“For the witch of pre-modern times, the hedgerow served both as a pharmacy and as a larder, and indeed, no modern witch can advance very far in the craft without at least a gastronomic intimacy with its hips and haws, its sloes and bullaces and crabs. More importantly still, it has always been a magical and poetic inspiration. Whether viewed in spring, when the hawthorn tips punctuate the winter browns with vivid greens, at the height of summer, when the foliage is milk-splashed with elderflowers, in autumn, when every bough is burdened with ripening fruits, both healthful and baneful, or even in winter, when the hedgerow is a gaunt skeleton of plashed boughs, dormant, leafless branches and forbidding, criss-crossed thorns, the living hedgerow is the place where nature and nurture are in equilibrium. In a modern age in which people span the globe in search of the mystical, the witch affirms that the otherworld is never further away than the nearest hedge.”
— Giles Watson, A Witch’s Natural History, pg. 117
