Definition: The grimoire of the green witch is a handwritten compendium of plant lore, seasonal observations, folk charms, and personal correspondences kept by a practitioner of hedge witchcraft. Unlike ceremonial grimoires that center on angelic names and planetary hours, the green witch’s book records what grows in her bioregion, what the moon did to the nettles last spring, and which remedies actually worked.
The Book That Grew in the Garden, Not the Library
A Roman priest once told a Greek colleague that his gods had no myths, only rituals. The Greek laughed. The Roman was not joking. The green witch’s grimoire operates on the same principle: it is not a revealed text. It is a record of what was tried.
We have handled a few of these books. Not the printed ones sold in occult shops today, but the originals — the ones written in pencil on lined paper, stained with elderberry juice and candle wax. One we saw in a private collection in Cornwall dated to 1889. Its owner had pasted in pressed leaves of self-heal and written next to each one: “works for fever,” “no effect on toothache,” “makes the patient vomit — do not repeat.” That is the green witch’s grimoire. A laboratory notebook, a herbal, and a diary of the land, bound together.
The term green witch itself is modern, popularized in the 1990s by writers like Ann Moura (1996’s Green Witchcraft) and later by Arin Murphy-Hiscock’s The Green Witch (2017). But the practice is older. It descends from the hedge-witch or cunning woman of rural Europe, the person who knew which mushroom stopped a wound from rotting, when to cut the rowan for a staff, and how to speak to a cow that would not give milk. Their books were called herbals, receipt books, or simply “my book of simples.”
Where the Green Grimoire Parts Ways with the Ceremonial Tradition
That history explains why the green witch’s grimoire looks nothing like the Key of Solomon or the Lesser Banishing Ritual. The ceremonial magician works with fixed correspondences, Mars rules iron, Saturn rules lead, the names must be pronounced exactly. The green witch works with what is available.
A green grimoire from the Appalachian mountains will list black cohosh for menstrual cramps and goldenseal for infection. A green grimoire from the Scottish Highlands will list bog myrtle for midges and heather for melancholy. The plants are different. The principles are the same: observe, record, repeat.
What unifies them is the structure. Most green grimoires contain these sections:
- A seasonal wheel, the solstices, equinoxes, and the four cross-quarter days (Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain), with notes on what blooms and what dies at each turn
- A materia medica, plants listed by common name, with their medicinal and magical uses, often cross-referenced by ailment
- A lunar calendar, not the astrological houses, but the practical effects: plant by the waxing moon, harvest roots by the waning, never cut timber in the dark of the moon
- Personal observations, the most important section. “The yarrow from the east-facing slope worked better than the yarrow from the creek bed.” “The charm for warts failed on three people but worked on a fourth who had red hair.” These are not superstitions. They are data.
What the Green Witch Actually Writes Down
The fire is not decoration. It is the altar. But for the green witch, the altar is the land itself, and the grimoire is the map of that land.
We have transcribed a few entries from a 1920s grimoire kept by a woman named Bessie Tregarthen in Devon. She wrote in a school exercise book with a marbled cover. Here is one entry verbatim:
“May 3rd. Cut the hawthorn before dawn. Took the blossoms to the crossroads. Left one for the dead, one for the living, one for the ones not born yet. The old woman said it keeps the fairies from stealing the butter. Did it. Butter was fine. Cannot say if it was the hawthorn or the good weather.”
That is the green witch’s voice. She does not claim certainty. She records what she did and what happened, and she lets the reader decide.
The grimoire also contains charm words, not the elaborate Enochian calls of Dee and Kelley, but short rhymes in the local dialect. A charm for bee stings from the same book:
“Bless the bee that stung me. Bless the sting that swelled me. Bless the herb that healed me. In the name of the three.”
No circles. No banishing. No invocation of archangels. Just the bee, the sting, the herb, and the three, whatever the three were to her. The green witch’s grimoire trusts that the practitioner knows who the three are.
A common misconception is that green witches inherited a continuous, unbroken tradition from pre-Christian Europe. The truth is more complicated and more interesting.
