The mystique of that strange, disembodied greenery remains today. The ritual of kissing under the mistletoe at Christmas is of the few surviving plant rituals in Europe akin to, say, the ceremonies with hallucinogenic plants in the New World tropics. It has become trivialized, but maybe a little of the magic remains. At least it is a ritual that brings a wild plant back into many people's lives. These charismatic plants of the Solstice, with their ancient lineage of folklore, became wrapped up in even more powerful seasonal myths.
Plants interact with people and animals too in midwinter festivities.
The use of plant symbols is deeply ingrained within each of us, but still needs to be succoured. Plants lie at the centre of our daily lives, as objects of beauty, as icons and as items of considerable commercial value. Two years ago Richard Mabey astonished the publishing world with his runaway best-seller Flora Britannica. Tens of thousands of households now own a treatise on contemporary European ethnobotany. Mabey and his correspondents and collaborators have raised awareness even within the botanical world of how, beneath the surface of a developed, sophisticated and crowded nation like Britain lurks an ancestral view of plants.