Signs You’re a Hedge Witch and Readily Walk Between Worlds

The mist filled path leading to an ancient moss-cloaked graveyard. The feeling of your soul lifting from your body and traveling far and wide. Over snow-covered mountains and down into the deepest of seas. A mystical day with tea, meditation, incense, and oils. If you’ve been a fairy-tale-loving, dreamer you’re entire life and now you’re a witch…well, I have news for you. You might be a specific kind of witch…and here we will explore all the signs you’re a hedge witch. Or, at least, that you should try practicing hedge witchcraft.

First, What is a Hedge Witch?

A hedge witch is an individual who practices a specific kind of witchcraft…obviously called hedge witchcraft. Hedge witchcraft is more than just working with herbs and tending a garden. I feel in recent years there was a misunderstanding of what a hedge witch truly is. To clear it up – a hedge witch crosses the “hedge”, so to speak, between the physical and the spiritual worlds. The hedge witch walks that fine line between here and there, and essentially is a liminal being. They might work with spirits from the Otherworld, go on regular journeys or “witchflights” up and down the World Tree, engage in astral projection and lucid dreaming, and much more. Let’s find out if you might naturally be a hedge witch…without even realizing it!

What it means to cross the hedge.

17 Signs You’re a Hedge Witch
Here are a few signs you might be a hedge witch. OR signs you should try actively practicing this form of witchcraft:

1. You’ve always been a dreamer
Ever since I was a little girl, I had vivid dreams almost every night. These dreams took me to other worlds, led me to meet my ancestors and other spirits, taught me how to heal myself, and warned me of things to come. One sign you’re a hedge witch is if you’ve always been an avid dreamer. Dreams of flying, separating from your body, traveling up and down a large tree, and diving down to the bottom of the ocean are all signs that you’re naturally crossing the hedge in your sleep.

2. Spirits are attracted to you
Since you were a child, you’ve had paranormal experiences. Spirits seem to be attracted to you…or perhaps you just sense them easier than others. You’ve never been quite sure. You just know that they are there. And it’s not a specific kind of spirit, it’s likely multiple types. At night, you had dreams of them. Any time you’d go to a haunted or historic location, you get hitchhikers (if you’re not sure what a hitchhiking spirit is, check out our post on types of ghosts). The reason why you are a magnet to spirits is because you perpertually walk in a liminal space between here and there. This is a big sign you’re a hedge witch.

3. Meditating and Visualizing Come Naturally
Visualization (being able to see pictures playing out in your mind) is an important factor of journeying to the Otherworld. Some folks have to practice at visualization, which is totally normal! And some people have the ability without ever practicing. If you find you’ve been able to visualize and meditate with ease, you might be a hedge witch.

4. Liminal Animals are attracted to you

Liminal animals have always been drawn to you. Since you were a child, strays and injured wild animals seem to come to you…drawn to you like a magnet. These liminal (in-between, Otherworldly) animals feel akin to you, since you yourself are Otherworldly. A few examples of liminal creatures include the deer, owl, cat, crow, fox, coyote, horse, and hare. The last time I visited my favorite place in the world, a mountain cabin nestled beside a babbling creek, there was a doe that seemed to come near whenever I stepped outside. I knew she was drawn to me and I to her because of our connection to the spirit realm. If you’ve had this moment, you’ll know. This is a sign you’re a hedge witch.

5. You enjoy studying and using herbs

Lots of witches are all about that crystal life, dawg. But you’ve always been more interested in herbs and that herbal life. You enjoy drinking teas for magical and medicinal reasons, you enjoy growing and harvesting your own herbs, and making magick with earth’s bounty. Some of your favorite herbs probably have otherworldly lore attached to them including the elder, hawthorn, rosemary, oak, thyme, ash, apple, etc.

