May Day is a day with many associations and representations: an “olde” festival with attendant Green Man and maypoles, a cross-quarter celebration of spring and surviving the winter, a day to celebrate and demonstrate the power of workers everywhere, a signal of alarm. In between its folkloric and political roles, however, it appears to have taken on the more mundane role of annual weather check. I went through some Massachusetts newspapers published in the nineteenth century to see how May Day was celebrated, if at all, and while there were occasional references to May Queens and lots of bad poetry, I found many more assessments of what’s in bloom and how present May Days compared to the past in terms of flora. Actually it was often more about the climate than the weather. Here’s a great evaluation from the Newburyport Herald in 1837: On the whole, we may consider ourselves as gainers in regard to climate. We enjoy longer summers, milder autumns and shorter winters than our ancestors enjoyed. Spring is the only season in regard to which we are losers. The celebrated season of “ethereal mildness” seems to be entirely degenerated — it is nothing but a constant alternation of summer and winter weather. Spring losers!
Dwight William Tryon, Early Spring in New England, 1897. Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art. Gift of Charles Lang Freer.
The Salem papers presented poetry for May Day in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century but then switched to more wary but still hopeful assessments of the day and the weather at mid-century. In their stories on the first heralds/flowers of spring, one is immediately struck by the lack of references to tulips and daffodils: bulbs must have been a later thing? It’s all about woodland natives, found in the “Great Pasture” off Highland Avenue. The Salem Gazette heralded a “May Morning Bouquet” in 1849, noting that May comes to us this year out of the atmosphere of an iceberg, as it were, but it may prove as pleasant a month as the poets avow it to be in less fickle climes. Five plants made up this bouquet: hepatica (which was generally called liverwort), Sanguinaria canadensis (bloodroot), anemones, mayflowers (trailing arbutus), and violets. These hardly flowers “will amply reward a search on May morning amongst the thickets and rocks in the neighborhood. But then it may rain, or freeze, or snow!”
Liverwort and Bloodroot in Charles F. Millspaugh’s Medicinal plants : an illustrated and descriptive guide to plants indigenous to and naturalized in the United States which are used in medicine, their description, origin, history, preparation, chemistry and physiological effects fully described (1892).
Anemone from William B. Barton’s Flora of North America (Volume 2), 1821.
Arbutus (also called Epigaea repens or Mayflower) in Jacob Bigelow’s American medical botany :being a collection of the native medicinal plants of the United States, containing their botanical history and chemical analysis, and properties and uses in medicine, diet and the arts (1817).
Violet from Jacob Sturm’s Deutschlands Flora in Abbildungen nach der Natur mit Beschreibungen (1798).
These are lovely little wildflowers: I have bloodroot in my garden and (unfortunately) violets too, but a bouquet? I think not, we need more robust flora for that. And please, I would prefer to stroll in a sunny green pasture rather than among the “thickets and rocks.” Maybe we should not have abandoned our devotion to the Green Man over here in Puritan New England: we have consequently become spring losers!
May 1st, 2024 at 7:26 am
Delightful article. Congratulations are due, but with the understanding that there are not many more examples of such interesting, thoroughly researched essays by Ms.Seger.
May 1st, 2024 at 10:43 am
Do you know the story of the Merrymount colony of Thomas Morton in Wollaston? They had a maypole, free beer, a LOT of sex and debauchery, and evidently were having a great time until Miles Standish stomped in like the thug he was and shut down the party.
May 1st, 2024 at 10:59 am
I do! It’s a great story!
May 1st, 2024 at 7:05 pm
Flowers win. Strolling in a meadow is such a good choice – I quite like the violets that hang out under the trees in my wild garden but the sever winter cold mitigates their spread I think.
May 1st, 2024 at 8:55 pm
Well you have land—I just have a little city garden and those spreading violets just take up too much space!
May 1st, 2024 at 11:45 pm
They do! They are very greedy!
May 1st, 2024 at 8:45 pm
Thank you for sharing. This is wonderful!
May 1st, 2024 at 8:54 pm
Thank you for stopping by!
May 2nd, 2024 at 7:09 am
Is there no tower in Salem where May madrigals could be sung to the residents, as happens at the school where I was a teacher? https://www.oundleschool.org.uk/may-day-madrigals-welcome-in-the-spring/ If you ever come to Roger Conant’s birthplace and All Saints’ Church where his family worshipped I can show you i. an obvious green man in stone; ii. a puzzling possible 16th century green man in carved oak OR – as some villagers believe – a Native American’s head with headdress.
May 3rd, 2024 at 8:34 am
oh that looks, sounds lovely!