Diod griafol, pihlaka vein & rowan vodka

Rowan berries have been used to make various drinks as demonstrated in yesterday's post.

A traditional drink in Wales was called diod griafol, literally 'rowan drink' and it was made, so I have read, by steeping rowan berries in water and allowing them to ferment.  I have tried this several times and have yet to produce anything drinkable, though John Evelyn, the famous diarist and arborist, said it was "an incomparable drink".  (Apparently Evelyn was overly fond of describing things as 'incomparable' so one should not, perhaps put to much store by that.

In the Collections historical & archaeological relating to Montgomeryshire, and its borders (1870) it quotes from a North Wales source in the entry for Criavol "Mountain-ash berries and burnt sugar have been added in brewing ale, to imitate porter. Diod-griavol is still used by the country people as a medicinal beverage."

(One Welsh word for mountain ash/rowan is criafol.  The f is sounded like an English v and, in diod griafol the initial c is mutated to g.  In English mutation of letters only seems to occur in dialect, e.g. I gorra go instead of I've got to go.  But I digress).

In Estonia their pihlaka vein, rowan wine, is made in the same way as cider, by crushing and pressing rowan berries and fermenting the juice.  There is a film illustrating this here.  However, to get it to 17 percent proof, I wonder if they fortify it, perhaps with vodka.

It seems that this drink is a particular speciality in Estonia (one woman said she liked its rather bitter taste) and this is illustrated by the picture at the top of this post and the one below, both from Estonian sources.

Despite some research, I have failed to find an equivalent in the neighbouring Baltic countries, though rowan vodka, made by soaking the fruit in the spirit, is quite well-known in places like Poland.

Rosie Macdonald in The Field gave this information on rowan vodka:

"Rowan berries are very astringent. Before ripening they contain tartaric acid; after ripening they have citric and malic acids, the sugar sorbin and the saccharine principle sorbitol.  Ideally the berries are picked when fully ripe and after the first frost, but quite often if you wait until then the birds get there first. Therefore pick the berries when fully ripe but before the first frost. Rinse them carefully, remove the stems and put them in the freezer for a couple of weeks. The frost makes the berries milder and sweeter.  Put 800ml berries in a glass jar with a tight-fitting lid. Cover the berries with vodka and allow to steep for one to four weeks in the dark at room temperature. Shake lightly and taste it occasionally. Strain and filter your infusion into a glass bottle. Store for a minimum of two months in a dark place at room temperature. Continue to store the vodka in this way, even during use, as heat and direct sunlight can cause unwanted change to its colour and aroma."

Estonian rowan wine

I have come across an Estonian label for rowan wine from the 1970s.

The leaf and fruit are clearly rowan, Sorbus aucuparia, and 'Pihlaka-vein' translates as 'rowan wine', while the Russian at the bottom of the label means, I think, the same thing.  'Valga veini-tehas' is the Valga winery (Valga is a town in south eastern Estonia).  The 17 per cent must be the proof level and is roughly the same as many fortified wines like sherry.  The 0,5 L (bottom right) denotes that the label was on a half litre bottle.

I wonder if this is the same, or similar, to the 'beer', diod griafol, of the Welsh brewed from rowan berries (more of this on some future occasion).

The label is, or was, being offered for sale.  For details, follow this link.

Sorbus orientalis?

Sorbus orientalis Schönb.-Tem.is a taxon that somewhat baffles me.  Judging by a pressed example from the Herbarium Berolinese at the Botanic Garden and Museum of the University of Berlin, the tree is very much like the wild service (Sorbus torminalis) with rather broadly lobed leaves (see this link.)  I am sure it is the same as Sorbus torminalis var. orientalis (Schönb.-Tem.) Gabrieljan as described in 'The genus Sorbus L. in Turkey' by E. T. Gabrieljan (1961).

This Berlin example comes from the mountains of northern Iran to the south of the Caspian Sea, but a similar from has been described by De Langhe et al. (1973) from Lorraine: On observe très rarement en Lorraine des individus dont les feuilles ont des lobes courts et arrondis au sommet. (Very rarely one sees in Lorraine individuals in which the leaves have short lobes rounded at the end.)

I once found a tree with leaves like the Iranian and French forms near Mayshaves in Kent, UK.  Not only were the leaves of a distinctive shape, they were of a thinner texture than normal S. torminalis leaves and dried to a paler shade of brown (see below).

I was also given, by Mary Briggs, a herbarium sheet example of a wild service in Harrow Road near Kensal Green, London, collected in 1904 which seems to have similarly shaped leaves (see below).

There are  37 forms and varieties of Sorbus torminalis listed on the Provisional Global Plant Checklist of the  International Organization for Plant Information and these include S. torminalis forma orientalis and S. torminalis var. orientalis.

REFERENCES

De Langhe et al. (1973)  Nouvelle Flore de la Belgique du Grand Duche de Luxembourg, du Nord de la France et des Regions Voisines.  Ist edition.  Patrimoine du Jardin botanique national de Belgique.