6. You feel comfortable in liminal places

When you’re friends wanted to go to the city to go shopping and eat at cafes, you felt the urge to travel to the mountains to go hiking and sit by a creek. You’ve always felt more comfortable in liminal places…graveyards, crossroads, herb gardens, abandoned places, shorelines. These are your happy places. You feel at home here because these places are closer to the Otherworld…you’re true home as a hedge witch.

7. You’ve had an interest in fairies and mythical creatures

Fairies, mermaids, and other mythical creatures are your jam. Signs you’re a hedge witch might include an interest in otherworldly creatures like fairies, elves, gnomes, dragons, phoenix, mermaids, and more. As a child, you pretended to be a fairy princess and a mermaid in the pool. You wanted to have a gnome as a friend, more so than an actual human friend.

8. You have Clair abilities

My honest opinion is that most witches have some sort of psychic abilities. These are often referred to as the “6 Clairs” which include clairvoyance (clear-seeing), claircognizance (clear-knowing), clairsentience (clear-feeling), clairaudience (clear-hearing), clairsalience (clear-smelling) and cleargustance (clear-tasting). Signs you’re a hedge witch include having one or more of these abilities…and probably in alignment with mediumship (speaking to the dead).

9. Liminal times call to you

In addition to feeling comfortable in liminal places, those otherworldly times also call to you. Samhain and Beltane are your favorite sabbats. You feel powerful during sunrise and sunset, as well as at midnight.

10. Divination is a favorite pasttime

What easier way to communicate with the other side than to use divination? Your favorite pasttimes are tarot reading, pendulum dowsing, reading omens and signs, throwing bones, reading runes, and scrying in mirrors. All of these practices connect us to the spirit realm and provide a channel of communication. If your favorite hobby is divination, you might be a natural hedge witch.

11.You practice in a solitary nature

You’ve never been one to join a coven or go to a group circle. Your practice is private and deeply personal to you. If someone asks, you typically say you are “solitary” and prefer it that way. Many hedge witches do. Your coven consists of your familiar spirits, animal guides, herb allies, and ancestors.

12. You live at the edge of town

Historically, witches and wise people often lived at the very edge of town. They didn’t like being in the middle of the chaos for multiple reasons. Maybe you find yourself living out in the country or far out at the edge of a suburb or city. Your body and mind crave solitude and quiet over the busy-ness of an urban setting.

13. Healing comes naturally to you

When you were a kid, you instinctively knew how to heal a scraped knee with a bit of aloe vera. You plucked mint from your grandma’s garden and chewed on it to ease a stomachache. How did you know these plants could do this? Healing comes naturally to you. This is one of the big signs you’re a hedge witch.

14. You know there’s an afterlife

You’ve always known there’s something more out there. You’ve always known there’s an afterlife and feel comfort in that. Maybe you’ve had dreams of Heaven or the Summerland. Maybe you’ve even had a near death experience and saw the afterlife yourself. Another sign you’re a hedge witch is that you know of your past lives and even know where you’re going when you die.

15. You ease the pain and uncertainty during major transitions

Speaking of the afterlife, your loved ones and friends come to you when they need comfort during times of great transition. Like death. Like pregnancy and childbirth. You seem to have a peaceful countenance and draw people to you that need advice during these scary times of life. Perhaps you’re even in the medical field and work in labor and delivery OR hospice.

16. You can find lost objects with ease

The hedge witch at the edge of town was frequently sought out for her advice and otherworldly knowledge. One of the things that people asked their town witch to help with was finding lost items. Every hedge witch has their own way of accomplishing this task from using tarot to pendulums, asking the fae, or simply using their clair abilities. If you’re able to find lost items with ease, this might be your sign.

17. The Hedge Witch’s Household Spirits

The typical hedge witch has many similarities to the green and hearth witch including an inevitable connection to the land on which they live. And to the spirits present in their own homes. If you’re naturally a liminal being, you likely already have ancestors, animal spirits, and fairies living in your home. Your home’s spirit itself might already feel a connection with you.

