Witch Hazel

Hamamelis virginiana

Witch hazel is the first featured species of the week that is woody.  It is a shrub or small tree up to 15 feet tall.  It has broadly oval leaves with large rounded teeth.  It has very odd flowers, as seen in the picture below.  The four petals are long, strap-shaped and wavy.  They are bright yellow, sometimes tinged with red.  Behind them are four tiny, triangular, dull-yellow sepals.  Since the flowers often grow in clusters of two or three, they give the appearance more of bright yellow long-legged insects than of flowers.  The flowering time is also unusual; they bloom very late in the fall when almost nothing else is in bloom.  Sometimes you can find one in bloom in the winter with snow around it.

The fruits are also interesting.  They are hard brown capsules that take a whole year to mature.  When finally ready, the following summer or fall, the capsules burst open explosively flinging the hard, black seeds up to 30 feet away.

Witch hazel is in the Hamamelidaceae or witch hazel family.  Sweet gum, a common ornamental tree, is also in that family.  There are only two members of the genus Hamamelis in North America.  Witch hazel is found in moist woods from Nova Sotia and Quebec west to northern Michigan and southeast Minnesota, south to Florida and Texas.  The other species is found only in the Ozark mountains.  Witch hazel is sometimes grown for ornament, especially because its flowers bloom so late in the autumn.  However, a Japanese species, a Chinese species, and a hybrid between these two are all more commonly cultivated than the native.

Witch hazel was used medicinally by Native Americans for colds, fevers, and eye diseases.  European settlers adopted these uses, making a tea of the leaves.  The tea has been used for diarrhea, mouth and throat irritations, rashes, insect bites, and minor burns.  The witch hazel of the drugstores is an extract of the bark used on skin irritations.  Water of witch hazel is a pleasant-smelling extract made from the bark and leaves and is a common ingredient in cosmetics, shaving lotions, mouthwashes, eye lotions, and soaps.

Another use that early settlers made of witch hazel, was to cut branches and use them to look for water by the method of dowsing or water-witching.  This magical use, coupled with the resemblance of its leaves to the leaves of hazelnut, gives the plant its common name.  The genus name, Hamamelis, comes from the name of another plant, not witch hazel, nor even a member of the genus Hamamelis, that was used medicinally by Hippocrates.  Perhaps naming the genus after the plant used by Hippocrates was a way of honoring its medicinal properties.  The species name, of course, honors Virginia where the plant was first encountered by scientists from Europe.