Spindle

Overview

In October, when most of the hedgerow has gone to brown and bare, the spindle produces one of the most startling colour combinations in the British countryside: lobed, four-parted capsules of deep cerise pink, splitting open to reveal seeds of vivid orange against a scarlet aril. The effect is deliberate and dangerous in equal measure — bright enough to attract the birds that will disperse the seeds, toxic enough to harm anything larger. The wood that gives the tree its name is fine-grained, hard, and slow-burning: it was used for spindles, skewers, toothpicks, and the charcoal for artists. The plant that makes these useful things also makes these fatal ones.

Botanical Notes

A deciduous shrub or small tree to 6 metres, with smooth green stems that become grey-brown with age, and opposite, elliptical, finely toothed leaves that turn pink-red in autumn. Flowers small, greenish-white, four-petalled, in loose cymes from May to June. Fruit a distinctive four-lobed, deep pink capsule, 1–1.5cm, splitting to reveal seeds enclosed in a fleshy orange-red aril, from September to November. Found in hedgerows, scrub, chalk and limestone woodland edges throughout England and Wales; less common in Scotland and Ireland. Prefers calcareous soils. Contains cardiac glycosides (euonoside and evobioside) and alkaloids (evonine); also diterpenes. The seeds are the most concentrated part; the bark and leaves are also toxic.

Lore & History

The spindle appears in European folklore under various names that reflect its most conspicuous property in autumn: witch's thimble, louseberry — the ground-up seeds were used to kill lice and mange on livestock and, reportedly, on people, a use that required the careful judgement of someone who understood the difference between a dose that killed the parasites and a dose that moved on to the host. The wood was specifically valued for making spindles for spinning wool and flax — the hard, smooth grain allowed the spindle to rotate without catching fibres — and for the small wooden skewers used in cooking and medicine. That a tree so useful for domestic implements should be so thoroughly inedible at every part is a combination that made it memorable, and the folk names that accumulated around it tend toward the cautionary.

Warnings