A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1068 entries
witch hazel
Witch hazel is a shrub or small tree that flowers in the middle of winter, putting out clusters of thin crumpled yellow or orange petals like torn ribbon on bare twigs, sometimes in frost. The American species flowers in autumn as the leaves drop. The seed capsules ripen a year later and split explosively, firing the seeds up to thirty feet, which is audible in a quiet wood.
Etymology
The witch has nothing to do with witchcraft. It is an Old English word for a tree with pliant branches, related to wych elm and to the verb behind weak and wicker, all of which describe bending. The hazel is a straight comparison of the leaves. So the name means, roughly, the bendy hazel-leaved thing, which is exactly what it is.
Notes
The pliant branches were used as dowsing rods in England, and English settlers carried the practice to America and applied it to the local species, which is how a plant named for bending ended up associated with divining and, by folk reasoning, with witches. The distilled extract has been a standard astringent since the nineteenth century and is one of very few plant preparations still in ordinary pharmacy use.