(Sorbus acuparia) Fruit: X - not recommended for internal use
Folk Names: Delight of the Eye, Mountain Ash, Quickbane, Ran Tree, Roden-Quicken, Roden-Quicken-Royan, Roynetree, Sorb Apple, Thor's Helper, Whitty, Wicken-Tree, Wiggin, Wiggy, Wilky, Wild Ash, Witchbane, Witchen, Witchwood
Gender: Masculine
Planet: Sun
Element: Fire
Deity: Thor
Powers: Psychic Powers, Healing, Power, Success, Protection
Magical Uses: Rowan wood, carried, increases psychic power, and the branches are often used in fashioning dowsing rods and magickal wands.
Add the leaves and berries to divination incenses as well as those designed to increase psychic powers.
Carrying rowan berries (or the bark) aids in recuperation, and they are added to healing and health sachets and mixtures, as well as all power, success, and luck sachets.
For centuries rowan has been used for portective purposes in Europe. Two twigs tied together with red thread to make a cross is an ago-old protectiveamulet.
Cornish peasants carried these in their pockets, and Scottish Highlanders inserted them into the lining of their clothing.
Walking sticks made of rowan wood are excellent tools for the person who roams woods and fields by night. Rowan carried on board ship will prevent its involvement in storms; kept in the house it guards against lightning strikes, and when planted on a grave Rowan keeps the deceased one from haunting the place.
The rowan tree planted near the house protects it and its occupants and those rowans growing near stone circles are the most potent.
[From Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs]
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In comparison to the true Ash, it is but a small tree, rarely more than 30 feet high. It belongs to the order Rosacece and is distinguished from its immediate relations the Pear, Crab Apple, White Beam and Wild Service Tree by its regularly pinnate, Ashlike leaves. It is generally distributed over the country in its wild state, but is also much cultivated as an ornamental tree.
All parts of the tree are astringent and may be used in tanning and dyeing black. When cut, the Mountain Ash yields poles and hoops for barrels.
Both the bark and fruit have medicinal properties.
The fruit is rather globose, with teeth at the apex and two to three seeded cells. They are used medicinally in either the fresh or the dried state.
---Constituents---The fruit contains tartaric acid before, citric and malic acids after ripening; two sugars, sorbin and sorbit, the latter after fermentation; parasorbic acid, which is aromatic and is converted into isomeric sorbic acid by heating under pressure with potassa; bitter, acrid and colouring matters. A crystalline saccharine principle, Sorbitol, which does not undergo the vinous fermentation, has also been found in the fruit.
The seeds contain 22 per cent. of fixed oil. It has been claimed that these seeds killed a child, apparently by prussic acid poisoning.
The bark has a soft, spongy, yellowishgrey outer layer and an inner thicker portion, with many layers of a light brown colour. It has a bitterish taste, but is odourless.
It is astringent and also yields amygdalin.
---Medicinal Action and Uses---In herbal medicine, a decoction of the bark is given for diarrhoea and used as a vaginal injection in leucorrhoea, etc.
The ripe berries furnish an acidulous and astringent gargle for sore throats and inflamed tonsils. For their anti-scorbutic properties, they have been used in scurvy. The astringent infusion is used as a remedy in haemorrhoids and strangury.
The fruit is a favourite food of birds. A delicious jelly is made from the berries, which is excellent with cold game or wild fowl, and a wholesome kind of perry or cider can also be made from them.
In Northern Europe they are dried for flour, and when fermented yield a strong spirit. The Welsh used to brew an ale from the berries, the secret of which is now lost .
[From: http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/a/ashmo076.html ]
Botany of the Rowan
Rowans are mostly small deciduous trees 10-20 m tall, though a few are shrubs. The leaves are arranged alternately, and are pinnate, with (7-)11-35 leaflets; a terminal leaflet is always present. The flowers are borne in dense corymbs; each flower is creamy white, and 5-10 mm across with five petals. The fruit is a small pome 4-8 mm diameter, bright orange or red in most species, but pink, yellow or white in some Asian species. The fruit are soft and juicy, which makes them a very good food for birds, particularly waxwings and thrushes, which then distribute the rowan seeds in their droppings.[1] Due to their small size the fruits are often referred to as berries, but a berry is a simple fruit produced from a single ovary, whereas a pome is an accessory fruit.
Rowan is used as a food plant by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species; see Lepidoptera that feed on Sorbus.
Mature European Rowan Tree: The best-known species is the European Rowan Sorbus aucuparia, a small tree typically 4-12 m tall growing in a variety of habitats throughout northern Europe and in mountains in southern Europe and southwest Asia. Its berries are a favourite food for many birds and are a traditional wild-collected food in Britain and Scandinavia. It is one of the hardiest European trees, occurring to 71° north in Vardø in Arctic Norway, and has also become widely naturalised in northern North America.
