One of the best ways to connect with your intuitive power is to plant a bewitching garden. Spending time in nature this way helps you feel the connection to all living things which in turn gives you a sense of peace, balance, and enchantment of course.
Witch’s Gardens are Traditional
For eons people have been planting gardens with the intention of growing medicinal and magical herbs. In fact, observing, planning, planting, and tending a garden is a witchy thing to do. The more you spend time with your garden, learning about the plants you chose, and connecting with them brings you closer to embracing your magic!
Keep in mind you do not need to have a large outside area to plant your garden. You can use planters and other fun containers. You can even plant magical plants inside. The important thing to remember is you are planting your garden with the intention of health and good vibs.
I had the opportunity to interview two herbal witches—Margaret and Hua. These fine ladies are key characters in my series; The Spellwood Witches. In the paranormal town of Witchland, NH Margaret and Hua share their wisdom of plants and secret potions. Here are some of their witchy tips.
1. Spend Time Outside
One of the best practices to do even before you choose your garden space is to get outside with nature. Walk around and clear your mind before you make any decisions.
Breath and listen to the birds and the insects. Take a look at the sun and feel her warmth permeate your skin, muscles, and bones. Quiet yourself and join your heart with mother nature.
2. Designing Your Witchy Garden
Margaret and Hua are master gardeners and this is one of their favorite parts of creating new herbal beds. They shape their designs partly suing their intuition and partly with their vast knowledge. They suggest if you are a new gardener is to start small. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself and you want to be able to spend time nurturing your plants. When you start small you give the plants the chance to teach you their wisdom as well.
One thing to also consider when designing your magical garden is to look at Pinterest or gardening magazines. Also, if you see a beautiful garden in your travels—by all means stop what you are doing and ask the gardener about her plants. You may find that experienced gardeners love to help those who are starting out.
Margaret and Hua also suggest that while practicing some deep breathing and visualize your layout as you move through the design process.
3. Choosing Magical Plants
This is Margaret and Hua’s favorite part. They pick plants that are key ingredients in their potions and healing formulas and local plants that they know will grow well in their outside gardens. Yet, they experiment with magical plants that are difficult to grow in their greenhouses.
As a newbie they suggest having fun with this part. Talk to your local garden center to learn what plants are hardy enough for your area. Pick up plant tips from those who are already growing some of the herbs you are considering and ask them about their success.
Also pick a few plants to start with. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself because the purpose of planting a witch’s garden is to enjoy nature and embrace your magical intuitive side.
Let’s begin with five of Margaret and Hua’s favorites . . .
Keep in mind where you live will dictate what plants you can grow.
1. Mugwort - Artemisia vulgaris
Magical uses: clairvoyance, protection, purification
Beneficial properties: calms nerves, digestive aid, repels insects
2. Rosemary — Rosmarinus officinalis
Magical uses: nightmare protection, past life recall, ward off evil spirits
Beneficial properties: antioxidant and anti-inflammatory, digestive aid, enhances concentration
3. Hawthorn Berries — Crataegus monogyna
Magical uses: harmony, happiness, faeries, protection
Beneficial properties: antioxidant and anti-inflammatory, may lower blood pressure, reduces anxiety
4. Angelic Root — Angelica archangelica
Magical uses: protect from illness, healing and protection spells, blessings, good luck
Beneficial properties: intestinal gas, loss of appetite, insomnia
5. Black Cohosh — Actaea racemose
Magical uses: love, courage, add to purified water and sprinkle around the room to drive off negative influences.
Beneficial properties: reduces nervousness and irritability, hot flashes and night sweets, sleep disorders
Magical Planting
Margaret and Hua suggest planting using the cycle of the moon. In fact, that’s what witches have done for centuries. The power of the moon is strong and her medicine adds to the potency of the medicinal or magical herbs you choose to plants.
• New Moon to First Quarter ~ When the moon is in this phase consider planting only those plants you are going to harvest the leaves or annuals.
• First Quarter to Full Moon ~ During this time period planting those plants you want to harvest seeds from is perfect.
• Full Moon to Third Quarter ~ A perfect time to plants magical plants that you will harvest their roots.
• Third Quarter to New Moon ~ This is not a time for planting. However, this is the perfect time to connect with your plants with care. You will be weeding, harvest, drying, etc.
