Witch hazel

Witch Hazel Comes to Call

When I first came to the mountains and lived on my land long before I built my cabin, I planted my first witch hazel bush (shrub or tree). I didn’t realize it then, but I was in the process of returning to my roots by seeding in a tree that had captivated me as a child.

On my grandparents’ farm, witch hazel bushes were common, sprouting up around old fieldstone walls at the edges of the damp forest that in places surrounded the field on three sides.

In the fall, after all the other trees had lost most of their leaves, witch hazels came into their own as buttery yellow spindles covered bare twigs. Clusters of these blossoms stood out starkly against the trunks of most of the hardwoods – hickory, beech, maple, and oak. I remember, as a young child, carefully inspecting each clump of flowers. On some, I found empty seed capsules, which, I learned much later, expelled their seeds all at once the year before. Even these bird-beaked pods looked to me like a kind of flower. If I stood beneath a witch hazel tree, the irregular shapes of the branches created a loosely woven string-like tapestry above me, mirrored by blue sky.

I remember my mother using a forked witch hazel stick to search for water by the barn. When the workers arrived to dig the artesian well, they were startled to discover water so close to the surface. I knew nothing of dowsing then. I never heard the term ‘water witch’ until I moved to the mountains from the coast.

I used to find witch hazel bushes along the edges of the Gore Road, which is where I dug my first sapling to plant by the brook (all the roadside bushes are gone now). It took about ten years before my bush developed slender golden spindles. Over almost 40 years, I have watched this witch hazel develop into a glorious gray-green being that rises up from the earth as a sturdy and dense multi-stemmed clump, all of whose branches are covered with hundreds of spindly flowers in the fall.

Later, when I built my cabin, I planted a witch hazel by the well, and later still another next to the brook when I buried my brother’s ashes.

Just last week (end of September) I was astonished to find bright yellow fingers on the two by the stream, even though they still have insect-ridden diaphanous deep green leaves and are 8-12 feet high. The next morning I hiked over to the original witch hazel to check her smooth gray limbs for flowers. This tree is at least 40 feet high, spread out like a giant blossom bowing to the brook. I was delighted to see it shimmering with golden oval leaves, the color the leaves turn before they fall, but this witch hazel is also full of clusters of fragrant saffron fingers all too high for me to reach. At each location, the trees have more buds, so maybe some won’t bloom until the bushes are leafless like they used to be when the sight becomes truly spectacular? If it cools down enough, the flowers last about a month, but those days might be gone.

Encouraging is the fact that two of the witch hazels have young saplings springing up about ten feet away. Witch hazels are very slow growers.

Last year at this time, I was bed-ridden with a broken hip, but by using binoculars I could still make out the stringlike flowers on bare witch hazel branches below the house. (In 2023, most all my deciduous trees except oak and beech had lost their leaves by the end of the first week in October). As I look out my windows this morning, not a wisp of air and yet a continuous flow of golden leaves drift to the ground like dying butterflies. Insect damage pervades the forests everywhere I go.

A warming more humid climate probably has to with an earlier bloom cycle here in the north as well as an increase of insect damage. I noted that most of the gold leaves on the original witch hazel bush were barely touched by insects, which reflects a general observation of mine. The older the tree, the less insect damage to leaves. So far.

American witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) is an understory tree that is shade tolerant. This tree or bush used to grow throughout northeast and southeast North America, from Nova Scotia to Florida and from the Great Lakes to eastern Texas, but the combination of filling in wetlands, bolstering lowlands with fill, an obsession with clearing out the understory, too much salt, and ever-widening roads is reducing the numbers of this native species. Now there are also many hybrids, but none carry fragrant flowers. Some bloom in the spring.

The name ‘witch’ hazel is European in origin. When colonists came to this country, they noted that Indigenous peoples used the forked branches of Hamamelis to find underground sources of water and believed it was a form of witchery, a practice that demonized a plant along with the Native peoples who used it. “Wicke” is a Middle
English word for “lively’ and “wych” is from the Anglo-Saxon word to bend (or shape). Witch hazel branches respond to the presence of water. The aggressively conservative colonists were afraid of natural processes. If Native peoples used a tree branch to find water, ‘witchery’ must be at work. These superstitious people understood nothing about how nature operates and weren’t interested in learning about the continent they ‘conquered’. Not much has changed.

An interesting side note is that the word ‘witch’ first appeared in the King James version of the Bible written in the 1600’s. This derogatory title became a way to demonize women healers who worked with wild plants by listening and learning from nature, much the way Indigenous peoples and herbalists still do.

The genus name, Hamamelis, means ‘together with fruit’, referring to the simultaneous occurrence of flowers with the maturing fruit from the previous year. I see blossoms and small fruits but few empty snapping capsules on my trees which bothers me a bit. Last year’s summer rains may have prevented seeds from forming.

Four stamens (male reproductive parts) are tucked in between the petals, protected from below by the four sepals that also protect the flower until it is ready to open. The pistils (female reproductive parts) can be seen in the very center of the flowers. Each individual witch-hazel blossom is functionally monoecious, meaning that it’s equipped with both sets of reproductive organs, but acts as either a male (producing pollen only) or female (producing fruit only).

Bees and insects are the primary pollinators. Witch hazel flowers produce a sticky pollen and sweet nectar that attracts insects. Oddly, the plant is also self-pollinating, but according to some researchers, little seed is produced. (?) Some sources suggest that a couple of species of moths pollinate the flowers because some can thermoregulate which means the moth can still fly when other insects are grounded due to cold temperatures.

Bees (including honeybees) who generally need milder temperatures to take to the air, may have historically visited less frequently but that’s surely not the case now. Dragonflies are still cruising the skies in October and there’s no sign of frost in the air. Bees carry a much higher percentages of pollen on their bodies, increasing the chance of successful pollination.

This year witch hazel’s early flowering took me by surprise because the insect-damaged leaves are still green down by the brook, but now that I have recorded the bloom date, next fall I am going to sit under one of the witch hazels to see exactly who visits and when.

After pollination, the small gray, seed/fruit capsules that form lie dormant throughout the winter. Fertilization and seed development do not occur until spring. The capsules expel their two shiny black seeds in late summer or early fall, as previously mentioned. Seeds take another year or two to geminate and then (hopefully) begin their lives in fertile ground the way a couple of mine have done. In the wild, witch hazel spreads by underground runners. All three of mine are increasing in size by sending up new shoots.

The abundance of deer is as detrimental to these young shoots and saplings as they are to young cedars. Rabbits can also be a problem.

Many of us know that the volatile oils and tannins found in the bark and leaves of witch hazel are the active compounds that serve as an astringent and are anti-inflammatory. As a child my brother and I used witch hazel to sooth our poison ivy blisters. The scent is intoxicating!

Since witch hazel is starting to bloom while the leaves are still on the branches it is harder to see than it used to be, but if you are walking along the edges of lowland forests, look for an understory tree/bush with a lemony blush around birch and beech, and maybe you’ll find this treasure hidden in plain sight.