About
This body of work invites you into the living company of Ireland’s native trees – to listen as their old voices rise again through leaf and root, and to walk with them through the turning of the Irish Wheel of the Year where story, season, and soul are one. It is not a calendar of trees, nor a borrowed zodiac, but a living weave of folklore, piseoga, myth, and long observation – how certain trees step forward as guardians and companions at the thresholds of the seasons, marking time as the land itself does. These are the trees of Irish memory – Birch gleaming at Samhain on new ground, Rowan shining against the Midwinter dark, Hawthorn opening before the fires of Bealtaine, Elder ripening her dark fruit at the year’s descent. They appear as they always have – in their right time and place – bearing the wild intelligence that once ordered the rhythm of our ancestors’ year. I was born and raised in West Cork – a coastline where story clings to every stone and mountains meet the tide. From childhood I knew the trees not as background but as presence – companions met in bark and berry, in proverb and superstition, in the small courtesies that once governed life on the land. Their ways were not written down but lived – in cures gathered at dawn, in charms woven for protection, in the quiet reverence kept for what could never be owned. Each tree is met here in its wholeness – myth, healing, piseoga, and ritual given voice again. The Irish names are written in Munster Irish – the dialect of my home in the southwest – for language, like land, changes with place. Drawn from a lifetime of observation and belonging, this original body of work is a living archive that spans almost thirty-five thousand words – a circle of Ireland’s trees where the trees are teachers, the seasons thresholds, and the living land the first and oldest book.