Gabrieljan, E. T. (1961). The genus Sorbus L. in Turkey. Notes from the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh 23, no. 4: 483-496

From:  Brussels 1973 by :

"

Wild services at Kew Gardens

In November 2009, three wild service trees (Sorbus torminalis) were planted at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, to mark the institution's 250th anniversary.  The trees were a gift from Henry Girling, who had grown them from seed, on behalf of the Arboricultural Association.

Details of the event and some background to the tree are given in a case study from Parkwood here: http://www.parkwoodconsultancyservices.co.uk/CaseStudy.aspx?casestudyid=26

The reason for choosing wild services (which I am sure are already flourishing at Kew and their Sussex outstation Wakehurst Place) seems to be that they are one of the less well-known native trees and they are described as having "long, but often forgotten, links to Britain's past."  There are many far rarer trees native to Britain, but it is good to see the wild service getting a high profile as it has often done in the past 40 years or so.

Parkwood explain the tree's links with Chequers pubs and the uses of the fruit in drinks and for desert and they say that "in the past, many wild service trees were coppiced ... to produce a fresh crop pf poles used to make everything from tools to houses to charcoal."  I have come across coppiced wild services from time to time, but I think there was no intent with this to produce wood with particular qualities - they could simply have been cut along with everything else in the wood that could be coppiced.  Special uses of wild service wood like making the striking portion of flails, crossbow and gun stocks, combs, musical instruments, harpsichord jacks and suchlike would normally have been taken from timber from mature trees.

Some of the other notions, such as Parkwood's explanation of the species' poor reproductive abilities are, in my view, rather wide of the mark, but the account of the tree is better than many I have seen and the three planted at Kew will certainly help to keep the species in the public eye during their lifetime.

Lightfoot on Sorbus

John Lightfoot was an 18th century English naturalist who wrote the two volume Flora Scotica published in 1777.

He travelled widely and in 1772 spent five months on  a tour of Scotland with Thomas Pennant, another well-known 18th century naturalist.  Lightfoot's flora contains some interesting material on the medicinal uses and folklore associated with the plants he describes and many of these seem to be from first hand experience and sometimes appear to have found their way into later literature, often without the caution that Lightfoot expressed on the reputed properties of some of these plants.

Of the mountain ash (Sorbus aucuparia) he says the Scots name is Roan-tree and the Scottish Gaelic Craobh-chaorain.  On its uses he writes "in the island of Jura they use the juice as an acid for punch".  This is curiously like the lines in Virgil's Georgics where he says of the Scythians "Et pocula laeti/Fermento atque acidis imitantur vitea sorbis ( And for an intoxicating drink/they mimic wine with a brew from acid service berries).  He adds that Highlanders often eat rowan berries "when thoroughly ripe and in some places distil a very good spirit from them."

On the folklore of S. aucuparia he writes that in North-Britain "the superstitious still continue to retain a great veneration of the wood which was undoubtedly handed down to them from early antiquity.  They believe that any small part of this tree carried about them will prove a sovreign charm against all the effects of enchantment or witchcraft.  Their cattle also, as well as themselves, are supposed to be preserved by it from evil; for the dairy-maid will not forget to drive them to the shealings or summer pastures with a rod of Roan-tree, which she carefully lays up over the door of the sheal boothy or summer house and drives them home again with the same.  In Strathspey they make, for the same purpose, on the first day of May, a hoop of the wood of this tree, and in the evening and morning cause all the sheep and lambs to pass through it."

Lightfoot does not seem to know the whitebeams very well, which is rather surprising for a well-travelled botanist, but he does say, in Flora Scotica and presumably of Scotland "the berries when ripe are red, and capable, by fermentation and distillation, of affording a good spirit."

The true service tree in Haringey, London

There is apparently an expanding colony of true service trees (Sorbus domestica) in the London borough of Haringey. David Bevan writing on the Tree Trust for Haringey’s website (http://www.ttfh.org.uk/cgi-bin/web/web?Our_Walks) says “The most interesting tree in St Ann's Hospital grounds is the true service tree ... There are several mature trees - all growing close to the perimeter road. They flower in early May - and bear copious "sorbs" in October (like small red and green "apples"). They have given rise to several "self-sown" seedlings in the adjacent hedges, and the two at Railway Fields originated from here. I also remember a fine "medlar-thorn", X Crataemespilus grandiflora, which I have not seen elsewhere."

St. Ann’s Hospital is at OS grid reference TQ32398860 and the Railway Land LNR at TQ31698813.

The London Wildweb says that in a narrow strip of woodland on the southern edge of St. Ann’s Hospital grounds, alongside the embankment of the railway “There is a single wild service-tree (Sorbus torminalis), while true service-tree (Sorbus domestica) is becoming naturalised through seedlings from several planted trees”

Of particular interest is the fact that the true service trees appear to fruit well and to have been regenerating from seed, whereas the wild service (quite characteristically) has not. Clearly the true service likes the north London conditions and I think they are not common from seed in many other places.

