Episode 2: Thistle
The second episode of Flowers & Folklore will be all about the thistle!
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Transcript
Hello, and welcome to Flowers and Folklore. I'm Sarah, a florist living in Glasgow in the UK. I run a business called Rook Botanics, which I started in 2020. I create flowers for funerals, weddings, I run lots of workshops, and I now host this podcast. I also write a newsletter called The Foibles of a Florist.
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You can find a link for it in the show notes. If you love flowers and folklore and odd floral facts, then you're in the right place. A quick note before we get started. I love reading and learning about flowers and the history and tales associated with them. There's so many different regional stories and so much lore,
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so what you may have heard or read may be different to what I talk about in the podcast. You're absolutely welcome to get in touch and let me know what you've heard. I'm always keen to learn more.
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If you stick around till the end of the show, then I'll share the best ways for you to get in touch. On with the show. Hello and welcome back to Flowers and Folklore. This is the second ever episode. Thank you so much for all of your kind comments about the Foxglove episode.
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It was so well received and just made me really happy, so thank you so much. I hadn't intended to leave such a long break between the two episodes, but it got really, really busy over the summer. Today we are going to be talking about thistles. These are absolutely iconic in Scotland and they're often requested for buttonholes,
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which we'll talk about later in the show. I love the juxtaposition of it being such a strong image in Scotland, but it's also considered a weed. So what really makes a weed? Is it just a plant in the wrong place? It's also interesting how they're viewed as prickly and uninviting,
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but they are actually used for protection and they have a lot of health benefits as well. A quick disclaimer before we get started. The term thistle covers a lot of plants and it's not always obvious which type of thistle the folklore and the myths are referring to.
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So I'm going to use thistle as a catch-all term during this episode, lest I know specifically what type of thistle the lore is about. Worldwide, there's about 200 types of thistles and I think there's about 14 different types in the UK, but I couldn't find a definitive answer. But if you do know, please let me know.
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There are three genera that thistle often refers to. I've had to double check the pronunciation for these, so if I get it wrong, I'm very sorry. The first one is cerceum, the second is carduus, and the third is onopodum. But thistle is sometimes used to refer to a wider range of prickly plants.
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Before we dive into the symbolism, lore and history of thistles, I'm going to give you five quick facts about the flower. Number one, the thistle is Scotland's national emblem, symbolising resilience and protection. Number two, the goldfinch is a whiz at extracting seeds from thistles and has a beak that is specifically adapted for the purpose.
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Number three, the dried flowers from a spear thistle can be used as a rennet substitute in cheese making. Number four, thistles are an important nectar source for pollinators. Number five, some thistles can grow up to two feet high. In the Victorian language of flowers, also known as floriography, the common thistle means austerity or harshness.
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I also saw misanthropy associated with a thistle a lot, but I'm fairly certain that this has actually been attributed to the fuller thistle, which is from the teasel plant and not actually a thistle. In Margaret Pixton's book which is one of my go-to sources for language of flowers.
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She attributes the Scottish thistle to mean retaliation, and we'll talk a little bit about that later. In Jessica Rue's book, Floriography, she suggests pairing rosemary with the thistle. indicate that you see through someone's facade or you compare the thistle with a pansy to show you're thinking of a friend going through a bitter separation which i
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think is very sweet but in practice pansies are so delicate and thin that i just think the spikes of a thistle would go straight through it there was an absolute plethora of information about the historical uses of thistles They were really useful as a food source but they also had a lot of practical uses
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and were used a lot in healing and finding cures for various nasty things. The English botanist, herbalist, physician and astrologer Nicholas Culpepper, who lived from 1616 to 1654, recorded a lot of uses for the thistle. These are all specific to the Centura Benedicta, which is also known as St Benedict's thistle, the Blessed Thistle, the Holy Thistle.
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So he claimed that the thistle could help with giddiness in the head, vertigo, jaundice. It could strengthen the attractive faculty in man. It could clarify the blood. It could also help with red faces and ringworm. It was also a cure for the plague. Sores, boils, itches, bites from a mad dog and venomous beasts.
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It could also strengthen the memory, cure deafness. It could be used for liver and digestion. And honestly, the list just seemed to go on and on. This is the reason that this thistle was given the name Blessed Thistle and the Holy Thistle, was because it was just believed to help with absolutely every ailment.
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And Nicholas Coolpepper wasn't the only person who thought that this was an incredible plant for healing. There's records of medieval monks and apothecaries using thistles as a cure for There was also a lot of records of the blessed thistle being used as a traditional tonic for women, as it was believed it would help with breastfeeding.
