Aspen

European aspen, Populus tremula, is a poplar native to the cool temperate parts of the Old World, from Iceland and the British Isles east to Kamchatka, north beyond the Arctic Circle and south to central Spain, Turkey, the Tian Shan, North Korea and northern Japan, with one outlying site in Algeria. It grows to 40 metres, its smooth, pale greenish-grey bark marked with dark diamond-shaped pores and turning dark grey and furrowed with age. Its nearly round leaves are more coarsely toothed than the American aspen's and tremble on flattened stalks; Gerard's Herball called them langues de femmes. Male and female catkins open on separate trees in early spring, and suckers spread one tree into a clonal stand. It can live 200 years, and its light, soft wood goes to matches, pulp and paper. The lore Kynes gathers under aspen comes from Europe, where this is the native aspen: Cormac's Glossary, an Irish dictionary of about 900 CE, tells of an aspen rod used to measure a new grave; Russians laid an aspen rod on a suspected witch's grave or drove it through the heart; medieval English arrow shafts were sometimes made of it; and in northern England a lock of hair was pinned to the tree to heal. Kynes ties it to the ancestors, to death and funeral rites, to divination, protection, prosperity and healing.