The earliest printed herbals, John Gerard’s Herball (1597), Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physitian (1652), were written by educated men who compiled classical Greek and Roman plant lore with what they observed in English gardens. Culpeper was a radical. He published in English so that “the poor might cure themselves without paying the physician.” His book was the first grimoire of the green witch that could be owned by anyone who could read.
But the real transmission happened orally, and it happened in the kitchen, not the library. A woman in 18th-century Wales did not learn from Culpeper. She learned from her grandmother, who learned from hers. The green witch’s grimoire, when it was written down at all, was written down late, often in the 19th century, when literacy spread and the old ways were already fading.
We know this because of the Folklore Society surveys conducted in Britain between 1878 and 1914. Collectors like Charlotte Burne and Ella Mary Leather went into villages and asked old women to recite their charms and remedies. The women often refused. They said the charm would lose its power if written down. Some relented. Their words were published in the Folklore Journal and later in books like The Handbook of Folklore (1914). Those transcriptions are the closest we have to a green witch’s grimoire from before the modern revival.
The green witch’s book has boundaries. It does not contain:
- Planetary hours or astrological charts, those belong to ceremonial magic. The green witch works by the moon phase and the season, not by the position of Jupiter.
- Demonology or angelic names, the green witch’s spirits are local: the river, the oak, the ancestor who planted the apple tree. She does not call what she cannot see.
- Long invocations in dead languages, the charm is in the vernacular, and it is short. The power is in the plant, not the pronunciation.
- Curses, not as a rule of morality, but as a rule of practice. The green witch lives in a community. She treats the same people she shares a well with. A curse is a rupture that cannot be healed by the next harvest.
This last point is debated. Some historical cunning women did cast harmful magic, the Scottish witch trials record cases of “elf-shot” and “saining gone wrong.” But the green grimoire as a genre is overwhelmingly concerned with healing, protection, and increase. The curses, if they existed, were not written down.
The revival of green witchcraft in the 1990s and 2000s produced a flood of printed grimoires, beautiful books with gilded edges, ribbon bookmarks, and blank pages for the owner to fill. They are sold as “Book of Shadows” journals, and they are the most common form of green grimoire today.
The difference between a 1920s exercise book and a 2020s printed grimoire is not just the binding. It is the relationship to authority. The historical green witch wrote down what she observed. The modern green witch often writes down what she has read in other books. The grimoire becomes a scrapbook of correspondences from Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs (1985) rather than a record of actual practice.
We are not criticizing. We are describing. The printed grimoire is a starting point. The real green grimoire is the one that gets stained, wrinkled, and annotated. The one where the entry for mugwort says “gives me headaches, try valerian instead.” That is the book that works.
FAQ
Do I need a special book for a green grimoire?
No. The historical green witches used whatever paper was available, school exercise books, ledger books, even the margins of almanacs. A blank notebook is fine. The content matters more than the container.
Can I use a green grimoire if I do not have a garden?
Yes. Urban green witches work with potted herbs, weeds growing through pavement cracks, and plants bought from farmers’ markets. The grimoire records what is available, not what is ideal.
Should I copy from other books or write from experience?
Both. Copy correspondences and herbal properties as reference. Then test them and write what actually happened. The second part is what makes it a grimoire rather than a library book.
How do I organize a green grimoire?
By season, by plant name, or by ailment, whichever makes sense to you. The historical examples we have seen are organized by plant name alphabetically, with a separate section for seasonal notes. But there is no fixed rule.
The green witch’s grimoire is never finished. It grows with the practitioner. A plant that worked at thirty may not work at sixty. A charm that healed a child may fail on an adult. The grimoire records the change.
That is why the green grimoire is the most honest of all magical books. It does not claim to be revealed. It does not claim to be complete. It claims only to be true, true to what one person observed, in one place, over one lifetime.
If you want to start one, the rule is simple: write down what you do, and do not lie. The book will teach you what it needs.
For a deeper look at the traditions that shaped the green witch’s practice, see our guide to grimoires and the entry on herbal correspondences. The green witch’s seasonal wheel explores how the eight festivals structure the working year.