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There has been research in recent times to suggest that the blessed thistle does have anti-inflammatory, anti-tumour and anti-cancer properties. And whilst it seems unlikely that the thistle can actually cure everything under the sun, people do still use the thistle to get health benefits.
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If this is something you're interested in, I'd recommend reading A Modern Herbal by Alice Fowler. She covers the thistle in depth, and there's recipes and suggestions as to how you can get the benefits from thistles. Thistles don't always have the best reputation, and we can trace that back all the way to the Old Testament. In Genesis...
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Once Adam and Eve had been cast out of Eden, God told them that thorns and thistles would grow across the land, and this was part of their punishment. And so it's no wonder that the Victorians associated harshness and austerity with the thistle. There's also more thistle slander in the Book of Job. For those who don't know,
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the story of Job is where he faces hardship after hardship, but he remains devout to God. In chapter 31 verse 40, he foresees thistles growing in place of wheat. There's also references to thistles in the New Testament. In Matthew chapter 7 verse 16, ye shall know them by their fruits.
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Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? I find it quite interesting that flowers that could potentially harm humans often get a bad rap in folklore. So with bluebells and foxgloves, that are, you know, quite highly poisonous. We often see them associated with changelings and like evil fairies.
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And it just helps warn kids to stay away from the plant. And I think that's just the same with the thistle here, is that they are sharp, they are prickly, and they can harm you. And so then they just get bad PR. It's this prickliness, however, that made it become the emblem of Scotland.
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So how did the thistle become Scotland's national flower? Legend has it that there was a sneak nighttime attack on Stirling Castle. This was during the 15th century and the country was under invasion by the Danes. Because the army of Danes didn't want to be heard as they were approaching the castle, they removed their footwear.
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They thought this would give them the advantage of being silent. and being able to approach without alerting anyone in the castle. Little did they know that Scotland is covered in thistles. As they were trying to stealthily make their approach, they ended up crying out in surprise due to the pain of the thistles on their bare feet.
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So all of the Scottish soldiers sleeping inside Stirling Castle were alerted to this sneaky attack. As a result, the thistle became the national emblem for Scotland. According to Odessa Begay in The Language of Flowers, In 1470, King James III of Scotland ordered the thistle to be incorporated onto national coins.
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Later, the Order of Thistle, an order of knighthood, was created. Its exact origins have been widely debated with some sources believing it was created in 1540 by King James V of Scotland, and others believing it was established in 1687 by King James II of England. Regardless, the order consisted of 12 knights, all wearing badges, depicting the thistle.
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The thistle continues to be an icon of Scotland. Queen Elizabeth's coronation in 1952, the dress that was specifically made for the coronation had the thistle embroidered into the fabric, as well as the emblems representing the other three countries within the UK. The use of the thistle in Scotland is pretty extensive.
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Perhaps I feel it so much being in Glasgow and visiting Edinburgh quite a bit, because it is used to sell a lot of touristy stuff. So you can get tea towels, tins of shortbread, all that kind of stuff, just plastered with thistles. It's also associated with Burns Supper as well, and so many logos across Scotland use it.
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The National Trust for Scotland, their logo looks kind of like a thistle. There's a ton of football clubs, Scottish Rugby, Netball Scotland, they all use the thistle as their logo. And then when I was reading Fiona Stafford's book, The Secret Life of Flowers, which is an absolutely gorgeous book,
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she noted that the thistle is emblazoned on top of the Scotsman newspaper. It's on all of their digital articles too. And I found this quite interesting because it almost just kind of blended into the background for me. Like I've just become so accustomed to seeing the thistle everywhere that until someone points it out,
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it like easily just passes me by. Unsurprisingly, Robert Burns used the thistle quite a lot in his work. as a symbol of Scottish pride and resilience. But Burns is not the only one, and I just wanted to make a note of Hugh McDiarmid's poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. It was published in 1926,
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and it's a really long poem composed as a monologue, and I'm not going to read an excerpt, because it was written in Scots. that's really heavily influenced by his own dialect, so it would just sound horrific coming from me. But he uses the thistle as a way to kind of look at the complexity of Scottish stereotypes,
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and I would just definitely recommend it as a poem to go and read. Now I would like to go on a little bit of a tangent. For any of you that read my substack, The Voibles of a Florist, you'll have already heard my thoughts on this. But I just wanted to talk about thistles in weddings.
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So at the start of the episode, I talked about how a lot of things are called thistles, even when they're not. And one thing that immediately came to mind was when I'm making buttonholes, which are quite often requested to include thistles, It's not actually a thistle that you commonly use.
