043898

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Kitty

And every shepherd tells his tale

Under the hawthorn in the dale.

MILTON

As a writer for magazines, I have traveled far and wide reporting about people, places, and events ranging from the trivial to the transcendent. Off the coast of Borneo I bribed fishermen to sneak me past the guards to an island where the first season of the CBS hit Survivor was being filmed. I walked across the bed of the North Sea at low tide to another island, this one off the coast of Holland, and back to the mainland before the tide returned, a peculiar and dangerous sport called mud walking that the Dutch seem to adore. I went around for a week with a busload of retired people taking in stage shows at Branson, Missouri. I spent a day in a machine shop in Austin, Texas, interviewing reality star Jesse James (before his famous divorce from Sandra Bullock). I bicycled around Provence on a gourmet tour and spent one night at the marquis de Sades chateau and another at a small castle belonging to Diane de Poitiers, the accomplished courtier and mistress of Henri II. I built a wind-powered boat and sailed it both legally and illegally on railroad tracks in Montana. And I spooked myself visiting some of the eerie humming places the tribes of the Northern Plains consider sacred.

But even as I was wandering around the world, outside my own back door was the most compelling story Ive come across so far. This is the drama of the hawthorn, a tree bound up with recorded human history for at least nine thousand years. After I stumbled across this extraordinary form of life and began studying it, I was astounded to discover that the role it played in the political history of Europe was indirectly responsible for my own existence. And so I decided that I needed to find out more about it, a serendipitous education that led me down a number of strange paths. The hawthorns role as a potent symbol in Catholicism compelled me to try to understand the religion I had rejected as a motherless child. And the part it played in my own history drew me to the Irish countryside, where my family had struggled to survive, and to the Jesuit mission in Montana where my great-grandfather found his place in the New World.

While my personal connection with the hawthornour home, Dark Acres, is in the middle of a community of hawthorns stretching for hundreds of milesdrove me to write this book, I also believe that its political, religious, and natural histories are stories that need to be woven into a single narrative. These stories may come as a surprise to many readers, especially Americans, because we have largely forgotten the role the tree once played in North America among European newcomers and indigenous peoples alike.

At the core of my fascination with the hawthorn are its paradoxes. This is a tree that, armed to the teeth with pathogen-bearing spines, nonetheless harbors and nurtures a multitude of creatures. This is a tree that once served as an important icon in the spiritual life of pagans yet became an object of adoration in the new religion, Christianity, that tried to eclipse the old worship. And this is the tree, planted in hedgerows that made farming possible, that was used mercilessly to deny poor Europeans access to what once had been land shared by everyone. Now the tree offers patients with bad hearts new hope for a healthier life.

The story of the hawthorn is, in some ways, our own story.

Theres no sense in getting killed by a plant.

DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS

O ne morning during our first spring at Dark Acres I filled my chainsaw with fuel and oil and lugged it across a pasture to a tangle of twenty-foot trees in full white bloom. The sky was moody and overcast, glowing with that gauzy May light photographers love. Overhead a chevron of Canada geese passed so low I could hear the hiss of their wings. The air was perfumed with pennyroyal and the languid fragrance of cottonwood buds. A breeze blowing up the Clark Fork pushed hypnotic waves through the fresh green grass, lush after a week of warm rain, making our river valley look more like Ireland than the normally parched terrain of western Montana. Now that my wife, Kitty, and I were living in the country again, in the same sort of redneck backwater where I spent my motherless, feral boyhood, the only thing that could have made me happier on this perfect day was finding a hundred-dollar bill blowing in the wind.

On closer inspection I saw that these bushy trees were actually a single tree that had shot out eight trunks in all directions. It wasnt graceful like the weeping willow in our backyard, or majestic like the hundred-foot ponderosas in our forest. Blotched with crusts of blue lichen, the gnarled and twisted limbs arched down from its crown like the fingers of witches. Its gray bark was peeled and flaking. This looked like a tree only its mother could love.

The trunk causing our recent problem had grown parallel to the ground for fifteen feet and a yard above it, building a thorny wall of zig-zaggy branches that embraced a confusion of vines and a length of web fencing that had been strung between pine posts, now rotted. Woven from steel wire into four-inch squares bound at the intersections with tight twists of a thinner gauge, the fence had been rusted and pitted by the weather, and warped and folded by the force of the growing tree.

I wondered why the ranch family whose cattle once wandered across this floodplain had used webbing instead of the odious barbed wire that snaked everywhere else through the forest. But recalling the pigs and their enclosures on my sisters cattle ranch in central Montana, I decided that pork-friendly fencing must indeed be the explanation. Whatever the reason, like the barbed wire, which I was beginning to replace with more horse-friendly post-and-rail fences made of pine, this nightmare union of briar and metal would have to go.

The day before, when I had gone out to bring in our quarter horses from the pasture, I was horrified to find Timer, our old brood mare, standing by the tree, head down, her left front hoof raised. Walking closer I could see that it was caught in the webbing. While concentrating on her work, which was the grazing she and the others were allowed four or five hours a day, Timer had somehow managed to step through a gap in the fence. I ordered Radish, our noisy red heeler, to back off. But hed already launched himself into his daily chore of herding the horses back to their corrals, and couldnt be recalled. When Timer saw him charging, his yap now turned to full volume, she pulled back from the fence in alarm. I stopped yelling at him, expecting the worst.