From a Midsummer Night's Dream to Violet Marmalade
via Faerie Flowers, Mystic Ungulents, MFK Fisher & Roman Emperors
Welcome gentle reader,
It’s wonderful to have you back. Today we can enjoy the light as we celebrate a sunny Summer Solstice. Have you any rituals for the Solstice or Midsummer? I always enjoy reading a Midsummer Night’s Dream, my second favourite Shakespeare play. I love so much about the play but I think I enjoy the fairies the most, they are capricious and mischievous but not downright malicious. They are the fairies I think of when someone mentions the term.
They are magical, bewitching and enchanting but also powerful and very happy to use humans for revenge and entertainment without any care for what might befall them in the end. Titania, Oberon and particularly Puck reinforced my childhood beliefs, enhanced by reading British folk tales, that were you ever to come into contact with them you must take care: these were not beings to be disrespected and definitely not benevolent unless it suits their interests. I feel the need to bring out a brilliant Terry Pratchett quote from Lords and Ladies:
“Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.”
However we can appreciate the loveliness of the fae in their natural habitat of those magical woods which Shakespeare created with his words. I think that those fantasy scenes that are conjured of Titania slumbering in a floral bower, the beauty of the Fairy Queen reflected back by the beautiful flowers are particularly lovely:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.
(Oberon, Act 2 Scene 1)
Alongside those books of folktales I mentioned I also discovered a different kind of fairy, the flower fairies as drawn by Cicely Mary Barker. I loved the gorgeous drawings and I had some particularly precious paper dress up dolls of some of my favourites alongside a set of fairytale princesses. So it’s probably safe to say that I was confused slightly as a child but I think I resolved it by considering the flower fairies to be a separate type of being who I desperately wanted to meet .
Flowers and fairies have a lot of connections. There is significant faerie plant lore and I’d need a lot more of your attention than I could considerately request to go through them all so I have selected some which I think you’ll enjoy. Some of these plants are considered both special to the fat and grant mortals protection from faerie mischief which is interesting in itself.
Shall we start with the primrose, the ‘first rose’ that blooms in Spring? These are beautiful flowers and said to belong to the fae and shouldn’t be picked by children. There is even a story collected I think by Katharine Briggs of a widowed farmer who goes on a journey to save his daughter who was abducted by faeries because she was found picking primroses. He eventually has to venture into a faerie hill having done various impossible things to win her back. They can also protect again faeries too and the petals can be scattered on the threshold on May Eve to prevent faeries entering a dwelling. They were sometimes even tied to tow cow’s tales to protect them.
Bluebells are also an ideal faerie flower and are said to provide a home for many small fae which my be why it is said that if you enter a wood to pick them that you will be pixy led through the trees until someone finds you and brings you out. It was even suggested that this only happens to adults and a child who does the same may never return at all.
Foxgloves are a perfect faerie flower, believed by some to have been gifted to foxes so they could use the soft petals to hide their noise when stealing livestock and eggs. They re another plant which are believed to provide a dwelling to faeries as well as dresses and other items of apparel. It is said that when a foxglove bows its head it means a faerie is passing. They are also a location for faerie dances. As with other plants with such a strong connection to the fae, they also offered significant protection. A glove can break a fairy spell and a child in a faerie trance could be brought back with the juice of leaves of the plant or the plant could be placed under the bed of the sufferer (much safer option as foxgloves are poisonous). Placing leaves on a suspected changeling child was also believed to reveal the truth about its origins.
Hawthorn and Blackthorn in the form of individual bushes/trees are known to be under the protection of the faeries and it is suggested that even broken branches of their different woods should not be used without permission otherwise bad luck will definitely follow. You’re safe if they are in hedgerows though although a healthy respect should still be offered.
Our final flower is the Hollyhock which was know for providing petals for fairy clothing and the seed pods were apparently known as fairy cheese as they resembled roughly a cheese wheel. However I’m really interested because there is a 17th century remedy made from holly hocks which is supposed to enable mortals to speak to a particular fae known as Elaby Gathon via a looking glass. The recipe reads:
“For an unguent to anoint under the eyelids, and upon the eyelids, evening and morning: take a pint of sallet-oyle, and put it into a vialle-glass; but first wash it with rose-water and marygold water; the flower [to] be gathered towards the east. Wash it till the oyle come white; then put thereto the budds of holyhocke, the flowers of marygold, the flowers or tops of wild thime, the budds of young hazel: and the thime must be gathered near the side of a hill where Fayries use to be; and “take” the grasse of a fayrie throne [i.e., ring] there. All these put into the oyle, into the glasse: and set it to dissolve three dayes in the sunne, and then keep it for thy use, it supra”.
An incantation must be said when it is used in order to “meekly and mildly to resolve him truly in all manner of question; and to be obedient to all his (the conjuror’s) commands under pain of Damnation”
I don’t think I’d risk it and not just because marigolds are toxic and hollyhocks can cause dermatitis.
I can’t help but keep the flower theme going with our historic recipe. This is from the book I mentioned last time, The Art of Cookery by CFLeyel, the noted herbalist and Olga Hartley in 1921 in the Flower Dishes chapter. I am fascinated with floral recipes and have big plans to buy Flowers as Food by Florence White as well as tracking down as many books as possible mentioned in a wonderful article about the origins of a violet salad mentioned by MFK Fisher in a wonderful article from the Oxford Symposium of Food in 1984 by Claire Clifton known as the ‘Search for the Blue Violet Salad’. If anyone shares my love for floral food please let me know. I’d feel very alone in my love if it wasn’t for the increased popularity of stuffed, fried courgette blossoms.
One last food and flower reference: the image at the top of the letter is of the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus who once had a dinner party and released so many flower petals from the ceiling that the diners were completely covered and some of them did not emerge from the party alive. Sorry, but it’s a story I felt the need to share.
So to sign off this week I will allow Puck to have the final word with my favourite lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.”
I love A Midsummer Night’s Dream and flower fairies! I have a lot of the figurines that are based on Cicely Mary Barker’s artwork. I haven’t tried eating flowers in salads, but I do drink a white rose tea, and I want to make some sugar cookies with edible flowers pressed on top.