I have, myself, grown the true service from seed taken from a fruit brought from Rome by a secretary of mine who went on holiday there. This single fruit contained three seeds and all germinated after stratification out of doors. One still flourishes in our garden in Sedlescombe and fruits intermittently, another went to the local RSPCA nature reserve in Guestling where, as far as I know, it is still growing, and the third to my secretary’s garden in Putney. I grew a further plant from seed from our garden tree and this went to the grounds of the New Vic Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent.

The medlar-hawthorn (X Crataemespilus grandiflora) is thought to be a bigeneric hybrid between the medlar (Mespilus germanica) and Midland hawthorn (Crataegus laevigata) and is occasionally found in gardens.

André Theuriet and the wild service tree

André Theuriet was a 19^th century French novelist and poet well known in France for his fine descriptions of field and forest, of small villages and the lives of their people. Unusually for an author, he seemed particularly fond of the wild service tree (Sorbus torminalis), alisier in French, and I have translated some of his references below.

In his book Sous Bois, impressions d’un forestier (1880) he writes in the essay Autumn in the woods:

“The earthy smell, especially of the woods, the discovery of a bunch of wild services still hanging from the branch.” And later in the same essay: “They came there, answered Tristan, bathed themselves and drank deeply after their lunch of wild services, sloes and other astringent berries had dried their throats too much.”

And “The berries of dogwood like scarlet olives ripened beside the crimson barberries, and high in the wild service trees hung brown bunches of fruit similar in taste and colour to tiny medlars.”

In a poem Automne he wrote:

In the great forest of purple and yellow umber,

The song of the birds was slain in September.

But an airy music still reverberates.

On the ground one hears, like light hail pattering,

Ripe acorns, wild services and beechnuts falling.

And in his book Surprises d’amour there is the following: “He preferred, to the fruits of the Tree of Science, the crab apples and wild services with which, in the autumn, he would fill his pockets while wandering through the woods.”

Finally in Theuriet's novel Bigarreau there is a longer passage involving a wild service tree:

"The work of the day was interrupted with half an hour’s rest and the warder relaxed his sharp-eyed surveillance a little. He, Seurrot, had a susceptible heart, and the bright eyes of the landlady of the Lion d’Or drew him irresistibly towards the inn’s orchard at the end of the yard. Bigarreau, prisoner number twenty-four, had hoped for this. When the warder had followed the track into the orchard, he wormed away like a grass snake into the junipers on the slope, reached the copse and picking out a slender wild service with a leafy crown among the trees on the edge, he climbed up it in short order like a squirrel.

Perched astride a fork in the uppermost branches and hidden by the thick foliage, he took out his cigarettes, lit one and slowly savoured this forbidden delight. It was good up there in the greenery and the fresh air! Between the branches he could see the roofs of the village, the reflections from the river Aube across the meadows and, on both sides of the valley, the wind-brushed fields of rye and oats variegated with pink sainfoin and crimson clover. Blackbirds were singing in the bushes, reed warblers chattering in the willows by the river and a fresh wind rocked him as though he were in a hammock. It was so good there that Bigarreau was lulled into a false sense of security.

When Seurrot returned, chewing a rose between his teeth, and cast his eye over his little troop he immediately noticed that one of the prisoners was missing. “Where is number twenty-four?” he cried, but the others only exchanged sly glances and shrugged their shoulders.

The warder thought at first that there had been an escape and turned pale. His eyes scanned the bushes anxiously, then suddenly at the top of a young standard tree he spotted some wisps of bluish smoke. This was hardly a natural phenomenon and the offender must be hiding up there. Seurrot jumped on to the slope and in the twinkling of an eye was at the foot of the wild service tree where he had no difficulty in picking out Bigarreau’s dangling legs.

“You scoundrel” Seurrot shouted “you think you’re above everybody else and you are smoking again – it’s against the rules. Are you going to come down, you brat?”

Bigarreau had been discovered, but he had the advantage of his position and tried to make good use of it.

“I’d be happy to” he replied “if you promise not to punish me.”

“It seems as though you’re making conditions” replied Seurrot angrily “come down sharp or you’ll regret it.”

“I’m staying put” replied Bigarreau stubbornly.

The wild service tree was very slender and had a very tall trunk; the warder had no talent as a climber and, although he had shaken the tree violently, the delinquent did not budge.

“So you defy my authority, you scoundrel.” “Just wait a minute – you others, go and get me an axe, and make it quick.”

The other two prisoners obeyed his bellowed order. Seurrot furiously grabbed the axe that was presented to him and, without the slightest hesitation about breaking forest law, attacked the wild service tree at the base of the trunk. After the first few blows the tree shook from base to tip, but Bigarreau remained unmoved. The blows of the axe continued, bark and wood flew in splinters, sweat beaded the warder’s forehead. All this greatly amused the two young prisoners who followed with interest the deepening V at the base of the trunk. There was a loud crack and this time Bigarreau reflected that of the two evils it was wise to avoid the worst and he let himself fall through the branches in a bundle on to the ground which, happily, was covered in a soft layer of moss.

“You rat! I’ll teach you to defy me!” shouted Seurrot grabbing his arm. (He had been a policeman and his fingers were like pinchers). At the same time he rained blows on Bigarreau’s back and pushed him towards the yard.