WelcomeThank you for visiting The Golden Bough Tree Farm - Online. Browse for Trees & Shrubs using the links along the left. The links across the top will direct you to information about our business, an order form, Hardiness Zone Map and other information to help you give your trees a safe and healthy new home. Autumn 2010. Our website is now fully updated with our fall offerings. Enjoy studying the sections of the website, and when you're ready to order, print and fill out our order form, and mail it to us with your payment by cheque or money order. Being a small company, we are pleased to not charge HST. To receive two years of our printed catalog please send $2 to Golden Bough, Marlbank, Ontario, K0K 2L0.
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We Ship Canada-WideThough located in eastern Ontario, our years of experience have taught us the very best way to transport bare root trees & shrubs across the country. Our expert staff pack your order for shipment using care and quality materials to safeguard your purchase as it travels from our home to yours. We ship only in early spring and mid-autumn to take advantage of the best planting seasons. |
Photo by Eye In The Sky Photography
Sir James Frazer's dense 12-volume masterpiece, The Golden Bough, still forms a cornerstone of social anthropology. Starting from a grove sacred to Diana, south of Rome, the good professor's lifetime study led him to conclude that our ancestors believed in magic as a means of controlling or mitigating elemental forces. These systems of faith began, at least in part, with a reverance for trees. This, in turn, led to religious beliefs in which tribal gods and spirits were propiated by shamans attuned to the emotional needs and fears of their people. To Frazer, the logical third stage in this process was scientific thought. As Robert Temple explains in his Illustrated Golden Bough (an attractive modern abridgement to the original) Frazer's "work made clear for the first time (around 1900) that matters of human belief are important, not so much for their content, as for their psychological significance."
YGGDRASIL is the name given in Scandinavian mythology to the greatest and most sacred of all trees, which was conceived as binding together heaven, earth, and hell.
It is an ash, whose branches spread over all the world, and reach above the heavens. It sends out three roots in as many different directions: one to the Asa-gods in heaven, another to the Frost giants, the third to the underworld. Under each root springs a wonderful fountain, endowed with marvelous virtues.
From the tree itself springs a honey-dew. The serpent, Nithhoggr, lies at the under-world fountain and gnaws the root of Yggdrasil; the squirrel, Ratatoskr, runs up and down, and tries to breed strife between the serpent and the eagle, which sits aloft. Dr. Oliver (Signs and Symbols, p. 155) considers it to have been the Theological Ladder of the Gothic mysteries.