Celtic Tree Astrology

Celtic tree astrology divides the year into thirteen months of about four weeks each and gives every month a tree. Each tree carries a letter of the Ogham, the old Irish alphabet whose letters were named for trees, and each tree is a character. The Birch is the pioneer who starts things. The Oak is the one everyone leans on. The Willow is the healer who feels the room before anyone has spoken. Find your dates and you have your tree, and it needs no calculator, no birth time and no sums.

I read your tree in every full portrait as the Celtic layer, sitting beside your numbers, your Western chart, your Chinese animal and the rest. It is one of the gentler systems I work with, and people tend to warm to it quickly, because a tree is an easier thing to picture yourself as than a planet in a house.

Where it comes from, in short

I want to be straight with you about this before you go any further.

The Ogham is real and old. You can still see it cut into standing stones in Ireland and western Britain from about the fourth century onward, and its letters do carry tree names. The thirteen month calendar that hangs those letters on the year is a much younger thing. It was put together in the middle of the twentieth century by a poet, and later writers took it up and filled it out. There is no evidence that the ancient Celts or their druids kept a tree calendar of this kind. The Learning Celtic Tree Astrology page tells that story properly.

So why do I use it? Because it is a good set of thirteen character pictures, and they read well beside the other systems. I treat your tree as the tree you were planted under, a teaching image, and read that way it does its work. The Birch people I know do start things. The Hazel people do gather and teach. The image holds, whatever its age.

The thirteen trees

The year opens on 24 December with the Birch, which runs to 20 January, and then the Rowan takes over from 21 January to 17 February. The Ash has 18 February to 17 March, the Alder 18 March to 14 April, the Willow 15 April to 12 May and the Hawthorn 13 May to 9 June. The Oak stands at the middle of the year from 10 June to 7 July, and the Holly follows from 8 July to 4 August. The Hazel has 5 August to 1 September, the Vine 2 September to 29 September, the Ivy 30 September to 27 October and the Reed 28 October to 24 November. The Elder closes the year from 25 November to 23 December, and the next day the Birch begins again.

The dates are fixed. They do not move with leap years and they do not depend on where you were born, so every day of the year belongs to exactly one tree. You will have noticed that the Vine is a vine, the Ivy is a climber and the Reed is a grass. The calendar calls them trees anyway, and so do I.

How this section is laid out

Learning Celtic Tree Astrology is the place to begin. It tells you where the system comes from, what it is and is not, and how I read it beside the other traditions.

The Ogham and the Tree Calendar explains the alphabet in plain words, the thirteen letters this calendar uses, why thirteen months, and what to do if your birthday sits right on a boundary.

The Trees gives each of the thirteen its own page: the living tree itself, the kind of person it describes, strengths, challenges, how it loves and works, what its Ogham letter meant, and how it sits against the Western signs it overlaps. Each page is about the length of a long article, and I would read your own first and then the one for whoever you are trying to understand.

Where to start

Find your birthday in the dates above. That is your tree. Read its page and notice what fits and what does not, because the parts that do not fit are usually worth a thought too.

Then look at the tree of someone close to you. In my experience a Holly and a Willow in the same house explains a good deal of the weather in that house, and neither of them is wrong.

Your tree is coming to Find Your Numbers and Signs along with the rest of your chart, though you will not need it. The dates do the job.

You will be your own teacher. All I will do is help you remember what you already know.

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.

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