Magical Botany W

         Welcome to the #AtoZChallenge ! 

My theme this year is the Botany of the Realms of Imagination, in which I share a selection of the magical plants of folklore, fairy tale, and fantasy.  You can find all my fellow A to Z bloggers on the Master List of participating blogs here.

        W is for Waqwaq tree, a strange and miraculous tree that grows all kinds of animals from its branches — but there’s a certain amount of disagreement about the details.  According to some versions it grows beautiful women, because that’s how the all-female population of the Islands of Waqwaq reproduces.  According to other reports the tree grows the heads of men, women, and monstrous animals, and they all scream all the time.  Then there’s the 1388 account that says the tree is covered with heads of women, birds, horses, ducks, monkeys, hares, foxes, and rams… but the reason for these fruits is that the tree eats the animals, and then their heads bloom from it like flowers!  But in any case, the Waqwaq tree and the land of Waqwaq serve as symbols of the very edges of the imagination in Arabic lore.  (For those

who like some of the non-magical scholarly background, it is likely that Persian tales of the Waqwaq tree influenced both the jinmenju tree of Japan, introduced at J, and the oracular Trees of the Sun and Moon encountered by Alexander the Great back at O.)

        The willow is well-known as a real-world mundane tree, but there are also a number of magical species in the willow family.  Old Man Willow of Middle-earth is an old and evil tree who makes all paths through the Old Forest turn to himself at its heart.  He then lulls trespassers to sleep so that he can engulf and imprison them within his huge, gnarled trunk.  Then there’s the Whomping Willow, the most famous specimen of which is grown on the grounds of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  This is a particularly violent tree whose arm-like limbs will attack anything within range, pummelling its victims with knotty branches writhing and

swinging like thick, heavy fists.  And finally, I have to include a gentler species, the pussy willow tree that grows real kittens, which I myself have recorded in a small relief block print.

        Woodland tweezers are another group of parallel plants described by Leo Lionni.  They grow in sociobotanical colonies in which the areas of growth may be determined by a mind which is composed of the rootstock of the tree beneath which these plants live.  (And keep in mind that Lionni recorded this before the discovery of mycorrhizal networks!)

        Finally, as I foreshadowed earlier, now that we’ve reached W it’s time to talk about world trees.  Like trees of life (see L) and often somewhat hybridized with them, these are a whole class of varied species that have occurred in cultures around the world.  The defining characteristic of a world tree is that it connects the heavens, the terrestrial world, and the underworld.  Often it holds up the heavens with its branches, and often it also serves as the axis mundi, which is the center or axis of the

world.  It represents order and harmony.  World trees support all kinds of life, but very frequently there are two particular creatures associated with them: a bird or celestial creature, often an eagle, living at the crown, and a dragon or serpent living down among the roots.  These motifs hint that some of our previous magical trees can also be considered world trees, including Fusang with suns in its branches, Golden Apple with a dragon at its base, Huluppu with a magic bird up top and a magic serpent in the roots, Jo Mu with its trunk forming a path between earth and heaven, and Kalpavriksha serving as an axis mundi on Mt Meru.  And even though we have only a few letters left in the alphabet, there are still a couple of world trees to come.

        The moral of W is that plant and botanical networks may have a lot more purpose and agency than the European Enlightenment gave them credit for.  Modern science with its discoveries about mycorrhizal networks is only just now catching up with ancient mythology in its understanding of the ways trees really do connect everything.  Gardening tip of the day: don’t make the plants angry!

        Do you have any willows in your neighborhood — and have you ever noticed any suspicious behavior from them?

[Pictures: Waq-waq, painting from Mughal India, early 17th century (Image from The Cleveland Museum of Art);

Waqwaq Tree, painting from Golconda, India, early 17th century (Image from The Met);

Old Man Willow, illustration by John Howe from The Hobbit, 1989 (Image from The One Ring);

Whomping Willow, illustration by Mary GrandPré from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 1999;

Pussy Willows, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2022 (now sold out);

Woodland Tweezers, illustrations from Parallel Botany by Leo Lionni, 1977 (Images from Ariel S. Winter on Flickr);

World Tree, steel drum bas relief by anonymous Haitian artist (Image from Etsy shop MetalArtofHaiti);

World Tree, clay sculpture from Nayarit, Mexico, ca. 300BCE-300CE (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

World Tree, pysanka motif from Ukraine, ca. 2009 (Image from Wikimedia Commons).]