The last day of May

Celebrating the end of May with some beautiful May blossom. My grandmother would never let me pick it and bring it into the house as she said it was bad luck. Lots of suggestions why;
It was associated with ‘unregulated love in the field, rather than conjugal love in a bed’. It was associated with hedges planted to create enclosures thereby depriving country people of their common land. In 1866 it was recorded in the Gentleman’s Magazine that the scent of hawthorn was exactly like the smell of the Great Plague of London’! More recently it has been shown that trimethylamine, which is formed when animal tissues decay, is present in hawthorn flowers. I can’t think that my grandmother was aware of any of those reasons. I wonder why she held that superstition.