Maypole Happiness Trees & Garlands

The last Friday in April is Arbor Day in the United States. (There are several other Arbor Day observances in other countries as well!) I knew I was going to do a May Day post on Arbor Day so I immediately thought of maypoles which were once made from trees. Arbor Day is a day to celebrate and plant trees and I was immediately reminded of an old project we did during covid lockdown to celebrate special trees. Everyone choose a tree that was special to them, in their yard, in a park or somewhere they went every day and decorated it with natural or compostable decorations. We called them happiness trees, in part because they brought joy to others during lockdown. As a part of that project we researched and looked at different sacred trees around the world and how people honor them. Some are especially old, some are thought to grant wishes– there are all sorts of reasons that people are drawn to trees.

So with happiness trees in the back of my mind I started researching the history of the maypole. It’s probably the first thing most people think of in relation to May Day, but I realized I didn’t actually know that much about it. Turns out that the pole with ribbons and children twirling that you are probably thinking of right now (as was I…) came about in the Victorian era as a throwback to the “golden era”. The ribbons first appeared in a play in 1836. The earliest written record on a maypole was a Chaucer poem in the 1600s. The tradition was possibly Roman in origin meant to celebrate the start of spring, but the details are hazy. Most accounts agree that maypoles used to be trees decorated with spring flowers though. They all were the center of the celebration with people dancing around them.

This then led me to the May bush, which is more traditional that the pole in parts of Ireland and Canada. It seems to be less a bush and more a flowering branch– often whitethorn or hawthorn that is similarly decorated with flowers and bits of cloth. These are always placed in the front of the house, which reminded me again of the happiness trees, bringing joy and prosperity to passers by.

All of this led me to the tradition of garlanding, which is a third iteration practiced in some parts of the UK. Here children decorate sticks with garlands and parade around town (rather than dancing around a central maypole) I was reminded of a sweet May Day book “Little Grey Rabbit’s May Day” in which the animals gather flowers and hold a May Day parade through the woods. With all of this floating around in my brain, we decided to make flower garlands from dead nettle and various other lawn weeds and bedeck a lovely dogwood tree at the corner of our yard by the street. It is a great climbing tree and perfectly positioned to bring joy to people walking down the street as well. We then took some garland and wrapped it around sticks for our own garlanding May Day parade! The kids were all drawn to them and did not require much encouragement to dance around and act silly.

Making a Weedy Flower Garland

You could do this with any flowers with a longish stem, but I like using using lawn weeds because we have a large supply and it’s dual purpose– it encourages the kids to weed! They are some of the earliest flowers available in our area as well. Deadnettles and dandelions in particular have nice long stems which is ideal for this project. Once you get the technique down its super simple and you can use it for all sorts of flowers.

Materials:

• flowers and/or weeds with longer stems

Method:

Take your first stem and hold it horizontally. put a second stem on top and right at the base of the flower in a vertical position.

Take the stem of the vertical piece and loop it back around the last flower and back over. You now have two horizontal stems.

Keep adding new vertical stems by looping them back around the previous flower and joining them to the horizontal stems. This locks the stems in place and allows you to keep adding until you reach your desired length. When you go want to stop tie off the end. (I use a dandelion stem, put you could also use string. )

You can now decorate a tree with your garland, or wrap shorter ones around sticks! Happy May Day!