Plants
Alder
Trees
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Alder, a tree, is ruled by Mars in Culpeper's herbalism, hot, martial, and stimulating, a herb of heat and iron. The alder grows in the wet ground between water and land and seems to bleed, for its pale wood turns to blood-red where it is cut, and so it was held both uncanny and sacred; in Welsh myth it is the tree of Bran the Blessed, the giant guardian whose severed head kept watch over the land. Its water-proof timber, hardening under water, was driven as piles beneath bridges and whole cities, and it yielded red, brown, and green dyes for cloth. The bitter, astringent bark was used to stanch bleeding, to cool inflammation, and to bathe swellings. A tree of the threshold and of guardianship, sacred to Mars and to Bran.
Facts
Attributions
Ruling PlanetMars 1Tradition: Culpeper Traditional WorkingAlder timber hardens rather than rots underwater, and was traditionally driven as piles to found bridges and whole cities on wet or marshy ground; the wood also yielded red, brown and green dyes for cloth. 2 Ruling DeitySourced to the subject's own accountBran the Blessed: in Welsh myth the alder is the tree of Bran, the giant guardian-king whose severed, still-speaking head kept watch over the land after his death. 3Tradition: Welsh mythology TemperamentHot, martial, and stimulating, a herb of heat and iron 1 Traditional AilmentsBark used to stanch bleeding and cool inflammation 1 Origins
Botanical IdentificationAlnus, family Betulaceae, the birch family 4 Origin of the NameOld English alor, a Germanic tree-word. The d is intrusive, added in later English as in place-names, and no part of the original. 5 Origin RegionTemperate and boreal regions of the Northern Hemisphere, in wet ground between water and land 4 Meaning
ThemesThreshold and guardianship 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe alder's pale wood turns blood-red where it is cut, a trait that led the tree to be held both uncanny and sacred in Welsh tradition. 6Tradition: Welsh tradition Learn More
The Tree That Bleeds
The alder, Alnus glutinosa, is a water-loving tree of riverbanks, marshes and wet ground, and it carries a striking natural feature that shaped its lore: when the pale wood is cut it slowly turns a deep orange-red, as though the tree were bleeding, which gave it an uncanny and sometimes ominous reputation. Set against that darkness is a genuine practical virtue, alder wood, worthless in the dry, is almost imperishable underwater, so that it was the timber of choice for piles, sluices and foundations sunk in water, and the city of Venice is said to stand on alder.
Alder has a genuine and ecologically important botanical trait behind its pioneering reputation: its roots host colonies of Frankia bacteria in small nodules, fixing nitrogen from the air and enriching poor, waterlogged or newly exposed soil, much as legumes do, which is why alder is often among the first trees to colonise riverbanks, spoil heaps and other disturbed ground and why foresters still plant it deliberately today to improve soil ahead of other species. This real capacity to improve barren ground sits alongside, and perhaps quietly explains, the tree's old reputation as a plant of transformation and of the boundary between waste and fertile land.
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Namesake Of
The Alder sign of the modern Celtic tree calendar is named for the alder; the calendar itself is a twentieth-century construction popularised from Robert Graves, as Hutton documents.
Sources
1. The English Physitian: or an Astrologo-Physical Discourse of the Vulgar Herbs of this Nation
2. A Modern Herbal
Maud Grieve, Dover Publications, 1931A Modern Herbal, on the AlderView the Source 2. A Modern Herbal
Maud Grieve, Dover Publications, 1931A Modern Herbal, alder: the wood underwaterView the Source 3. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
Robert Graves, Faber and Faber, 1948The White Goddess, on Fearn, the alder, and Bran the BlessedView the Source 4. Plants of the World Online
5. The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition
6. A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology
James MacKillop, Oxford University Press, 1998on the alder (Fearn), Bran, and its bleeding woodView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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