Hedgecraft: How It Works

If you go to the Internet hunting for hedge magic or hedge witches, don’t be surprised when 95% of what you find is related to role playing games. To such depths are the mighty fallen. Well, sort of mighty. Hedge magic was never quite considered to be REAL magic, the kind that sorcerers or black witches could do. Hedge magicians, more often called something like cunning man or wise woman, were people who had two or three seemingly unexplainable skills. Both of my grandfathers were water witches, often called dowsers. They used Y-shaped small branches clipped from live trees and cut to the proper size.

My mother’s father always found the right place to dig a well. The water was sweet and copious. My father’s father, however, had a slight problem: he could find water, but he couldn’t get any information about quantity or taste. Thus, because my mother’s father was dead before the house was built, I spent many years of my childhood drinking lignite-tasting water from a well that often ran dry. My father’s father, on the other hand, knew plants. When we moved to the country for the first time, this grandfather took us out and showed us “weeds” that we could eat. Sourweed you stripped the strings from, rather like celery, and then ate all of it. Sheep sorrel, though it might have been good cooked, was totally unswallowable when we ate it in the woods.

We chewed all the juice out of it and spat the stringy mass onto the ground. Although the number of hedge magicians has plummeted as city and suburb swallow country, you can learn from any good survival manual. The hedge magician can find water in a dry creek bed? So can I, if it’s not too dry. Just dig in the inside corner of an inside loop. Often, by studying the ground, you can see where the water has laid longest on the surface, and if you dig there, you’re likely to find water within two or three feet. That’s hedge magic: the ability to see what others don’t see.