by Ned Barnard and Pauline Gray

As we bicycled up the hill from Valley Green Inn this fall, we saw native witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) blooming in the Wissahickon woods along the road. Imagine that – a tree blooming in fall!

Witch hazel certainly is an oddball. As John Burroughs wrote: “All the trees and shrubs form their flower buds in fall, and keep their secret to spring. How comes the witch hazel to be the one exception?”

We remembered walking in the Upstate New York woods one November before we knew much about trees. We happened upon a shrub with yellow, falling leaves. Low and behold, when we looked closely, we saw it had flowers with tiny twisting yellow filamentous petals partially obscured by its leaves. We couldn’t believe that this queer shrub was flowering when winter was fast approaching.

Another time in fall when we were writing an entry in a guidebook on witch hazel, we brought a small branch home with us. It had a few flowers and a number of seedpods formed from the previous fall’s flowers. We laid it on a shelf above my desk, but were soon startled by a loud ping sounding across the room. It turned out that a witch hazel seedpod had released its seed like a cork out of a champagne bottle, firing it 15 feet to a green metal light shade over our dining table.

These strange habits would seem to have been enough for early colonists to ascribe something almost supernatural to this shy little tree with less showy flowers than the gaudy Asian spring-blooming witch hazels you can see at the Morris Arboretum.

Settlers from England also associated our native witch hazel’s pliant twigs used by Appalachian dowsers with the very pliant young branches of common hazel native to Britain, also used there for dowsing. In fact, etymologists trace the “witch” in witch hazel back to an Old English word wive, meaning flexible or bendable – not to the Old English word “wiice,” from which “witch” derives.

Given the weird ways of the witch hazel, however, it’s not surprising that early colonists found witchery in this fascinating small, multi-stemmed tree.