Winter Witch Hazel

Just when winter couldn't get any more bleak, look at what started to bloom this past week! Witch Hazel (Hamamelis family) is the star of the winter garden. It explodes with flowers in mid January to early spring and keeps its blooms long after you have been distracted by other fun goings on in your spring garden. When the sun is out, you'll smell the sweet scent of the blooms from a number of feet away - it often turns heads as people wonder where that sweet smell is coming from.

The plant itself is very hardy - it grows well in many zones, depending on the species. It's very cold and drought tolerant (once established) and has wonderful fall color and growth habit. There are many varieties available on the market now, with the main distinction being an American or Asian species. Check out Paghat's fantastic description of American witch hazel here.

Many of the witch hazels you see around the Northwest are the intermedia species, which is actually a hybrid of two other popular Asian species: the mollis and the japonica. Yellow seems to be a common color, but my favorite is certainly the orange witch hazel 'Jelena.' Unfortunately, my first witch hazel was a Jelena that ended up dying, probably because I didn't remove all of the clay from the root ball when planting. That was an expensive and sad mistake!

Witch hazel is one of those plants that has a long and storied history worth knowing about. To me, one of the most interesting things about witch hazel is the origin of its common name. You might be thinking to yourself that it refers to a witch as in Sabrina or Tabatha. It most likely actually refers to the age-old practice of "water witching" or "dowsing" - when someone would walk holding a forked branch of H. virginiana witch hazel to locate underground water sources. "Wych" is an Anglo-Saxon term that means "bend," which is exactly what the branches do when you walk over an underground water source. Again, Paghat has a wonderful description of the origins of the name and uses of witch hazel. Keri's grandfather used to 'witch' wells in the Yakima valley in Washington state, so the practice has always been fascinating to me. We just returned from her grandmother's wake last week and were looking through pictures of her grandfather standing in a mountain of water shooting upward from the ground at one of the locations he found. Amazing. If we ever run out of rain in the PNW, stop by and we'll pull off a branch to find some water.

Images from a winter walk in the Washington Arboretum last year: