Juniper, the tree of thresholds
There’s an old Lithuanian riddle I love.
What tree bears fruit in winter and summer?
Juniper. Its berries take two years to ripen, so on any one bush you’ll find this year’s green berries beside last year’s dark blue ones. Winter and summer, both at once.
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Going to the tree
I travelled to Sussex to film the juniper session of With the Trees. Juniper is rare in this country now, protected in many places and hard to find growing wild. My whole way of making this course has been to go to the tree and stand inside it, not talk about it from a distance. So when I found a pinetum with a protected juniper collection, I packed a bag and went.
The smell reaches you before you’re close. Sharp, a little sweet, unmistakable. Your chest opens. Your attention sharpens. And you feel very precisely where you are.
I’ve worked with juniper in the heat for years, but standing among those old bushes I understood something about it I hadn’t before. That’s in the session.
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Not I who strike
On Palm Sunday morning, Verbų rytas, whoever woke first in a Lithuanian house would go through it and strike the sleepers with a juniper branch, saying:
Ne aš plaku, verba plaka, duokite, dievai, sveikatą!
Not I who strike, the verba strikes. Give us health, gods.
The line I keep coming back to is the first one. Not I who strike. The person holding the branch isn’t the one acting. The tree is.
In the pirtis, that’s still how I hold juniper.
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What the old sources say
Juniper turns up at more moments of Lithuanian life than almost any other tree: at the beginning of things and at the end of them, in the house during thunder, in the pockets of people going about an ordinary day. There’s even something juniper insists on if you ever try to move one from the forest, and it’s one of my favourite details in the whole course.
I’ve gathered all of it, from the archives and from old Lithuanian plant sources, most of it never put into English before, into the juniper session of With the Trees.
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Walk with the seven trees
With the Trees is my online course in the Lithuanian pirtis tradition. There are seven trees and seven sessions, each one going deep into a tree’s medicine, the charms and songs once said to it, and how it was brought into the heat.
If you’d like to begin, Session 0 is free. In it I tell you where this knowledge comes from, why I made the course, and whether it’s for you.
See you in the trees.
Silvija
