bay (tree)

bay (tree). There were many uses, both practical and symbolic, for the aromatic evergreen leaves of bay (also called laurel); it was much favoured for festive decoration, but at funerals it expressed the hope of resurrection, since it can revive after dying back to its roots. The herbalist John Parkinson wrote in his Paradisus Terrestris (1629), 426:
The bay-leaves are necessary both for civil uses and for physic, yes, both for the sick and the sound, both for the living and for the dead. It serveth to adorne the House of God as well as man, to crowne or encircle, as with a garland, the heads of the living, and to sticke and decke forth the bodies of the dead; so that from the cradle to the grave, we still have use of it.

In Pliny's Natural History (AD 77), it is said that laurel guards the doorways of great men's houses, and is never struck by lightning. Both ideas passed into English lore; a bay in the garden was thought to protect the house from lightning and keep away witches, the Devil, or (nowadays) bad luck ( Opie and Tatem, 1989: 14; Vickery, 1995: 28). Occasionally bay trees wither for no apparent reason, an omen of death for rulers ( Shakespeare, Richard II, II. iv).