Ne’er cast a clout til May be out

The morning dog walk around the back field revealed a new arrival that, for some, heralds the arrival of warmer weather. There’s a blurry phone photo of it next to this paragraph – the freshly-opened blossom of Hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna. Yesterday I was running a foraging course and spent a good deal of time poking at one of the semi-ancient hawthorns, waxing lyrical about the easily-acquired subtle flavours of the leaves and long ethnobotanical associations between this species and pre-Christian European civilisation. I also uttered, in a poor approximation of 16thC English:

Ne’er cast a clout ’til May be out

Hawthorn shrubs are unmissable in the British countryside. They usually make up anywhere from 40 to 70% of hedgerow species, and isolated Hawthorn trees are listed as Anglo-Saxon boundary markers. Indeed, the name ‘Haw’(thorn) comes from their word ‘haeg’ or ‘gehaeg’, which is given as being the name for either the enclosure near a dwelling or the trees that marked the boundary around it. It is a key species in the British landscape and one that is accessible for both rural and urban-dweller alike.

The phrase “ne’er cast a clout til May is out” (sometimes “Cast ne’er a clout til May is out“) probably arose sometime in 1500s, but may be a lot older. The ‘clout’ referred to is an old English word for clothing (clout = cloth, roughly), but the meaning of ‘May’ is under a little more debate. Some would take it to mean the month of May, i.e. the fifth month of the Gregorian (modern) calendar, but this is probably an over simplification.

Hawthorn is just one of the common names for Crataegus monogyna – others are ‘White-May‘, ‘Whitethorn‘, ‘Thorn-Bush‘, ‘Mother-Die‘ and at least a dozen more. The clusters of delicate white flowers are very often referred to as ‘May‘ or ‘May Flower‘ though, and this is most probably the root of the “May” in the phrase above. The flowers will show as tightly-closed green buds from March onwards, but will only open and show themselves fully when the last of the cold weather and overnight frosts have finished and the warmer weather of late spring and early summer has truly arrived. There are plenty of other species out there than share the word ‘May‘ somewhere in their common name, and all of these probably take their name from the name for the month – even if the origins of that name itself are under some dispute.  As the month of May is roughly when the warmer weather of early summer arrives for the northern hemisphere then there is probably some parallel thinking going on – if a flower first appears when the cold weather ends then you might as well name it for the month when that happens.

So the phrase “Ne’er cast a clout ’til May is out” would probably translate into standard modern English as: “Don’t put away your clothes until the flowers of the Hawthorn bush are out“.Apparently, that was today for our corner of Denbighshire. On Saturday night the overnight temperature was down at -2°C, last night it was +5°C and tonight it looks like a balmy +9°C will be with us until the dawn. This – coupled with 12+ hours of heavy rain – will hopefully end the dry, cold spring we have endured and finally allow the trees, shrubs and plants that are yet to show their first leaves to finally appear.

The first blossom of the Hawthorn flowers have appeared and we can finally cast our ‘clouts’. Which I’m taking to mean the heavier, thicker clothes of winter – please don’t expect any naked foraging walks from us this year.