Ash: Folklore, Food and Medicine

Walk beneath an ash tree and you're standing under the Norse world tree — roots reaching into the underworld, branches into the heavens, a dragon and an eagle trading insults through a squirrel who runs messages between them all day long. Few trees in these islands carry so much story in so ordinary a shape.

Robin Harford, founder of Eatweeds and an ethnobotanical researcher whose foraging courses have been recognised by BBC Countryfile as among the finest in the UK, has spent more than two decades travelling across Africa, India, South-East Asia, Europe and the United States documenting how people actually use wild plants — not just what the books say, but what survives in kitchens, hedgerows and grandmothers' remedies.

In Ash, he traces the tree from Yggdrasil to the kitchen table. You'll discover:

• How the ash was woven into rituals of birth, protection and healing across Britain, Ireland and Europe
• Why the tree was both a ward against witches and, in some tales, a place where they gathered
• How to pickle ash keys in the old style, and grind the dried seed into a spice dust for the kitchen
• The herbal uses of ash bark, leaf and seed, from an old Saxon cure for earache to treatments for gout, fever and rheumatism
• What the charms and rhymes reveal about how our ancestors actually watched the world around them

Much of what follows won't convince a modern mind — a shrew nailed alive into a trunk to cure a lame cow, a naked child passed through a split tree to heal a hernia. But look closer and a pattern emerges: magical belief hardening, over centuries, into medicine. The wound-wood that stopped King James II's nosebleed. The bark tannins now known to aid healing. The bitter decoction once used for fever, before quinine arrived from the New World. Superstition and pharmacology, tangled at the root, and not always easy to tell apart.

So what did our ancestors know that we've forgotten — and what did they simply wish were true?

Price

£4.95