Alternative Wheel: Other seasonal cycle stories

When this column started, it was all about exploring different ways of thinking about the wheel of the year, reflecting on aspects of the natural world to provide Pagans alternatives to the usual solar stories. It's still very much an alternative wheel, but there's a developing emphasis on what we can celebrate as the seasons turn. Faced with environmental crisis, and an uncertain future, celebration is a powerful soul restoring antidote that will help us all keep going, stay hopeful and dream up better ways of being.

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Celebrating the catkins

The standard issue wheel of the year for the British isles has us celebrating the first flowers at Imbolc, when the snowdrops emerge. This is a bit awkward, because tree flowers – specifically catkins – emerge in January and open. They are also manifestly at odds with the standard issue notion that trees spend the winter sleeping. They don’t. Once the leaves are down, trees get busy making buds ready for the new year, and may also be making their catkins, which have been sat there hard and closed for some time now.

The thing about leaf buds and catkins is that they are small and you probably won’t see them if all you do is look at trees out of windows. Especially not if you are in motion and the windows are in a car. To spot buds and catkins, you have to be within a matter of feet of the trees and looking at them closely. When nature is an abstract concept that you celebrate from the safety of your living room, this is the kind of thing that gets overlooked.

Catkins start out as little, tight things and gradually unfurl until they become loose, open and ready to move pollen about. Different trees produce different catkins – and not all trees produce catkins. Blackthorn, hawthorn and oak all have regular flowers later in the year. The photo I’ve taken shows hazel catkins near my home.

Catkins are actually the male part of the tree – easy to spot because they look like willies! (Anything longer than it is wide...) The female part of the tree can be very small and subtle. The male and female catkins are easiest to spot on alder which has dangly male catkins and round female flowers as well. More about that here - https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/visiting-woods/trees-woods-and-wildlife/british-trees/native-trees/alder/ For anyone interested in sexual polarity, trees are really worth a look. A single tree can have overtly male and female parts, some trees are gendered – holly trees are male or female. Some trees are androgynous.

 

The Woodland Trust has lots of information about tree identification here - https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/visiting-woods/trees-woods-and-wildlife/british-trees/how-to-identify-trees/

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Nimue Brown is the author of Druidry and Meditation, Druidry and the Ancestors. Pagan Dreaming, When a Pagan Prays and Spirituality without Structure. She also writes the graphic novel series Hopeless Maine, and other speculative fiction. OBOD trained, but a tad feral, she is particularly interested in Bardic Druidry and green living.

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