SPINDLE TREE

Milan, 15 October 2025

It was our last hike in Austria this year. We hiked across the hills between Sankt Veit an der Gölsen (another Sankt Veit) and Wiesenfeld, in the pre-Alps behind St. Pölten. During the final walk into Wiesendorf, I spotted this flowering bush on the roadside.

I’d seen the plant before, but this time I decided to identify it. I did my usual trick of using my iPhone’s plant identifier programme, but it was a complete failure. It first suggested “hawthorne”, which even I knew was wrong, and then, on two other try’s, it simply suggested “plant”, which was really not very helpful. So I turned to the internet. And there I got my answer: I was looking at a Euonymus europaeus, the European or common spindle tree (or bush to some people – it seems to fall between being a small tree and a big bush).

The plant has a rather lovely fruit, which is why I’d spotted the plant in the first place. I throw in a close-up of the fruit.

It is a lovely pink, and then, as the photo shows, when it ripens it splits open to reveal a bright orange seed (actually, what you see is an orange aril, a “fleshy” material in which the seed is buried; the edible aril attracts birds and other animals, which helps in seed dispersal).

To my eye, this combination of pink and orange is a bit jarring, but hey! that’s the colour combination the plant “chose” (is there some scientific reason behind the colours you find on plants? A question for another day).

The fruit’s pink colour, and the fact that it is four-lobed, has led to one of the plant’s French names: bonnet d’évêque, bishop’s cap. I don’t know if bishops wear them anymore, but the hat they wore in the past was four-sided and pink.

All very nice, but as I said in my previous post, while our ancestors might have admired the colours of nature, they were highly utilitarian in their approach to plants: how can I use them? Well, the fruits of the spindle tree are toxic – indeed, every part of the plant is toxic – so there was no nutrition to be had from this particular plant. But our ancestors did manage to eke various uses out of it. Two stand out for me.

As the plant’s English name indicates, the plant’s wood was used to make spindles. Women (for the most part) used spindles to spin wool or flax fibres into yarn or thread. In this picture, the spindle is in the woman’s right hand (and the distaff in her left).

And here we have a group of women all spinning together. I guess this was seen very much as a communal activity, the way women used to knit together.

Spindles are a very ancient technology. The oldest evidence of their use goes back 12,000 years. But at least in the developed countries, they were eliminated by the Industrial Revolution, when automation destroyed the cottage industry of spinning. Their use lingered on here and there; this photo, for instance, from 1901, shows a peasant woman in Greece still spinning by hand.

And I still remember watching a housewife in Eritrea, where I was born, sitting at the door of her house spinning with a distaff and spindle. This would have been in the late 1950s.

One of the plant’s French names – fusain – indicates the second of the plant’s intriguing uses. Fusain is a charcoal made from the wood of the spindle tree, which is used in drawing. It’s much appreciated by artists for its exceptional strength and density. This is a good excuse for me to throw in a few charcoal drawings by famous artists, although I will start with an artist I personally have never heard of, François Bovin, simply because the subject of his drawing connects us back to what I was just writing about, spinning.

Turning to other artists, these are preparatory drawings of Tahitian faces, by Paul Gauguin.

This is a drawing by a favourite artist of mine, Käthe Kollwitz, of a home worker.

And this is a drawing by another of my favourite artists, Egon Schiele, of a reclining model in chemise and stockings.

And finally, a cubist charcoal drawing by Pablo Picasso of a standing female nude.

A week after this hike, we were gone. We’ll be back next year, maybe early enough to see a spindle tree in flower.