Bran, War and the Whistling Wood

In Celtic tradition the alder is linked to Bran the Blessed, the giant king of the Welsh tales, and it carried associations of war, prophecy and the crossing of water; its wood made whistles and pipes, and the letter Fearn of the ogham is the alder. Cutting an alder was in places thought unlucky, for its bleeding wood suggested it might feel the axe, and it was a tree of the fairy and the fringe of the human world. A tree of the watery margin whose wood bleeds when cut yet lasts forever beneath the flood, the alder gathers meanings of war and protection, of prophecy and of the uneasy boundary between the human world and the wild.

Alder bark and young shoots were also a valued source of dye in traditional textile work: boiled with different mordants the tree could yield green, brown or, combined with iron, a deep black dye, and Highland Scottish tradition used alder dye in the making of tartan and everyday cloth, a practical craft use resting on the same colour-changing sap that gave the tree its uncanny bleeding reputation in the first place. The three colours obtainable from a single tree made alder an unusually versatile dye source for a household that could not easily obtain imported dyestuffs, one more case of a tree's plain usefulness lying not far beneath its uncanny reputation.