Root, Branch and Devotion
I am and have always been a hedge witch -
a woman who lives at the edge and whose soul insists on a rooted relationship with place, ancestors, myth and magic. But it has taken a long time to get here, to the House at the Edge of the Woods and to living in such a way that my life and livelihood are aligned with what my being had for so long ached for.
For years I moved around relentlessly.
Like most of us born in this part of the world, I was planted and grown in a culture that craves the fast road and the adventure.. The orientation of my life was seeker, searcher, itchy-footed and always looking for a better day, a better place, a better me.
And twelve years ago my life turned upside down, and the journey here began. In 2014 my husband’s cancer was diagnosed as terminal. He wasn’t going to get better, and all the assumptions my life was propped up with were suddenly laid bare for the spindly, fragile things they really were. I had planned that we would grow old together, that we would live in Switzerland, where we had moved some years before, surrounded by grandchildren. I lived securely in the belief that we had all the time in the world to experience life unfolding together. I had assumed that these things were all a given, an inevitability, and that my happy-ever-after was already in the bag.
The seven years that followed included the heartbreaking year of nursing my beloved through the end of his breathing days on this earth, and the being-on-my-knees, “I can’t go on I’ll go on,” first few years of grieving.
I moved back from Switzerland a year after Richard died, back to Southsea where we still had our family home. I had never wanted to live back in the UK, but I realised that I really needed to be around people who had known me all my life, and for the first time since I had settled by a lake in Switzerland six years previously, I missed home. I also desperately needed people who had stories of Richard, memories that were not just mine — people who could share the responsibility for missing him out loud and re-membering him. My heart was in shatters and I needed to be in places and with people where both our roots went much deeper.
My friends came to help say goodbye to my home — to the room where we had last danced, where we last made love, the place where Richard spoke his last words and took his last breath. I flew back to the UK weeping, and as I stepped out of the taxi a wave of greeting rose up through my body. My feet touched the ground and I was amazed to know that the pavements were glad to see me. The unholy concrete, the streets and the places I said I would never go back to because Lake Geneva and the mountains had my heart and were so much more beautiful — all these places that I had cast off in favour of somewhere more lovely, welcomed me back with warmth and a gentle greeting.
“Hello,” they said. “We are glad you came back. You are home now.”
I wept with relief, and for the first time ever I experienced a deeply felt sense of the truth that everything — every thing — is alive. This wasn’t exactly news to me; I have always known this to be true, ever since I was a small child, but previously the aliveness was only really true for things I considered to be ‘natural’: trees, plants, rivers and mountains — these were all certainly alive.
But asphalt? Concrete? Wooden gates? Door handles? Light switches? Things ceased to be things in that moment and from then on EVERY THING (not things at all in fact) was truly and certainly alive.
Soon after I got home, following instruction I received in a meditation and without knowing anything about taking care of trees, I bought eleven acres of ancient woodland about half an hour out of the city. I spent the next five years living/not living in our old house, often at times undone by grief and finding sustenance in my visits to the woods.
Slowly I was falling into a deep entanglement with the place.
I learnt to coppice, and a community of people that loved and tended to the woods alongside me started to grow. Monthly gatherings, storytelling and ceremony, a green woodworking workshop and community forge — all these things were growing in the place and it was wonderful. Five years went by grieving, weeping, storying and community gathering, shape-shifting and being pulled deeper into a relationship with the woods.
And yet — for some bizarre reason I kept trying to buy houses in other places. I cannot explain what possessed me — probably the death throes of that old itchy-foot syndrome — but I tried to buy three houses in Wales, two at auction, one on the Isle of Wight and another not far from where I eventually landed. Each time I was scuppered, outbid, outmanoeuvred, relieved…and confused.
Eventually I submitted and committed to staying still. I agreed that I would not move anywhere unless it was really close to the woods — a 15-minute drive was my maximum distance. I had already sold my house and was preparing myself for some time living in my van and waiting… trusting that my decision to stay, to allow myself to be rooted and claimed by this place, by these trees and by the people who had started to gather around them, would work out.
And of course, very quickly after I had given up, it happened — a home showed up, just a 15-minute walk from the woods.
I bought it before it even went on the market and I sank my hands into the earth and whispered “thank you.” I gathered up the baskets of apples that were ripening and rejoiced in being able to visit the woods almost daily — tending my garden, growing my food and gathering my herbs.
I was no longer living in the city and just visiting this other woodsy life of mine. Now my hands turn daily to ancient spiritual and ecological practices that connect me to an old, old story of people in this place — things like coppicing the hazel, foraging for mushrooms, gathering nettle seeds and making apple scrap vinegar.
Practices that connect me to my ancestors, to this soil, to the herbs and trees of this particular place — along with rituals and ceremonies that weave me and my days into the cycles of the seasons and the moon. Wild food, kitchen witchcraft, soil tending and beauty making. My hair has twigs in it most of the time and my pockets are full of seeds, bones and feathers.
I have of course grown older in the ten years since my beloved died. I am greyer and my bones and joints often ache after a day working in the garden or with the trees. But I have a community of good people around me and some fine and wonderful women who I sit around the fire with on full moon nights and who help keep my body and heart together.
I am beyond lucky. Of course, I have worked hard to gather them in and to listen and to make kin with this living world. And I have been so unbelievably fortunate too.
I count my remaining years in seasons, harvests of wild garlic and blackberries, delighted every time I get another chance to pick apples from my favourite tree, and grateful every time I walk to the woods after a big storm and see that the old beech tree is still standing.
Work with Emma
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Grief Work
Grief is not a problem to solve - and grief was never meant to be carried alone.
For Those Walking With Loss, 1:1 Grief Accompaniment Services and Grief Retreats. If you are carrying sorrow that has gone underground, you are welcome.
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Mentoring
Mentoring with me is a companionship for the moments when life feels tender, tangled, or on the cusp of becoming something new.
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Bespoke Retreats
Offering room to step out of ordinary time, to be held by the woods, the hearth, and the steady companionship of others. From grief tending, witch‑remembering, to kitchen magic.
All retreats offer ritual, beauty‑making, nourishment, and a deep bow to the living world.