YORKTON - Sit down with me…we have a nice hot cup of tea…don’t pay any attention to the noise at the window, it’s just the wind. Did I tell you the story of the jack-o-lantern? It’s quite a tale. A long, long time ago, an ocean away in Ireland, a sneaky man named Stingy Jack tricked the Devil into buying him a drink, and while his games may have worked once, they didn’t a second time. Jack went on his merry way, until one sad day when he died and arrived at the gates of Heaven. Word gets around, and God wasn’t having a character like Stingy Jack sneaking into Heaven, so he was banished from there. But the Devil didn’t forget how Stingy Jack made a fool out of him, so Stingy jack was banned from Hell as well. All he was given was a wee burning coal, and told that he would have to roam the earth forever, not belonging anywhere. So Jack carved a turnip into a wee lantern to hold his coal, and began his cold and lonely travels, never to find rest.
But a tradition was born. People in Ireland and Scotland liked the idea of having a wee glowing lantern in their windows to scare Jack away, and used turnips or potatoes for this purpose. When the idea arrived in North America, pumpkins were used instead. And so the “Jack-O-Lantern” was part of the Halloween tradition.
Do you have a mountain ash in your yard? Did you know that ancient cultures thought the mountain ash, or rowanberry, was very powerful. The Norse held it in high esteem because on one occasion, Thor was struggling in a swift river in the underworld. The rowan branches on shore reached towards the water, and Thor was able to grab a branch and pull himself to safety. This was important to the Norse, because Thor was the good-guy god who made the thunder roll and the lightning flash and was a protector for all, including sacred trees.
In Scotland the rowan tree was important protection for homes against fairies. These are not the North American, cartoon image fairies with glittering skirts and sparkling tiaras. These “faeries” were very private and did not care for human interference. If they were crossed, they let the villagers know that they were annoyed by making a field of crops fail or making someone feel ill. The rowan tree was believed to give protection from the faeries based on its outward appearance. Red berries: red was a color that protected one from magic. And the berries, small as they are, held the image of a star with five points, a pentagram, another thing that in ancient times meant protection.
Did you have poppies in your garden this summer? Let’s go back to ancient Greece and hear the myth of Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and the harvest. She was a kind goddess, and taught people how to grow crops. Maybe she and her beloved daughter Persephone worked in their gardens together! When bad-boy Hades came along from the underworld and kidnapped Persephone to be his girl, Demeter was so heart-broken that another god Morpheus, who must have been a gardener as well, gave her soothing mystical poppy-juice to help her calm down.
So many plants have stories and mysteries connected to them, dating back hundreds or thousands of years. Some may be fact, some may be fantasy…or are they? Whatever they may be, they are all interesting, and make us appreciate the history of the plants in our gardens.
The Yorkton and District Horticultural Society will be having their AGM, for members only, and then there will not be any meetings till March 2025. Details will follow. Till then, visit us at www.yorktonhort.ca. Thank you to our friends at YTW for their continuing great work.
More tea? Hopefully these tales of mystery didn’t make you uneasy. My goodness, it sounds windy out there tonight, doesn’t it… Happy Halloween!
