You will by now have thrown out the fading greenery that has decorated the house over the Christmas. The holly sprigs with the red berries, the bits of ivy, and, in some cases, the fraudulent mistletoe. The custom of using evergreen plants to brighten or give hope to houses at the winter solstice, it is said, long precedes Christianity in these parts. They symbolised, after all, in houses that were dark in a way that we can hardly comprehend, the continuity of life and the hope for the spring. In the Mediterranean, the plants would be bay, pines, evergreen oak, for example.
Customs differ in these climes as to when the greenery should go up and when it should come down. Twelfth Night or Little Christmas has long been the norm, but Richard Mabey in his Flora Britannica tells us that in some areas the Christmas greenery was kept until Candlemas Eve, and in some parts of England was ceremonially burned, and in others fed to cattle. As a charm, mark you. And Mabey says that there are places where the various rituals associated with Christmas greenery were observed locally until quite recently.
Odder still was a custom of the men of a church in Lancaster of carrying on their shoulders conifers about three feet tall on a Sunday near Christmas. (Did not the custom of the Christmas tree come from Germany with Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's consort?) And an even odder custom, according to Mabey, was attributed to the Isle of Man where holly and other greenery was left in place until Shrove Tuesday. For by then it was dry and gave a fierce heat, just right for cooking pancakes. Custom or codology? April fool?
Some of you will have been worrying about your plants during the freeze and the snow. A friend tells that in a professional horticultural magazine, a Scots nursery man has become so accustomed to frost killing off or damaging so much of his stock that he has decided, in hard winters, to blanket them over with a safe substance. He is buying a snow making machine. And right enough, as the snow melted, you will have found that many plants were kept warm or warmish, and any way safe, under the white envelope.
Flora Britannica is a marvellous anthology of knowledge. Worth £30.