4. Talk to Your Plants
As you are tending your garden whether you are plants, weeding, or harvesting it is important to talk to your plants.
We have people who walk by our gardens and hear us talking to our plants and kind of look at us funny, shared Margaret. Hua and I find this to be the perfect opportunity to educate people. Especially if they stop to ask us what we are doing—we tell them studies show that plants grow better when spoken to with encouragement.
5. Time to Gather
If you really want to follow the witch’s tradition of gardening harvest your plants during the moonlight. This is healthier for them because they are not out in the scorching sunlight possibly withered and dry. When you pick during the moonlight you can add your own witchy rituals and pick beautiful and luscious plants.
6. Potions and Lotions
After you have fully harvested your magical plants it’s time to make your potions and lotions. You can do so much with the herbs you grew. In fact, you may even want to plan your garden with plants that are specific for a certain lotion or herbal tea blend.
As you spend time in nature in your witchy garden be open to the glorious feeling when your stress melts away and you feel in balance with your soul—that is magic and yes wit
The Spellwood Witches
Book One
Melanie Snow
Genre: Paranormal Cozy Mystery
Publisher: Spirit Paw Press, LLC
Date of Publication: September 8,
2020
ISBN: 978-1-7324375-6-2
Number of pages: 220
Word Count: 46,311
Cover Artist: Molly Burton
Tagline: Her mentor died fighting
to save an enchanted forest. Can she solve his murder before she’s bewitched?
Book Description:
Can she awaken her dormant powers
and stop a desperate killer destroying the forest?
Sarah Spellwood feels she’s hit
bottom. Divorced and jobless, she relocates to the enchanting village of
Witchland intent on solving the murder of her late mentor. But as she pursues
clues buried in the man’s fight to save the endangered forest-dwelling lynx,
she makes an enemy of a ruthless land developer.
Encountering fairies in the
woods, Sarah discovers she’s been repressing unique gifts passed down from her
ancestor and founding witch, Lativia Spellwood. But though she can now hear her
deceased friend’s dog speak, she isn’t sure her abilities are enough to expose
the greed and corruption covering a killer’s lies.
Can Sarah work with the magical
beings to bring a murderer to justice?
Witch’s Tail is the charming
first book in the light-hearted The Spellwood Witches cozy mystery series. If
you like paranormal puzzles, delightful canine companions, and environmental
enlightenment, then you’ll love Melaine Snow’s wagging-ly fun whodunit.
Prologue
Lativia
Spellwood sat on her ghostly throne of branches on the summit of Mount
Katribus, with many other ghosts swarming around her reminiscing about life and
drinking wine.
The ghosts of
Witchland residents always came to this clearing after they died to stay near
Lativia for guidance and to wait until they were ready to pass on to the
afterlife. Lativia had been dead for hundreds of years but had still not passed
on, for her work overlooking Witchland and its forest was not yet done. One
day, it would be, and she was beginning to welcome that time, for she was
growing very tired.
A tiny troop of
Leekin faeries moved about the arms and legs of Lativia’s throne, placing
flowers into the holes between the woven boughs. They did that every day, as a
way to honor her as Queen of the Forest.
Lativia sipped
from a goblet of ghost wine, enjoying the blue fire as it spread down her
throat, engulfing her in tingly warmth. Being a ghost was always cold; the
magic wine was one of the few momentary sources of warmth that she could
cherish.
“What else do
you need, my queen?” chirped one of the Leekins, buzzing on tiny brown wings
before her nose.
Lativia smiled.
“I think it’s time I checked on Sarah, don’t you agree?”
The Leekin
nodded excitedly and flew off into the woods. A huge bunch of Leekins soon returned,
flying in formation to carry the weight of a glowing crystal ball. They lowered
it to Lativia’s lap, where it sank through the spectral outlines of her legs.
Lativia could pass through things, and things could pass through her, for her
physical body was long gone and all that remained was her powerful soul
Lativia smiled
even more broadly and began to draw her transparent ghostly hands over the
ball, summoning the blood bond she shared with her descendent, Sarah Spellwood.