How to Practice Hedge Witchery

You’ve been nodding your head to every single on of the signs you’re a hedge witch. And you’ve decided perhaps this is a practice you’d like to explore. But how do you go about starting to practice hedge witchcraft? First, if you’re already a witch, you’re probably already practicing at least a few of these.

But if not, here are some practices to get you started:

1. Meditation and visualization
2. Shamanic journeying and astral projection
3. Lucid dreaming and recording your dreams
4. Keeping a grimoire to document your otherworldly experiences
5. Work with herbs of a “liminal” nature like mugwort
6. Learning to make and use your own flying ointments
7. Meeting and connecting with otherworldly beings and familiar spirits
8. Spirit work: aiding spirits who come to you for help, eradicating negative energy and spirits from your home or others, communicating with the other side
9. Keeping an herb garden and using your homegrown herbs in your practice
10. Connecting with liminal animals in the physical and spiritual realms
11. Honoring and celebrating liminal holidays and sabbats.

The Hedge – Physical Boundaries

Henges and hedges, dill heaps, stone walls and more have marked the edges of a community. In my own little parish, a couple of years ago we re-established “beating the bounds”, a tradition of going around and adding soil and sod to the “dill heaps”, little mounds of earth that mark the parish boundary. We have two boundaries, one for the lower common and one for the upper common. Looking at old maps, we determined that there were 35 dill heaps for the lower common, and established a day when members of the community could walk the
boundaries and search for these little heaps of earth, to reinstate them and to take care of them every two years. It was also the custom to
bounce the youngest child on top of each dill heap: why I have no idea!

Our vicar blessed the community, the farms and fields, the crops and gardens, the shop and school and then we headed out on a four-mile trek through the landscape. At each dill heap I left an offering of seeds for the local wildlife and the Fair Folk .

To walk a boundary is to find where edges meet. In permaculture, the place where two environments meet, such as forest and field, is where there is the most diversity. Where we find our edges meeting with another, we can gain inspiration, called the awen in Druidry. This is
what relationship is all about: the give and take, learning and working together, finding out how you fit in your own local patch. The threads of awen shimmer where the edges meet. These are liminal places, where one energy merges with another, such as at the seashore, or on a
mountaintop between earth and sky, at the edge of a lake or in a park in the middle of a city.

Hedges are often places that delineate boundaries, and here in Britain there are some hedgerows that are hundreds and hundreds of years old, places of great bio-diversity in an ever-increasing mono-cultured world. Where I live in East Anglia, it is mostly farmland or grazing pasture, and the hedgerows mark the boundaries of the farmer’s land. They are also incredible habitats for nature, wonderful “corridors” that allow animals to travel many miles in search of food or places to live. Hedges that link with each other can stretch for miles, and are places where wild birds, mice, snakes, toads, insects of all kinds and more can thrive. Hedges are also places that can mark the boundary between our garden and the wilderness beyond. I have a hedge all around my back garden, and at the bottom of the garden the hedge marks the spot
between me and a small patch of a wild and wooded area that flows along the small valley’s depression. Often wild creatures come through
holes in the hedge to visit my garden: fallow deer and muntjac deer, badgers, foxes and pheasants. It’s also a highway for local cats to pass
through into the “wilds” beyond. Yet the hedge is not only a boundary in this very physical sense; it is also a boundary between this world and the Otherworld.

