GEAN, n.

Dictionaries of the Scots Language defines gean as

“the wild cherry, Prunus avium, and its fruit”.

An early example (1735) comes from Life and Labour on an Aberdeenshire Estate and is an excerpt from an inventory:

“4 Ash planks and 2 geen...4/- [4 shillings]”.

Another spelling appears in John Leyden’s Scenes of Infancy (published in 1844):

“The guine, whose luscious sable cherries spring, To lure the blackbird mid her boughs to sing”.

In Jock, to the First Army (from More Songs of Angus and Others, 1918) Violet Jacob writes these elegiac lines:

“O Rab an’ Dave an’ rantin’ Jim, The geans were turnin’ reid When Scotland saw yer line grow dim, Wi’ the pipers at its heid...”.

Later in the twentieth century Angus Martin’s 1998 Song of the Queen gives us this simile:

“A bleezard oot aff Bennan, lan nae langer seen; the Firth a swirl o saftness lik blossom o the gean”.

The word is still in use today. Here are a couple of examples. First, from Stuart A Paterson’s poem Blate (Wheen: New and Collected Poems, 2023):

“Ma chakks will gan rede as a gean, ma shooders will drap tae hauf-wey, ma palms will nae doot be like twae guddled troot and ma heid will fill full o bad lies.”

And second from Angus Whitson describing in the Courier (11 May 2024) a drive through Kilberry.

“We’d come at the right time because the roadsides were awash with bluebells and yellow primroses and the frothy white blossom of geans, our Scottish wild cherry.”

This Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language.

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