Gradually, the
fog inside the ball began to clear and an image of Sarah’s frizzy explosion of
red curls filled it. Lativia drew back a few feet with her mind and saw Sarah
was at a coffee shop ordering a vegan sandwich. Sarah’s love and respect for
animals always made Lativia proud. She noticed there was a conspicuous pale and
indented band of skin on Sarah’s ring finger where her huge diamond wedding
ring had once been. “That no-good husband of hers is finally gone!” Lativia
crowed with delight. But then she noticed that there were bags under Sarah’s
eyes, the bags of someone who had been up all night crying. Sarah must be
heartbroken, Lativia thought with a heavy heart.
The barista
serving Sarah froze when she saw Sarah’s last name on the credit card receipt.
“Um, are you related to . . . ?”
Sarah drearily
raised her hand. “Yep, I’m descended from Lativa Spellwood.”
“That’s amazing!
I mean, have you ever been to Witchland and looked at the Lativia memorabilia?”
The barista’s pigtails wiggled with her excited body language, and Lativia felt
a swell of pride that people still remembered and even revered her. It had been
four centuries and she was still honored as the greatest witch of New England,
the one who had turned into a wolf and fought her way free of her captors at
the Salem Witch Trials!
“Yep,” Sarah
said, her voice full of annoyance. It was clear she was ready to dash out of
the coffee shop.
As good of a
lawyer as Sarah was, Lativia noticed how awkward she was around most people,
and how little she liked to disclose personal details, especially of her
magical ancestry.
Sarah was a
woman of facts and logic, which is why she fought the magical powers pulsing
through her like a current, trying to pull her back to her destiny. Her
resistance to her true self and her stubborn adherence to logical facts made
her unpopular with many people. Lativia yearned to watch Sarah blossom into her
beautiful potential.
“Don’t you see?”
Lativia cried. “You are not meant to be in New York! You should be here,
following your calling, completing my work as a witch! You’re not happy there!”
But Sarah couldn’t hear these words.
“Yes, yes,”
several Leekins agreed. A ghost who was standing near Lativia also nodded his
head.
Sarah trudged
out of the coffee shop, carrying her drink and the sandwich in a paper bag. A
man in a trench coat bumped into her, and she hastily checked her pockets to
ensure he had not pickpocketed anything. Then she continued on to her office, a
massive steel gray prison with spikes in the window ledges to repel pigeons. There
was no sign of life anywhere but for the scraggly maple planted out front of
the building and a few waxy tropical plants blooming inside the lobby. Lativia
groaned, feeling the despair and coldness of the place.
“It’s time for
you to come here, to your destined home,” Lativia declared. “My Leekins have
told me about the Hunter tracking lynx and the land surveyors, and I sense that
there is about to be trouble in the forest.”
At the mention
of the Hunter, the Leekins gathered around her throne began to turn blue and
tremble in terror.
“I am not strong
enough to fight these battles much longer, so I need you to come home, to come
into your true self. Your marriage fell apart of its own accord, and I sense
your job is about to unravel on its own, too. You can’t fight destiny,” Lativia
said, giving the group of hovering Leekins their crystal ball back and shutting
her eyes. “I could use magic to bring you to your destiny sooner, but it is
evil to interfere with one’s life that way. I can only hope you don’t take much
longer.”
She opened her
eyes as the Leekins cried, “We need her!”
About
the Author:
Melanie Snow is the pen name for Wendy Van de Poll, a bestselling author, pet loss grief coach, and animal medium. She is the author of The Spellwood Witches, a paranormal cozy mystery series.
Melanie Snow is the pen name for Wendy Van de Poll, a bestselling author, pet loss grief coach, and animal medium. She is the author of The Spellwood Witches, a paranormal cozy mystery series.
Her books weave together positive
magic, snarky forest faeries, and insightful animals with fun and eclectic
humor. True life adventures and intuition are woven into her stories laced with
unbridled imagination.
She has been followed by wild
wolves in minus 60 degrees, hissed at by a mama bobcat, and played ball with a
wild owl—among other animal encounters.
Find out more about her work:
1 comment:
Margaret and Hua , Witchland's Herbalists would like to thank you for sharing their wisdom with your followers.
Love,
Melanie Snow
Paranormal Cozy Mysteries, Animal Communicator and Medium
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