Hedgerows are the
living boundaries of our landscape. They create an invaluable
habitat, rich in pollen, nectar, fruit, leaves, and berries, and
provide essential resources for a range of bird, mammal, insect, and
invertebrate species. Hazel dormice (one of our rarest small
mammals), shrews, bank voles, hedgehogs, stoats, badgers, bees,
butterflies, spiders, bats, and a range of birds such as tits, yellow
hammers, wrens, robins, chaffinches, and whitethroats, find food and
shelter in their green embrace. They also act as windbreaks, help
prevent soil erosion, and form 'wildlife corridors', which species
can use to move from one isolated habitat to another. The more
diverse a hedgerow, the more species it can support and so our
ancient native hedgerows, containing green and growing hedge plants
such as blackthorn, hazel, hawthorn, dogwood, oak, ash, wych elm,
wild cherry, elder, birch, crabapple, blackberry, honeysuckle, rowan,
traveller's joy, and field maple, are to be treasured ~ although they
have suffered a marked decline as field sizes and monoculture farms
have increased. It is telling that, in a recent study, it was found
that bumblebees foraging in hedgerows would rather stay on the side
of a busy road than on the side of a field farmed using modern
methods.
There are around
28,000 miles of hedgerow in the UK, many of which are considered to
be ancient or 'species-rich'. Aside from their trees and creatures, they also support a rich diversity of wild flowers; common mallow,
dog rose, red campion, hedge bedstraw. bluebells, bugle, common
vetch, henbit deadnettle, common woundwort, cow parsley, cowslip,
foxglove, dog violet, garlic mustard, dandelion, meadow crane's-bill,
ragged robin, meadowsweet, nettle, dog daisy, self-heal, teasel,
meadow buttercup, yarrow, yellow rattle ~ even their names are a
meditation and a prayer.
Hedgerows hold many
echoes of our far-away history. The first hedgerows were created in the
Neolithic Age, 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, some still date from the
Bronze and Iron Ages, and many more were created during the
enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries. It
has been estimated that many of the hedgerows thriving in our
countryside today are more than seven hundred years old, having been
planted in the medieval period. Many are built on older banks,
ditches and earthworks.
Not all of that
history is kind and the Enclosure Acts led to the ending of many
traditional rights to mow hay & graze livestock and to open fields and
commons being divided up by hedgerows and fences and taken from the people to be
held in ownership by the few. It is a deep grief to me that we have
been divided from the land in this way and that our wild, anarchic
hawthorn, so deeply connected with the otherworld and faery lore, has
been one of the most common trees used in hedgelaying and therefore
used against us to keep us from our beloved earth. But all of that
history matters if we are to understand where we have come from and are truly to be the 'people of the land'. And I like to believe that the
hedgerows, rather than taking the land away from us, have retained
just a little bit of wild that we might otherwise have lost.
Boundaries, whether physical or psychological, are difficult and
tricksterish things and these wild edge places are never going to do
what they are told or be what they were intended to be.
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| Hawthorn blossom |
Which brings me very
beautifully into my second 'B', the Welsh goddess Blodeuwedd, who
certainly carries that shapeshifting trickster energy within her, and
if I was asked to choose a 'Goddess of the Hedge' it would most
certainly be her. When I first heard the Wild Feminine calling to me
it was through her story and she has been a constant companion and
deep teacher since. Like the history of the hedgerow, her story as it
is presented to us is not an easy one and, just as the hedgerow
has been used against the people of the commons, she has been used
against women.
The
story of Blodeuwedd, whose
name in English means 'Flower-Face' (also an ancient Welsh name for an
owl), can be found in the fourth branch of the Mabinogi, a collection
of Welsh mythological tales written down by monks in the
13th
and 14th
centuries but which carry within them a much older oral tradition. In the tale she is created out of
nine
flowers; the
oak, broom, meadowsweet, bean, burdock, nettle, chestnut and, my
favourite anarchist, the hawthorn,
as a wife for Llew
Llaw Gyffes, who has been cursed by his mother to never marry a human
woman. In order to gain kingship over the land, Llew
must marry a woman as representative of the sovereignty of the land.
However, like a hedgerow, Blodeuwedd, with her dual nature of flower
and owl, is not so easily tamed. Although she marries Llew
she falls in love with another man, Gronw Pebyr, and they plot to
kill her husband leading to a train of events in which Gronw himself
dies and Blodeuwedd is turned into an owl as a 'punishment'; “You
will not dare to show your face ever again in the light of day, and that will be because of enmity between you and all other
birds. It will be in their nature to harass you and despise you
wherever they find you. And you will not lose your name - that will
always be "Bloddeuwedd (Flower-face)." ('The
Four Branches of the Mabinogi, Will Parker). A fuller version of her
story can be read on the Welsh & Celtic Myths and Legends page here.
