Of Trees, Notches and Folk Healing!

I must say, while my friends usually tease me about my tendency to jump from one rabbit hole to the next, few of them keeps feeding my little addiction! Today the topic at hand is tree notching, which I had never heard about before, so a big thank you to the friend who pointed me in that direction.

Let me first clarify that the intention is not to address the best way to treat or cut a tree. That being said, I found that notches come in many forms there too, whether it be the traditional notch, the Humboldt notch or the open-faced notch, to cite only a few.

But no, today we are looking into the practice of tree notching as a treatment used in folk medicine.

What do trees have to do with medicine will you ask?

Well, imagine what would happen if you could transmit your disease to a tree, be cured, say for example of asthma or croup to only cite a couple. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Yes, there is a chance the tree might die, but very few people nowadays would have an issue with that, after all what is a tree compared to a human life. Let’s not open THAT can of worms.

As a disclaimer there is very little information online, or at least very little that I could find. The most useful articles were dated from 1968 and 1973. A big thank you to Mr Wayland D. Hand and Mr John Q. Anderson!

Folk medicine involving trees seems to come in many forms, from using a stick or cutting a branch to using the full tree itself. I have focused on the practices involving the whole tree, which means plugging, pegging, nailing or notching.

The interesting element here is that while each of those ways vary (what kind of tree, which kind of mark, what side of the tree, for what disease etc.), the base is the same for all: measuring an individual against a tree, exactly like you might do with your own kids, using a door frame in your family home. From there, the difference lies in how the measuring is done.

Plugging or pegging require for the mark to be done digging a hole in the tree, filling it with the individual hair and nail, and then closing the hole with a plug often made of pine resin. Notching simply necessitate a notch on the tree trunk. Both those practices involve the individual outgrowing the mark for the disease to be gone, absorbed or transferred to the tree, meaning those are probably intended for children. Nailing is done by pushing a nail in the trunk of the tree. The disease is expected to disappear once the tree bark cover the nail, making this option applicable to both children and adults. Let me repeat again though, that all those rituals come in many forms and seem to evolve as they spread.

What I find rather fascinating is that not only the practice seems to be mostly documented in the United States, but also that people kept using this folk medicine well into the 20th century, and it might still be commonly used today in some remote places for all I know. Interestingly enough, I couldn’t find any information as to the original location of this practice. Did it come from Europe? Was it a tradition of the native population of the Americas? Was it a bit of both? If anybody knows, please do email me!

Now, if you are wondering how exactly you could pass a disease to a tree, let me tell you about this medieval European practice whereby eating a mouse was considered a cure for bed-wetting. I am kindly relieved we don’t do that anymore… we don’t, right?

Anyhow, passing a disease to another human, animal or plant is called transference. An old woman’s cure for wart was to rub a wart with an onion and the onion would catch the wart and take it away. I couldn’t find much about transference apart from the fact that it might have emerged during the Renaissance (15th-16th centuries). That being said, it is not because a practice didn’t have a fancy name that it wasn’t already in use by people all over the world. Just saying!

As I researched transference, I came across another notion which I thought was related somewhat to tree notching: sympathetic magic. It is a practice that implies a connection between a human and an object of some sort to affect either other people or the environment. That type of magic can work through imitation, using fetishes or effigies to do so (voodoo doll for example) or through correspondence, whereby you can influence something or somebody based on the resemblance or relationship. For example, red beetroot juice is believed to impact blood, or walnuts affect the brain.

I think the bottom line is that there are many traditions and practices out there, being forgotten. We do not sit down with our elders and listen to their stories anymore, we’d rather look at our screens, endlessly searching for the next thing, the next innovation, the next technology, the next viral tik-tok video or even looking at rabbit holes (I sure am guilty of that one!). And hence, we forget to look back and learn, to be thankful and content. More importantly I think, we forget that for the next generation to receive we need to first give back to the world around us.

I know, I sound like a dreamer!

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