North American native rowans include the American mountain-ash Sorbus americana and Showy mountain-ash Sorbus decora in the east and Sitka mountain-ash Sorbus sitchensis in the west.
For other Sorbus species, see whitebeam (Sorbus subgenus Aria) and the genus article Sorbus. Numerous hybrids, mostly behaving as true species reproducing by apomixis, occur between rowans and whitebeams; these are variably intermediate between their parents but generally more resemble whitebeams and are usually grouped with them
[From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan ]
Rowan Berries as Food:
Rowan cultivars with superior fruit for human food use are available but not common; mostly the fruits are gathered from wild trees growing on public lands.
Rowan berries contain sorbic acid, an acid that takes its name from the Latin name of the genus Sorbus. Raw berries also contain parasorbic acid (about 0.4%-0.7% in the European rowan[6]), which causes indigestion and can lead to kidney damage, but heat treatment (cooking, heat-drying etc.) and, to a lesser extent, freezing, neutralises it, by changing it to the benign sorbic acid. Luckily, they are also usually too astringent to be palatable when raw. Collecting them after first frost (or putting in the freezer) cuts down on the bitter taste as well.
Mythology and Folklore:
The European rowan (S. aucuparia) has a long tradition in European mythology and folklore. It was thought to be a magical tree and protection against malevolent beings. It was said in England that this was the tree on which the Devil hanged his mother.
The density of the rowan wood makes it very usable for walking sticks and magician's staves. This is why druid staffs, for example, have traditionally been made out of rowan wood, and its branches were often used in dowsing rods and magic wands. Rowan was carried on vessels to avoid storms, kept in houses to guard against lightning, and even planted on graves to keep the deceased from haunting. It was also used to protect one from witches. Often birds' droppings contain rowan seeds, and if such droppings land in a fork or hole where old leaves have accumulated on a larger tree, such as an oak or a maple, they may result in a rowan growing as an epiphyte on the larger tree. Such a rowan is called a "flying rowan" and was thought of as especially potent against witches and their magic, and as a counter-charm against sorcery. Rowan's alleged protection against enchantment made it perfect to be used in making rune staves (Murray, p. 26), for metal divining, and to protect cattle from harm by attaching sprigs to their sheds. Leaves and berries were added to divination incense for better scrying.
In Newfoundland, popular folklore maintains that a heavy crop of berries means a hard or difficult winter. Similarly, in Finland and Sweden, the number of berries on the trees was used as a predictor of the snow cover during winter. This is now considered mere superstition (however one can hear old men talk of it), as fruit production is related to weather conditions the previous summer, with warm, dry summers increasing the amount of stored sugars available for flower and fruit production; it has no predictive relationship to the weather of the next winter. Contrary to the above, in Maalahti, Finland the opposite was thought. If there rowan flowers were plentiful then the rye harvest would also be plentiful. Similarly, if the rowan flowered twice in a year there would be many potatoes and many weddings that autumn. And in Sipoo people are noted as having said that winter began first when the waxwings (Bombycilla garrulus) had eaten the last of the rowan berries.
In Sweden it was also thought that if the rowan trees grew pale and lost color, the fall and winter would bring much illness.
[From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan ]
Mystical Associations of the Rowan:
To the Celts, the rowan was a symbol of the hidden mysteries of nature and the quickening of the life force. A sacred and magical tree, rowan offered many kinds of protection against enchantment and illness, and it was considered unlucky to fell one. The rowan was associated with visions and portents, with vitality and reawakening, and with spiritual strength. The rowan is intimately associated with snakes and dragons and the tree was believed to protect earth energies in ley lines and standing stones. The Druids often planted rowans at places of worship and they used smoke from rowan fires to call up spirit guides and warriors. Rowan smoke was also traditionally used to foretell the future of lovers.
In Wales, rowan was planted in churchyards to protect the spirits of the dead, while carrying two rowan twigs tied into a cross with red ribbon was said to offer protection from the dead at Samhain.
Boughs of rowan are still hung over stables and dairies in many parts of Britain to protect livestock from barrenness and harm. Rowan twigs, known as witch wands, are used for metal divining.
The rowan has a special place in many mythologies. In Scandinavian and Irish myth, the first woman was born from a rowan tree. In Greek legend, the rowan itself was born from the blood and feathers of an eagle, which fell to the ground as the divine bird battled with demons to save the cup from which the gods drank nectar. The rowan's red berries and feathery leaves are a mark of the sacred eagle's spirit. Yule legends say that a star shone on the top of the rowan tree to herald the return of light and life to the world of darkness, just as a star was later said to have shone over the stable when Christ was born, to show where he was.
In the Irish 'Romance of Fraoth,' the berries of the magical rowan were guarded by a dragon and contained the nourishment of nine meals. They could heal the wounded and add a year to a person's life. The Quickening Tree of Dubhous, another magical roway, had marvelous berries that could transform a one-hundred-year-old man into a youthful thirty-year-old.
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