Rowan berry ink and the tree of protection

Red berries, no red ink

Rowan berries are red, so I assumed the ink would be red. It isn't. When you cook them down and add a few modifiers to shift the colour, you get a coral pink, a duller, darker pink, an olive green and a dark earthy brown, and no red at all.

What does the rowan tree mean?

Rowan is known as the tree of protection, and its old names are things like Witchwood and Quicken. People threaded the berries onto red cotton and wore them as necklaces or hung them by the door, and fishermen built rowan into their boats to keep them safe at sea. There's an old rhyme that starts "rowan tree and red thread".

At our first Tree to Ink workshop I read everyone a story over tea, from Lisa Schneidau's Woodland Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland. It's an old Irish tale about a hurling match between the fairy folk and the men of Ireland, played for Áine, a daughter of the king of the sea. The king of the sea brings rowan berries from the otherworld for the match, and only the players are allowed to eat them. Nobody else, mortal or fairy, may touch them. One gets dropped and grows into a tree, and the tree has to be guarded. In Lisa's telling a troll ends up taking over the guarding, the animals come to eat the berries and thrive and stay, and the troll does very well out of it too.

A tree we'd all walked past

The berries came from a rowan on the farm in Screveton where my studio is, near Bingham. Everyone at the workshop was a friend of mine from the group we go to there for home-educated children, so between us we'd walked that farm a million times. Once we'd made the ink, I walked everyone up to the tree.

I'd picked what felt like loads of berries, but the tree was still full and you couldn't tell where I'd taken them from. I wanted people to see that. You take a little from a tree that has plenty, and the rest is there for the birds and for next year.

What surprised people most was that the tree was there at all. They said they'd walked past it over and over and never really noticed it, or any of the individual trees. Spending an afternoon with one plant, with their hands in it, made them pay attention to what was actually around them, and I think everyone left feeling a bit more connected to the place.

Can you eat rowan berries?

Cooked, yes. The Woodland Trust says rowan berries are edible to humans when cooked. They're sour but high in vitamin C, and they make a tart jam. We were making ink rather than jam, but it's something people ask.

Four pages from one tree

Everyone had the same four colours, and everyone made something completely different.

One woman didn't know how to start, so I handed her a basket of natural things and she picked out a feather. She drew with it all afternoon and ended up with a beautiful dragonfly-looking thing, with colours dropped all over the page.

Someone else started with really careful little doodles in bamboo dip pen, lots of separate neat ones. By the end her page was a sopping wet mess, but a good one, with blobs of every colour on top of each other, and you could see the edges where the colours met and reacted with each other. Then she covered a small piece of paper in ink and stamped circles on it with a paper cup. The cup soaked up some of the ink, so she ended up with lighter patches in circle shapes.

Another woman drew little wispy leaves, then used the paper cup the other way round, stamping with ink to make a background. Hers came out mostly pink and green, and once it had dried she drew a little dragonfly and some flowers on top in charcoal.

Because all the colours came from the same berries, they all go together. Whatever you put next to what, it works, and nobody has to worry about choosing the wrong colour.

A little piece of protection

Everyone took their pieces home. I'd suggested they think of what they made as a little piece of protection, something for the hallway or a handbag, but I don't know where any of them ended up. If they went in the bin and it was just a fun afternoon, that's fine. But it would be lovely if they ended up somewhere nice.

Next time I want to make more of that part, and get people thinking about the meaning of whichever berry we're using and how to bring it into what they make.

If you'd like to try it

Pay attention to the plants growing around you, the individual ones. Be curious about what they are, what their histories are, and what they've meant to people. A hedge is always more than a hedge. We look at it and see one thing, but it's so many things, and we're surrounded by story without realising it.

If you'd like to make ink from one with me, there are three Tree to Ink mornings in November, 10am to 1pm, at the studio in Screveton. Book a place on Tree to Ink, or join the list on the studio page to hear about new dates two days before anyone else.

The second workshop used elderberries instead: purple berries, bottle green ink.