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It's usually a piece of orangium, which is also known as sea holly. It's kind of thistly, like it's prickly, but it's not the colour of thistles. Like when you think of a Scottish thistle, you think of purple. Whereas orangium comes in a bluey colour and a white. And this is maybe quite niche to florists.
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But I just don't know why. Like, I don't know why we don't use real thistles. I don't know if it's because they don't last out of water or whether... I don't know. And I checked with the wholesaler that I like to use. And when you search for thistle, the only thing that comes up is Oringium.
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And I can't think that it's to do with not being able to get hold of it because thistles grow everywhere. There's a patch of neglected ground that's not too far from my flat where I love to take Abby on our walks and she's a very sniffy dog so this patch of land is amazing
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for her because it's just full of weeds and thistles and the foxes must hang out there. So the point to this is that they grow easily in a lot of places. So if anyone has the answer as to why most florists use eryngium and not actual thistle, please let me know because it's really been bugging me.
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And it's just one of those things I've done without question. Like I think I must have made my first thistle buttonhole like aged 14 or 15 and I'm now in my 30s and never questioned why we're using eryngium and not thistles. Okay, let's move on from Scotland.
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One of my favourite bits that I found out about the thistle was something to do with May Birching. I'd never heard of May birching before, but it's something that happens in the northwest of England and in the Midlands, which is where I'm from. So between sunset and dawn,
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May birchers would go around to people's houses and secretly fix greenery to their front doors. And so each piece of greenery or branch or whatever was carefully chosen by the May birchers because it would rhyme with whatever they considered to be the outstanding character or quality of the person within the household.
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So some of the examples that I saw was pear, which would rhyme with fair, lime, which would rhyme with prime. I used the discovering of folklorum plants as one of the resources for this. I mean, I also looked at a couple of blogs and they all agreed that thistles was a negative thing to receive,
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but I wasn't able to find out what the rhyme with thistle was that made it negative. Anything that ended in thorn meant scorn, but I kept seeing nettles, thistles and weeds meant you were unpopular. But maybe they just didn't have rhymes to go with them.
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But I say we should make this popular again, because it sounds like fun. Also in Discovering the Folklore of Plants, which is by Margaret Baker... There was a reference to the thistle being used in France, Germany and Spain as a weather indicator, so you would nail it to your door, and then if the flower closed,
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it meant rain was expected soon. I found a few references to growing thistles as a way to fend off thieves, which could possibly just be similar to what happened with the legend of Stirling Castle. And rather than it having magical properties, it maybe just made it harder for intruders to get into your house.
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But there was also plenty of references of people wearing or carrying a piece of a thistle to keep them protected from evil. Unsurprisingly, I came across a lot of stories that talked about thistles possessing magical properties to heal. And I think this makes sense considering how many things that the thistle was claimed to be a cure for.
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Before researching this episode I had pretty neutral feelings about the thistle but honestly I'm pretty in love with it now after reading everything I did. I'm not sure whether this is going to get me kicked out of Scotland or not but I didn't know about the legend of the Dean stepping on the thistle as though trying
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to ambush Stirling Castle and I found that really nice. It kind of gave me a new respect for why the thistle was chosen as the emblem. It also really intrigued me as well that So many people really hate thistles and consider them a huge nuisance,
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and so I found it really fascinating that there was such a tie-in with royalty for this plant that's considered a weed. I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on the thistle, whether this episode has made you change your mind, or whether you really hate them or really love them. Please come and let me know.
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For a list of the sources that I used in this episode, please head over to my sub stack. There's a link in the show notes. Substack also allows you to leave comments on each episode, so if you do want to share your thoughts, that's the place to come and let me know.
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You can find me on Instagram, my handle is rookbotanics, that's R-O-O-K botanics. You can also send me an email on podcast at rookbotanics.com. If you're listening in Glasgow and you want to make a wreath this Christmas, then I've got a couple of tickets remaining for my wreath workshops that are running in November and December.
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If you're not based in Glasgow and would like to learn flower arranging from me, then I've recently published an e-book called Flower Arranging at Home and you can find more info about that on my website, which is www.brookbotanics.com. For a list of the sources that I used for this episode, please head over to my Substack.
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There's a link in the show notes. Substack allows you to leave comments on each episode as well. So if you have any thoughts or feedback, please let me know. Unless you've only got horrible things to say, then, you know, you can just scroll past. It would be really great if you could share this episode with a friend,
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subscribe to the show or leave me a five star review. Alternatively you can do none of those things and that's totally fine. I'm just so pleased that you're here. Thanks for tuning in and I'll see you next month.
