I could barely swing the pickaxe into the soil for two wild cherry saplings a friend gave me, to grace the summer cabin. Toomingas are one of the sacred trees in the old country, so could not refuse the task, even though I felt very weak. On return to Wellington, I tested positive for covid-19, and pulled out “Estonian mythology for the beginner” by Marju Kõivupuu.
Clearly, it was too late for the toomingas to protect me – its heady scent is said to prevent the pandemic spirit from detecting human beings. However, this appears to only work if you are sitting inside the branches of the tree, which seems impractical.
But this is not the only magical benefit of the toomingas. Its scent offers a defence against koerakoonlased, mythical beings having the head of a one-eyed dog atop a human body. The parallels with Ancient Greece and Egypt are before us, the kynokephaloi, and Anubis, the god of the underworld who hastens departing souls on their ultimate journey.
The Estonian folklorists point to this transmogrified figure appearing in many ancient mythological traditions; however, its arrival in Estonia seems relatively recent, dating from the crusading German military religious orders who arrived in the early 1200s.
Koerakoonlased emerge from their hiding places in the mountains in times of war to do harm to humans, and their deeds foretell the imminent end of the world. In Estonia, this would have happened many times over the centuries, yet Estonia is still here, and to stay.
Returning to the wild cherry, there is an obvious snag that, you, the reader, will have already spotted. What happens in winter when the tree has no leaves, let alone any other time of the year when it’s not in flower?
Part of an answer lies with an interesting read about toomingas on an Estonian herbalists’ website. The heady aroma about which so much is written has to do with the blossoms, leaves, seeds and bark, all of which contain prussic acid, otherwise known as cyanide. This sounds poisonous and it is.
The ancients of the Uralic world used smoking wild cherry blossoms indoors as insect repellent, also to repel mice. Likewise in the garden, stuffing fresh branches into molehills supposedly repels moles, and having plenty of bird cherry trees about keeps pest insects at bay, also mice - a more prosaic explanation of why Estonian farmsteads were and still are planted in toomingas. A millennia-old tradition.
To end on a cheery note: the toomingas is associated with the nightingale, or ööbik, which begins its song every spring at the same time the wild cherry comes into bloom. No nightingales in faraway New Zealand, sadly, but we do have the honeyeaters – tui and bellbirds – to delight us at the break of dawn.
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