Wassailing the Apple Trees

A winter landscape can look bleak and barren but it may contain the promise of plenty in the year to come.

Much has been written (and refuted) about the benefits of talking to your plants, singing to them, and even playing music to promote their healthy growth.  This clearly isn't a new idea, as an old English custom involved singing and toasting the apple tree and other fruit trees on the Eve of Epiphany.  In wassailing the apple trees, workmen went from farm to farm with pitchers of cider.  Following the farmer into the fields and orchards they encircled the trees and sang their toasts to the trees.

"Here's to thee, old apple tree,

Whence thou may'st bud, and whence thou may'st blow!

And whence thou may'st bear apples enow!"

*****

"So well they might bloom, so well they might bear,

That we may have apples and cider this year!"

 A new  field of scientific study is called 'plant neurobiology.'  It seeks answers to questions of plant intelligence.  Are plants capable of their own type of cognition, learning, communication with other plants, memory, response to environmental input, and information processing?  The wassailers would answer with a definitive 'yes.'