The line of trees beside the road into Tenbury Wells are bare of leaves at the beginning of December. But on their spindly branches are huge clumps of mistletoe, weighing them down like muffs on the skinny arms of dowagers. Most of the country’s mistletoe grows in a small area of England – Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, the counties around the Malvern Hills – but no one is quite sure why; it may be the number of orchards (mistletoe grows well on apple trees) or the climate of cold winters and warm summers.
Pliny the Elder writes that the druids of Gaul held nothing more sacred than mistletoe
Or it may simply be that the birds who disperse the seeds are not big travellers: mistle thrushes tend to eat the berries on one branch and use another branch of the same tree as a latrine. (‘Mistal-tan’ means ‘dung twig’; the plant may have been sacred to the Celts, but the Anglo-Saxons, being Anglo-Saxon, were more interested in the fact that it was spread by bird droppings.) Tenbury Wells is in the middle of mistletoe country and, since the Victorian era, has been selling itself as the mistletoe capital of the UK.
My wife wouldn’t come with me to the Tenbury Mistletoe Festival, on the grounds that when we got married we could stop going to things that could feature on a list of ‘quirky date ideas’. But it is anyway not a place for romance. (Mistletoe and romance seem to coincide only in the abstract: Mills & Boon has more than 300 books with ‘mistletoe’ in the title – His Mistletoe Proposal, Miracle under the Mistletoe, Military Grade Mistletoe – but I am told that none of them actually involves mistletoe in the text, still less as a plot device.)
Mistletoe is strictly business here – or was until 2005, when the UK’s biggest wholesale mistletoe market moved from the centre of town to an industrial estate over the border in Herefordshire. Now the only remnant of the trade in the town is a small stall manned by Girl Guides and mistletoe-themed ironwork tracery around the big Tesco built on the site of the open-air market. ‘You should talk to Stan Yapp,’ a helpful lady tells me. ‘He’s Mr Mistletoe. When the Royal Mail had mistletoe on their stamps, he was the consultant. He’s dead now, though.’ But even if mistletoe is now as important to Tenbury’s economy as pirates are to Penzance, they still hold a mistletoe festival at the beginning of December every year.
Jonathan Briggs, one of its founders, is a mistletoe expert – when I mention that it doesn’t grow in my part of the country, he reels off a list of colonies that merit a visit within a couple of hours’ drive of my house – and his interest is in the plant’s unique botanical characteristics. ‘It flowers in February, which is a stupid time for pollination in evolutionary terms. It has berries in midwinter, which is a stupid time to ripen…’ Mistletoe berries contain a seed and a sticky mucous gel – the sticky white stuff which has led to its ancient association with fertility – which attaches the seed to the branch of a tree. From there it sends down taproots into the branch, and henceforth gets water and minerals – and, according to Briggs’s latest research, sugars – from the tree.
The only way to eradicate mistletoe is to cut off the branch, but it won’t harm the tree if kept in check. It grows slowly – by probably only a foot every five years. The big sellers at Tenbury market are the orchards which would be cutting it back anyway so they might as well be paid for what would otherwise be parasite management. There are always rumours of mistletoe scrumpers – I presume anything in an orchard can be scrumped, not just apples – but Briggs does not believe they exist. ‘Not since Tenbury stopped paying in cash, anyway.’
The Tenbury mistletoe festival culminates in the blessing of the mistletoe by druids. Pliny the Elder writes that the druids of Gaul held nothing more sacred than mistletoe, and they would cut it with a golden sickle to be caught in a white cloak before it could hit the ground. ‘If it touches the ground,’ says Suzanne Tumnus from the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, ‘its power would be dissipated into the earth. So we still make sure it never touches the ground. The coat hooks in cars are very good for transporting it.’
This is modern druidry, a nature-based spirituality with ‘no rule book’. The druids’ ceremony involves bringing together male and female mistletoe – like holly, only the latter has berries – and an invocation of the various meanings of mistletoe: not just Christmas and romance (‘But you must burn by 12th night sure/ Or time unwed you must endure’), but also the Norse myths of the god Balder being killed by a mistletoe dart because his mother omitted to sign mistletoe up to a no-harm pact (‘Go honour this most sacred twig/ Alas forgot by goddess Frigg’). The Norse elements at the Tenbury festival are new: ‘We wanted to go a bit more multi-faith, so that people didn’t feel left out. And the story of Balder [who is restored to life at the end of the world] gives us hope, which we all need at the moment.’
The ceremony has caused controversy only once, when an evangelical Christian from Droitwich interrupted to say that it was satanic (he was led away by security). It might not be Christian, but it is very much Christmas: feeding off pre-existing folk beliefs, like the sort of hemiparasite that it is.
Like many Christmas traditions, mistletoe was invented by Charles Dickens. A localised custom of hanging mistletoe was spread across the country by The Pickwick Papers and the railways. But it lost something, I think, when the symbolism was reduced to Mr Pickwick being allowed to kiss young ladies.
Tumnus doesn’t seem to mind – what mistletoe represents is much less of a concern than how it is represented: ‘It annoys us so much when pictures of mistletoe are botanically incorrect.’ Berries and leaves do not grow together – the berries are formed on the previous year’s growth – but that is how they appear on virtually every Christmas card or cake decoration or plastic sprig. And on the mistletoe-themed ironwork tracery outside the big Tesco in Tenbury Wells.
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