Bough

In a field on the outskirts of the village, sitting snugly between the road to Saint Saveur de Pierrepont and the voie vert, dwell two elderly donkeys. Their rich chocolate-coloured coats absorb the light and their soft pale muzzles make them look as though they have dipped their noses in cream. They might look up at you as you amble past, but only for a moment, entirely occupied in their browsing. Before the team of reindeer in their coca-cola-commercial colours, St Nicolas’ mode of transport was a donkey called Gui: the French word for mistletoe. The Feast of Saint Nicolas was some weeks ago, flashing past on the 6th of December on neat little hooves. The donkeys graze on as it begins to hail, white spheres gathering in the ditches like miniature moons.

Mistletoe on the marais, dawn, November 2021

If the alluvial mud of the marais gives rise to mineral rich dairy, it also produces another, more mysterious crop, one whose presence only becomes apparent once the cattle have been taken in for winter. To see it, you must look up into the tree line. Black Poplars (Populus Nigra Fastigiata) grow in abundance here, their towering needle forms punctuating the landscape, often in careful parallel lines, drawing our eyes down long drives, otherwise bordering the Marais like sentinels.[1] They grow quickly, favour wetlands. They drop their leaves early in the winter, revealing within their branches great skeletal globes of mistletoe, like Christmas baubles, which interrupt their columnar selves and renegotiate the skyline. France is known for its mistletoe, exporting large quantities of it to the UK for Christmas every year, with Normandy one of the largest mistletoe producing regions in the country. Before the globalisation of the trade in this ambiguous plant, mistletoe sellers - marchands de gui - walked the countryside selling bunches of it, strapped to long poles carried over their shoulders. Pablo Picasso immortalised the figure in his painting of the same name. In it an etiolated male figure, in the muted blues of a coming storm, wraps long pale fingers around a spar laden with downcast bunches. Beside him, a small boy in a white tunic offers a sprig to someone outside of the frame. It is a gesture at once hopeful and fragile.

‘Marchand de Gui’, Pablo Picasso, 1902

In neighbouringBrittany mistletoe is known as La Herbe de la Croix, a remnant of the legend that the true cross was constructed from mistletoe wood. Its penance for its role in the passion it was downgraded to the status of a parasite. For while it is found in trees, it is not a tree in and of itself, and cannot survive alone. Instead, it sucks the living marrow from its hosts, slowly forgetting how to photosynthesise, turning from pale sage green, to golden chartreuse. It favours trees with soft bark – hawthorn, lime, apple - the better to insinuate its way in, a splinter of winter beneath the skin.[2]

Symptoms of mistletoe poisoning: blurred vision, diarrhoea, vomiting, nausea, seizures, hypertension, cardiac arrest. Household protection from witches and demons, purification of the soul. The ability to see and speak with the dead, who are gathering now as midwinter squats on its haunches.

Walking at dusk, the starlings sent up in clouds from the darkening earth and the cold set in, I notice mistletoe everywhere. Not just in the spires of poplars but hidden among hedgerows. Re-greening fruit trees which haven’t borne a crop in decades. At the boundary of the horse field where it cascades from an elderly apple tree, gilded with lichen. You can watch the horses through its green mesh and see their breath steam. The winter solstice is a week away and the landscape is shimmering on the cusp of the turning year. We are holding our breath. I cut a bough away from the bocage and we carry it home, not allowing it to touch the floor, our knives gilded only in imagination.[3] A porte bonheur. A good luck charm.[4] In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas uses mistletoe to travel to the underworld, accompanied by the Sibyl of Cumae, she who scrawled the future on oak leaves and let them scatter. In a corner of my kitchen it sprouts, miraculous, from an old oak beam. Life in death, suspended above my head as I write.

[1] It is black poplars which make up the structure of The Green Cathedral, an art installation in the Netherlands which uses the trees to recreate the floorplan of Notre Dame cathedral in Rheims. Now fully grown, as the poplars die away, beeches will take their place and the cathedral will regenerate itself.

The ‘Golden Bough’ of the Aenied, plucked by Aeneas from an oak tree, is widely interpreted as a bough of mature mistletoe. The image was later used by James George Frazer to title his influential comparative study of religion and mythology The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. The first edition bore a woodcut of mistletoe foliage, embossed in gold against a background of dark green leather and looks suitably druidical.

[2] By contrast oak has the ability to develop a chemical barrier beneath its bark which stops mistletoe from taking root. As such, mistletoe grown on oak is extremely rare. There are rumoured to be only fifteen such trees in all of France.

[3] The image of white draped druids harvesting mistletoe with golden knives originates with a single account, given by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History in a description of the ritual of oak and mistletoe.

[4] In most of medieval Europe, and in France to this day, mistletoe did not have an association with the tradition of snatched kisses (which give mistletoe its popular name of ‘Kiss and Go’). Instead it was considered a good luck charm, bestowing prosperity and long life. Mistletoe was hung in the three weeks running up to Christmas and remained there until the next year when it was burned. The ashes, collected and sequestered beneath a bed, were thought to protect one’s home from being struck by lightening.