It is possible to
write a whole book about the layers and depths of meaning contained
within Blodeuwedd's story. However, for now, I am mostly interested
in her role as a 'boundary keeper' and in how we have so often made
attempts to tame her. When I first mentioned my new devotion to
Blodeuwedd to a Pagan friend her immediate reaction was to say, “Oh,
well she is a warning to women about our unfaithful nature”! Even
then I found it hard to believe that this was all that the wildly
spinning vortex of petals and owl feathers that was the Blodeuwedd I
had come to know was about.
In our culture we
are very used to thinking in a fixed and dualistic way, with
everything being either/or, good/bad, dark/light and this is how we
create our boundaries of mind. A healthy and living boundary must be
permeable, allowing new ideas in and allowing old ones to fade. This
is the same whether we are talking about the boundaries that we use
in our own lives to keep ourselves safe or a boundary in a field,
which would be a poor one indeed if it didn't allow a dormouse or two
through! In our dualistic way of thinking we find it very easy to
label Blodeuwedd's 'flower self' gentle, sweet, non-threatening, and
'good', whilst her owl self is considered dark, murderous, frightening, and 'bad'. Like the domestic apple we have tried to tame Blodeuwedd and make her manageable but this interpretation shows
little understanding of the nature of flowers or owls. If we are
truly people of the hedge/edge, then we will certainly not leave it at
that.
First, let's
consider the nature of flowers. Of course, we humans find them very
beautiful and, as they bloom throughout the year, they carry us along
on an enchanting tide of smell and colour. And the enchantment that
we feel is a clue to the purpose of a flower, which is to 'enchant'
or to lure pollinators. Blodeuwedd is indeed 'the honey to the bee'
and flowers, just like the goddess created from them, are not there
just to be pretty. Flowers are the sexual organs of plants, employing
any means at their disposal to ensure that the egg is united with the
sperm. Indeed the blossom of the hawthorn, one of the primary beings
of the hedge and also one of the flowers used to create Blodeuwedd,
are said to have the smell of a sexually aroused woman and have the
reputation of being an aphrodisiac in Arabic erotic literature. We
have only to look at the art of Georgia O'Keefe or Judy Chicago, both
of whom used flowers to represent female genitalia, to see a different
aspect of what a flower might be. Perhaps, in exploring the deeper
nature of flowers, we are beginning to break down the dualism that has
controlled Blodeuwedd's story and see through some tiny gaps in our
richly fertile hedge?
So to the owl,
Blodeuwedd's second nature. In the story her transformation into an
owl is explained to us as a punishment for her betrayal of her
husband and certainly owls have a challenging reputation in many
cultures. In some African tribes, owls are linked with death, bad
luck, and evil. These same associations exist through Native
American, Mesoamerican, and Arabic mythology. However, in the West,
the owl is more often seen as a bird of wisdom, whilst retaining some
associations with death and bad luck. Many of these 'darker' aspects
are also associated with femininity and with women, as is wisdom
which in Christianity is given the feminine name of 'Sophia'. Maria
Gimbutas traces the veneration of the owl as a goddess to the culture
of Old Europe, which refers to a time between the Mesolithic and
Bronze Age periods from roughly 7,000 BCE to 1,700 BCE. My own
fondness for owls was increased when it was pointed out to me how low
they fly when they are hunting and I have come to think of them as
our own 'hedge-riders'.
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| Owl Face/Flower Face |
And so we see that,
if we are hedge-conscious, it is impossible to pin anything down to
one meaning. In the hedgerow, which was once devised to control
nature and the people of the commons, there is also a song of such
chaotic, joyously disordered, and wilful wildness that it, and the
people who love it, can never be controlled. And in the goddess, who
was conceived of by monks to give us dire warnings about the
treacherous nature of women, is a being of wanton beauty shining with
nectar and looking at us with the wise, deep eyes of an owl (and maybe with a sharp talon digging into our flesh). Both
teach us of the edge, in ourselves and in our society, between what
is domesticated and tamed and what is wild and unbound. I pray that
we will all ride that hedge with our wild wisdom intact and that our
thoughts will always allow through a dormouse or two.
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| Meadowsweet |
If you would like to support, or just know more about, the people who are working to celebrate and protect our hedgerows please click on these links...
http://www.hedgelink.org.uk/
