A Red-Letter Day
April 25th is a complicated date. It is St Mark’s Day, which is honored with a wide variety of celebrations; and it is Robigalia, an ancient Roman festival intended to propitiate the god — or demon — of wheat rust and thus ensure a good harvest. These disparate themes may actually be related.
Mark the Evangelist, the writer of one of the narratives of the life of Christ, is an important early Church figure. Of course he wrote the book, but he also founded the church in Alexandria which is the ancestor of the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Greek Orthodox Church and the Coptic Catholic Church, all major branches of Christianity.
However, the thrust of ritual activity on 25 April is difficult to tie to Mark, or indeed to Christianity. In English tradition, St Mark’s Eve is a night for divination, mostly with regard to marriage partners. One custom is to spread ashes, sometimes near the hearth, sometimes near the door. In the morning, whoever’s shoe fits the inevitable footprints in the ash will be your betrothed. Folklore says that this is also a night of magic. Animals can talk with human voices; and fern-seed, a faerie plant, will ripen and disperse and grow lushly all overnight, particularly when this is a full moon. (Sadly, it is not this year…)
In Lithuania, it is a festival that opens the grain-growing season. There is a ban on eating meat and on touching earth. No digging or plowing on this date, as that is seen as disrespectful of the hard work the earth will be doing in bringing forth the harvest. More recently, Italy grafted on a celebration of liberation to this date. The country was officially rid of Nazi-Fascists on 25 April 1945. Today, this date is a national holiday. In Mexico, St Mark’s day gives its name to a month-long fair that has international appeal, the Saint Mark National Fair. In Sardinia, this is a shepherd’s holiday in which bread is offered as a sacrifice and there is a good deal of drinking.
In Venice, which takes Mark as its patron saint, this is the Rosebud Festival. Men give a single red rosebud to the woman they love. This tradition can be traced back to the wars of the 8th century. A commoner fell hopelessly in love with a woman from the nobility. He went off to war and was mortally wounded, but before dying he managed to pluck a budding rose and send it with a companion back to his love. The rose was covered in his blood.
This strange tale actually comes fairly close to the day’s Roman roots, at least symbolically. Robigalia was a festival of propitiation in which the color red is paramount. There was a bloody sacrifice of a red-furred, unweaned puppy. The name of the festival is tied to the Latin ruber, meaning red. And the deity invoked, Robigus (though sometimes in feminine, Robigo) is likely a variation of Mars, the god of both agriculture and war, a bloody deity.
The color literally “stems” from the blight that Robigus both caused and therefore prevented — if in the right mood. It is wheat leaf rust, a nasty fungus that can overwinter in mild climates and destroy large swaths of an infected field. It can kill not only wheat, but oats, rye and many other grasses, reducing yields to a pittance where it sets in. It is endemic throughout the world, and there is no cure once it takes hold. This wee beastie has the particularly foul habit of using the dying plant tissues to fertilize itself; so it eats the plant, kills it and then propagates itself in the plant’s decomposition. Fortunately, there are hybrids that are resistant to this menace, but the main defense these days is genetic engineering.
It is likely that climate change will exacerbate the spread of this fungus and other grain rusts since the cold temperatures needed to kill them may no longer happen in many parts of the world. Perhaps it is time to pray to Robigus… though without the blood, please…
imprecation
and it is given that we gather this day gather to guarantee gathering in the face of fungal effrontery we are given this day together that we may harvest future days red ways notwithstanding we gather to grant days despite spiteful time and so we gather not in supplication but imprecation against infringed fortune days of bloody dearth and barren bellies together to gather we are given this day to ward days of stolen harvest never to come
Arbor Day
Today is also Arbor Day, a very recent addition to the year round, a day to reflect on our relationship with trees.
We have a fraught relationship with trees. To mask our utter dependence on the green world and to justify taking whatever we desire from the planet, we have stripped even the possibility of consciousness from other life forms, woody ones in particular. We name them resources, so that the value of trees is determined only relative to ourselves, usually proportional to the profit that we will extract when we kill them.
But sometimes we value living trees.
Arbor Day is a day to value and salute living trees. Admittedly, the history of Arbor Day is somewhat tainted with white privilege and a general air of cluelessness. But the Arbor Day Foundation is working hard to refashion this day into something we all can celebrate and participate in, a day of planting, a day to ameliorate some of our past destruction and to propagate trees for the future.
While most holidays celebrate something that has already happened and is worth remembering, Arbor Day represents a hope for the future. The simple act of planting a tree represents a belief that the tree will grow to provide us with clean air and water, cooling shade, habitat for wildlife, healthier communities, and endless natural beauty — all for a better tomorrow. (Arbor Day Foundation)
I wholly support planting trees wherever you live — natives, fruit-bearing, nut-bearing — on this day and every other. In fact, I tend to do this, sometimes even buying saplings from the Arbor Day folks and planting them on property that I don’t own, rather like Johnny Appleseed, but with more of a penchant for oaks, maples and walnuts. Wherever you are, a tree is needed. So go find a seed or a seedling and set it on its future path. You are planting delight for your descendants.
the grandmothers
our grandmothers wisdom keepers guardians of life they stand in silent sentinal witness to the fall from the center and the margins they know our hearts people our dreams bind our world create our earth they forgive and give breath sustenance shelter yet we take and unmake wealth body home we are their children their flesh made anew our debts can ne’er be repaid but they do not demand reciprocity only being to grow into old age passing light into the new
From the Book Cellar
A small selection of picture books for Arbor Day:
Arbor Day Square by Kathryn O. Galbraith, illustrated by Cyd Moore (2010, Peachtree).
A Tree Is Nice by Janice May Udry, illustrated by Marc Simont, a Caldecott Medal winner (1956, HarperCollins Children’s Books).
The Busy Tree by Jennifer Ward, illustrated by Lisa Falkenstern (2009, Marshall Cavendish Children).
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 
Another delightfully meaty read before I get down to the business of the day 🙂
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A good addition to the Arbor Day book cellar would be Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s Our Green Heart: the soul and science of forests. Beresford-Kroeger was raised in the Druidic culture of gratitude, reverence and love for trees, which is very much reflected in her writing.
P.S. Dendrophiles out there must be aghast at the U.S. government’s efforts to define and limit human sexuality to the biologic male or female at birth. Human beings would do well to consider dioecious and monoecious trees’ broader perspective on sexuality. Some trees are separate male and female, while others are both sexes together.
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