Gifts Recieved and The Folk-lore of Plants, by T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

For Christmas a dear friend of mine from Finland sent me some straw crafts with which I became immediately in love with. In his package  there were several snowflakes and two olkipukki, straw goats.

 

Made with the intent of being used as Christmas tree decorations, I'm thinking of dyeing the goats red and use them as representations of the Lord of the Woods whilst the snowflakes will be used as decorations on the wall behind the altar space. (Thank you Jarno for the lovely pieces!)

Other than this little update, I bring you yet another book and this one you can get for free at the Project Gutenberg . This website features thousands of titles that are copyright free and together with Sacred Texts and Cornell's University Witchcraft Collection is one my most used web resources for research of folk-lore and traditional witchcraft practices and beliefs. I hope they can serve you well too.

The Folk-lore of Plants is a slim volume that amounts to not much more than 170 pages and is already a bit dated (1889) however its filled with information, as the author says:

   Apart from botanical science, there is perhaps no subject of inquiry connected with plants of wider interest than that suggested by the study of folk-lore. This field of research has been largely worked of late years, and has obtained considerable popularity in this country, and on the Continent.
Much has already been written on the folk-lore of plants, a fact which has induced me to give, in the present volume, a brief systematic summary—with a few illustrations in each case—of the many branches into which the subject naturally subdivides itself. It is hoped, therefore, that this little work will serve as a useful handbook for those desirous of gaining some information, in a brief concise form, of the folk-lore which, in one form or another, has clustered round the vegetable kingdom.



There is one great flaw in this title: it makes you hungry for more. Nevermind its small amount of pages. The sheer wealth of information and the varied topics it covers just makes me cringe at the fact that there is an end to the book. I am, in truth, at a loss of words to describe how phenomenal it  is and how rejuvenated i felt after reading it. Its more then just an amalgamae of information and accounts, its inspirational.

Learn about the doctrine of signatures; plant worship and sacred plants; plants in witchcraft, demonology and faery lore as well as their cerimonial and transcendental use;  the place of plant in folk medicine and in the calendar and how they were used to affect the weather amongst other topics of interest.