The Alchemist Papers

I’ve been building out a green witch practice in the backyard since last fall. Steve and I have slowly been rewilding with native plants: blackfoot daisy, Turk’s cap, and esperanza, things I had to learn the names of because they kept showing up everywhere I looked. The process has made me realize how much green witch and plant magic content treats the practice as something that happens primarily at a supply shop or in pretty bags of rare herbs.

Most of it’s about correspondence: lavender equals calm, rosemary equals memory, mugwort equals dreams. None of this is necessarily wrong, but it can easily keep you removed from the relationship with them that actually makes their magick potent. The folk herbalists and kitchen witches this tradition is actually descended from worked with what was growing on their land, in their season. Temperance Alden argues in *_Year of the Witch_* that most modern practitioners are using somebody else’s seasonal calendar. I’d add that many of us are also using someone else’s plant list.

So for Central Texas in May: the month of Hawthorn just opened (May 13 in the Celtic tree calendar). Rosemary is ripening in the heat. Prickly pear (which was almost the state flower) is about to bloom for about two weeks. Yarrow is at its peak. Cedar is done releasing pollen. That’s the actual May plant calendar for me right now, and it’s not the one in most guides.

What’s growing where you are?

Photography by Monika Grabkowska from Unsplash+