Lucky White Heather
Postcard from Edinburgh featuring white heather with a plaid bow
This exploration brings us to Scotland, where Calluna vulgaris, commonly known as heather, is the national flower. It’s a perennial shrub that grows in abundance in the Scottish highlands. Scots have used the wiry branched stems for roof thatch and brooms and boiled the tops and flowers to make a yellow dye for wool.
Associated with the summer solstice, heather was a sacred plant to the Druids. The flowers are typically purple in color, but there is also a rare white variety. Like a four-leaf clover, finding a sprig of white heather is considered very lucky, and some use heather as a charm of protection. It is hung in homes to protect against evil, hunger and fire.
Heather blossoms yield a distinctive brownish honey that is used to make Drambuie. (Speaking of spirits, it is also the symbol of the Lucky White Heather Scottish Gin Club.)
A wealth of folklore surrounds white heather, including a legend about a young maiden named Malvina who receives a bouquet of purple heather along with the news that her beloved Oscar has died in battle. Her tears are said to have turned the purple flowers white as she announced that white heather would heretofore bring good fortune to all who find it.
Other folk tales maintain that white heather grows on patches of land where no blood has been shed in battle (hence its rarity, given Scotland’s bloody past) or that white heather marks the graves of fairies.
Queen Victoria popularized the idea that heather is lucky when she wrote about a trip to Scotland where a servant spied a patch of heather and ran off to collect some. But the belief in lucky heather isn’t a relic of the Victorian era. Even today, many brides in the U.K. include white heather in their wedding bouquets.
While it’s less common today, visitors to London will sometimes see women on the street selling lucky heather. These women are usually Romani (perjoratively, “gypsy”), and the flowers they sell as “lucky heather” are not always actual heather. Long-held cultural prejudices likely contribute to the fact that many Londoners view this practice as a nuisance or a scam. It probably doesn’t help that the ladies’ approach can sometimes be aggressive, including threatening to curse people who don’t make a purchase.
Ricky Gervais performed a song called “Lady Gypsy” as David Brent, the main character from Life on the Road. In the song, Brent recalls meeting a beautiful woman when he was 18 years old. He describes her as a “traveller” with long dark hair with whom he was quite smitten. At one point in the song, the woman lays Brent down “on a bed of heather,” where he assumes they will begin a love-making session. But Brent is confused by her request to “be careful” with her merchandise, which leads him to ask if she is a hooker.
Still image from David Brent’s “Lady Gypsy”
She responds, “No. I mean the heather. I sell the heather, like a lucky spell.”
Brent continues to clarify and argue the point and when the woman tells him that, “the sex is free” but “the heather’s a pound.” Brent replies, “I don’t need no heather. And if I did, I would just pick some. It’s free. It’s growing in the ground.”
Not surprisingly, Gervais was lambasted for racist and sexist attitudes portrayed in the video. His supporters responded “Satire,” and a proper controversy ensued with calls to boycott the show.
This controversy is of little interest to The House. When one explores cultural beliefs and superstitions, one often runs headfirst into attitudes and practices that would be appalling by modern standards. What is of interest here is the characterization of heather as “lucky” and the apparently widespread practice of selling and using it as a charm.
So getting back to where we started… The House believes that the rarity of white heather is the primary factor in its association with good luck and good fortune. We see this clearly in the animal world, where white elephants, white deer and white alligators are all rare creatures that are thought to be auspicious.
Read about another Scottish good luck charm — the Grouse’s Foot.