Seed Gathering Sunday

[StuartDH]

A couple of hundred years ago the average Briton had limited access to some of the treats that nature's pantry could provide, but it must have been great to wait with anticipation for the seasons to change.

Honey, strawberries, sloes, blackberries, hazelnuts etc, together with all the various sites, smells and sounds that came and went throughout the year, must have left them with something to look forward to almost on a week-by-week basis.

Nowadays, you can buy everything in the supermarket almost all year round and many people's big events boil down to just their summer holiday and Christmas.

As a result I think it's great that the tree council are promoting things like 'Seed Gathering Sunday'.

http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk/ne...1054&Itemid=43

This is the sort of thing that would have been a common tradition in almost every village in the British Isles in the past, but has since been lost out to the 50/60 hour week.

Normally, I'm not too keen on 'dedicated' days and weeks as most of them seem to have been hijacked by the media men as yet another way to get us to eat more curry or buy life insurance.

So in an attempt to get some of these great traditions (and new ones) back into the public eye and give people a good excuse to go outdoors, we're going to build a new part of the site that's dedicated to the some of the lost events of the wildlife calendar.

Stay tuned for more info soon.

[Jacky]

I think it's a fantastic idea to recapture what we are in serious danger of losing. I am currently collecting wildflower seeds to populate part of my garden next year and also for the local zoo, who are designing several wildlife habitats. How many people now knwo that the idea of beuaty queens come from the May Queen? Or that Santa was the personification of the Holly King before the Coco Cola ad turned him red from green? We need our traditions and our heritage back.

[galanthus]

...and of course those very same May day and Xmas occasions you refer to Jacky came from pagan celebrations of the cycle of seasons and life of flora and fauna. Timeless stuff and far more important to the earth than fizzy drinks and trick/treat money-making scams. Lots of old lore books refer to times of year to tend and gather seeds and fruit, facinating.

[Cotham Marble]

Now upgraded to seed gathering month:

New Page 1

I would suggest caution in trying to link modern day activity to what may or may not have happened in the past. Access to resources from the medieval period onward was frequently strictly regulated and the notion of a peasantry that could wend its way into the woods and fields and enjoy nature's bounty unfettered may have been pretty much a dream for most of our ancestors. Likewise ideas of a continuity of pagan practice need to be tested against the mulitplicy of religious, social and ecological changes that have often been brutal in their effect of retained beliefs.

CM

[Jacky]

Thanks but I as a pagan I knew that May Day and Yule are pagan celebrations but wanted to limit my comments as a lot of people who chose to celebrate May Day and watch morris men aren't pagan, they do it for the love of tradition and I have no problem with that. People did used to have to pick what they could from the wild as a way of subsisting, rather than as an extra pleasure that we use it for now. Sure, time was limited for the medieval serf, but (for example) children had their uses when too young to go to work.