Alder

Overview

Cut alder and the wood turns orange-red almost immediately, as if the tree is bleeding. It dries to a pale, workable timber, but that initial wound-colour has made it remarkable to everyone who has noticed it — which is everyone who has used it, for thousands of years. It grows at the margins of rivers and lakes, in the wet carr woodland of fens, its roots binding the bank, its canopy sheltering the water. It fixes nitrogen in its root nodules, which is unusual for a tree, and it does not rot when submerged — a property that made it the timber of choice for foundations, pilings, and the wooden posts on which Venice was built.

Botanical Notes

A deciduous tree to 25 metres, with a straight trunk, dark, deeply fissured bark, and sticky young leaves that give the species its name (*glutinosa* — glue). Leaves rounded to obovate, dark glossy green, with a notched or flat apex. Male catkins pendant, 2–5cm, reddish-purple, appearing from February before the leaves. Female catkins ovoid, developing into small, woody, cone-like fruits that persist through winter. Found throughout Europe in wet, waterlogged habitats: riverbanks, lakesides, fens, and alder carr. One of the few trees to fix atmospheric nitrogen through root-nodule associations with the actinomycete *Frankia alni*, which is why it can colonise poor, wet soils and why it improves soil quality wherever it grows.

Lore & History

In Irish mythology the first man was made from alder — *fearn*, the third letter of the Ogham alphabet — while the first woman was made from rowan. Bran the Blessed, the giant god-king of the Welsh Mabinogion, carried a branch of alder as his emblem; the alder was associated with oracular knowledge and with the Otherworld, the land of the dead that lies beyond the water. The tree bleeds when cut; it does not rot in water; it grows at the boundary between land and water — three properties that placed it unmistakably at the edge of things, in the tradition that reads landscapes for meaning. The bark was used to produce a black dye; the catkins gave a green dye; the wood was burned to make a high-quality charcoal for metalworking. The clog-maker and the charcoal-burner used it; so did the one who asked the tree questions at midnight.

Warnings