Hedgewitch: A Universal Telephone Line

Remember Harvey? And do you recall how he said that his house insurance was cancelled?
Here is the creative way in which he handled it:
“I got this darned letter in the mail that said ‘your house insurance is cancelled because
your windows have peeling paint.’ I’d just finished arranging for a new loan on the house to
fix the place up, and here I get this letter. I was furious, because the insurer knew about the
loan that cleared not thirty days before and that I was planning to use the money to repair the
house. Frustrated, I decided to fix this problem … promptly!
“The day before, I’d purchased an old-fashioned phone at the mall, thinking it would add
a special touch that the wife would like. I marched to the bedroom and took the phone out
of the package, repeating a mantra: ‘Always a blessing.’ I placed the phone on our bedroom
dresser. I didn’t hook the phone up to the house line. In fact, I didn’t hook it up at all. In my
mind, if a cell phone could call my kid, my magick phone could call the universe! What’s the
difference?
“On a notecard, I wrote: ‘I want this house insurance mess fixed immediately, to my benefit.’ I stuck the card under the phone, picked up the receiver, and dialed 911. I said, ‘Hello,
Universe? Harvey speaking. I want this house insurance mess fixed immediately, to my benefit.Thank you for helping me,’ and I hung up. In less than one hour, I had the phone number
of a new agent. In less than twenty-four hours, I’d made arrangements with that new agent to
come view the house. In forty-eight hours, I had a new policy that was cheaper than the old
one, and it covered the exact same thing. And seventy-two hours after that phone call, the old
agent phoned, wanting to fix things, where before when I originally called them they had all
but ignored me.
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“I didn’t stop there. My son has a new job as a salesman, and he was lamenting he needed at
least two sales his first week to show his employer he would be good at the job. So, I went to
the phone in my bedroom, dialed 411, and said, ‘Hello. This is Harvey. I want my son to land
at least two sales today. Thank you,’ and hung up. Sure enough, my son called me that night.
He made his two sales, and by the time the week was out, he’d made a total of four. You can
bet I’m going to keep using my magick phone!”
Harvey’s example shows us that a simple spell can work miracles. Now, let’s check Harvey’s
beliefs so we are all on the same page. Harvey believes that something runs the universe that
is good, caring, and all-loving. He isn’t sure what that something is, but when he is addressing
the universe, he believes that he is somehow aligning himself with divinity. Secondly, Harvey
has always believed that a solution to every problem exists; you just have to find it sometimes.
Therefore, solving this problem was well within both his conscious and subconscious minds,
and calling on a solution was not out of bounds in either type of thought.
To help his mind believe that he could contact the source of all things, he used a vehicle
familiar to all of us: the telephone. Like Harvey said, if he could call his son on a cell, he could
call the source on his magick phone. The act of dialing familiar numbers-911, in most areas
of the United States, is the three-digit Emergency number, and 411 is Information. Harvey
later explained that he used 411 because he wanted the universe to find two people who needed what his son was selling. In both cases, remember, the phone was dead-he never hooked
it up, so he didn’t really call 911 or 411. He just went through the motions. Also, in the desire
for his son to land the sales, Harvey had the greatest confidence in his son’s ability-he’d seen
him perform before, and knew his son could do it-meaning he believed his son was capable
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of landing the sale. As his son’s desire and Harvey’s
desire for him matched, the sales were made in
less than twenty-four hours. When two or more
people are joined together in a single thought
in which they both believe (both consciously
and subconsciously), then that desire will manifest quickly. Finally, Harvey had this to say: “I didn’t
for one moment allow myself to doubt. I just forged
ahead, knowing that I would get what I wanted. I used a HedgeWitch technique whenever I
felt doubt coming on. I said, repeatedly, ‘It ALWAYS works!’”
And it did!
Linking your mind to a physical object to support your belief or matching your words
to something you know to be true is not new. Magickal practitioners have been doing this
for centuries. The trick is that you must believe in what you know to be true. Sounds funny,
doesn’t it? We find an excellent example in mental fluidity when studying Pow-Wow spells
(Pow-Wow is a German-American magickal system). In Christianized Pow-Wow, the practitioner often adds a rider, such as:
“As surely as Mary gave forth Jesus Christ, so will Suzanne experience the fullness of healing in His name.”
For a Christian, this works perfectly, but that isn’t the original text. Indeed, the original
version states rivers and territories that no longer hold the same names, so to update a bit, we
might say:
‘~s surely as the Mosel River flows through France, Luxembourg, and Germany, so too will
Suzanne experience the gentle flow of healing energy until she is completely well.”
Both versions work-again, it is what you believe that counts.

What is a Hedge Witch

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.