A Hedge Witch is a solitary practitioner of the herbal arts – both, medicinal and spiritual. She is the person you call when you develop a rash or get a toothache, and the doctor or dentist is unavailable. She is the person you consult when strange things go bump in the night, or you are certain that someone just gave you the evil eye.
Her cupboard contains the remedy for what ails you – physical and spiritual.
A Hedge Witch does not belong to a coven. She does not follow the tenets of any sect or organized religion. Her craft is her own – usually handed down to her by family and honed by her own experience and research.
You will not find two Hedge Witches that are alike. Each follows her own path. The common thread that puts us under the heading of Hedge Witch is our herbal remedies and our solitary spiritual practices
The name, Hedge Witch, comes from days of old when villages were separated by forests. The edge of a village where the forest began was called the hedge. In most villages there was an herbal practitioner, who lived in the forest or near the edge of the forest. This was the person the villagers appealed to when there was no doctor, or the doctor couldn’t cure them. The practitioner who lived by the hedge and practiced herbal arts was called a Hedge Witch.
Today, a Hedge Witch may or may not live near the forest, but you likely will find her there at one time or another. Most Hedge Witches have a reverence for nature. They know the medicinal and spiritual properties of everything that grows, and they understand nature’s balance. A wise Hedge Witch enlists nature to deal with natural problems. She harvests more weeds than she pulls. She invites wasps, spiders and other predators to kill unwanted bugs. She uses plants and animals to divert bunnies from the vegetable garden.
But the most definitive characteristic of a Hedge Witch is that she has a remedy for everything under the sun, and much of it was prepared by the light of the moon.
