Everyday plants: what the countryside gave and people knew how to use

One plant, several jobs

In the mountains, almost no plant served a single purpose. An oak supplied shade, leafy branches for goats, firewood and charcoal; a juniper roofed a shepherd’s hut; a lavender bush brought money in September. Each task had its date, because common woodland had rules: people could not gather everything whenever they liked.

Espliego: a woodland harvest

In Peralveche, Valentina Romero Pascual remembers the stills producing lavender oil. People had to rise early, cut, carry, weigh and deliver the plants. The oil brought families income; señor Andrés, a carpenter, prepared it. In the same issue of Abarca, Paquita Blanco Alcolea recalls accompanying her aunt María to cut wild lavender: it was not yet grown there for that purpose.

Miguel Pascual López adds a detail: residents set out early for patches they had found on waste ground and plateaux. His Peralveche memories also include cutting oaks for charcoal and firewood, and gathering pine cones and plants for small animals. A plant had several destinations, depending on the household, trade and season.

Cantueso for Saint John’s Day

Valentina Romero Pascual remembers girls and young women walking towards the road workers’ cottage on the way to Arbeteta to gather cantueso. Returning, they sang and used it to carpet Peralveche’s streets. They visited houses, collected food and shared a Saint John’s Day meal. The magazine preserves a line of their song: “We young women go to gather lavender.” It records a local celebration as well as an aromatic plant’s use. Source: Abarca 4, pp. 62–64.

Asphodel, from Checa to Valsalobre

A vocabulary published in Aguaspeña records gamón in Checa as Asphodelus albus, stating that its cooked leaves were fed to pigs. It calls the fruits gamonitas. The plant’s name therefore also preserves a household and farmyard task.

In Valsalobre, in Alto Tajo’s Cuenca area, residents interviewed by Vestal Etnografía recall lavender gathering being prohibited until an agreed date. It was cut in early September, weighed and distilled in a boiler beside the bridge. The oil provided important income for some households. Asphodel was also gathered in turns: stems and roots were cooked for pigs. Its calendar is described in A year in a mountain village.

Juniper became a roof

Stems, bark and trunks could become objects too. Masegosa’s vocabulary documents rye baskets, wooden troughs and tools for making hives. It continues in What could be made from a stalk, a log or a horn, through Masegosa’s words.

In Ablanque, Escalera and Olmeda de Cobeta, Spanish juniper supported and roofed the shepherds’ huts. Trunks and rafters formed the framework; branches formed the barda, deflecting rain. Sometimes a living juniper was left at the centre as a support. Building required recognising suitable timber, placing it and maintaining the roof. Pruned trees nearby also preserve pastoral use.

Oak, pine and gorse

In Olmeda de Cobeta’s common pasture pollarded Pyrenean oaks are still visible. Regular pruning supplied firewood and leafy fodder for livestock. The area’s ethnographic route also points out a black pine from which residents obtained resin to treat animal wounds.

In Villanueva de Alcorón, the lime kilns reveal another connection between plants and stone: feeding for days the furnace that turned limestone into lime. Fire exceeded 900 degrees, supplied with juniper and gorse branches for five to ten days, according to the trail panel. Lime went into mortar, whitewash and animal pens. What looks like hillside scrub could be fuel for a trade.

Words that preserve instructions

Vedar, ramón, barda and trasmochar are working words: an agreed date, livestock fodder, a roof and a method of pruning. In Checa, Aguaspeña records balea, the guilloma broom used to sweep after threshing. One word connects plant, tool and task. In Peralejos, accounts in A year in a mountain village preserve another workplace saying: “A man of many trades is sure to be poor.”

A night beside the charcoal clamp

In Peralveche, Miguel Pascual López, born in 1950 when the village had 430 residents, recalls in Abarca helping his father and uncle build a charcoal clamp: logs stacked in a cone and covered with plants, straw and earth. It was lit from below and watched so it slowly charred for a week rather than burning. One night he asked to stay on watch with them, sleeping outdoors in sacks filled with straw. He also remembers the bellmaker hammering sheet metal on an anvil so each flock sounded different and its shepherd could recognise it, and his grandfather Mauricio, the shearer, cutting decorations into the hair on mules’ rumps.

Other workplace sayings, from a Checa bell’s copper to the miller’s bad reputation, appear in What people said while they worked.