Our Poison Lady Foxglove

Eye-Opening Life Guidance from the Plant Priestesses....

Early in 2022 I poisoned myself with Foxglove.

These magical ladies call you to them in this way.

That feverish, dystopian night granted me a vision.

A completely new way of seeing that changed me.

Let me set the bigger context….

When I was pregnant with Orphea in 2019, the land had an outpouring of pink and purple foxgloves

The fairy bells of witch tradition were tinkling and singing my new baby into being.

It was so effusive, even the FedEx guy noticed and commented on it to me.

We were surrounded by a profusion of magical, enchanting, poison flowers.

I was also remembering that I was a Poison Plant Priestess, across many timelines.

It was the biggest homecoming of my life.

The Annointrix lineage is a Poison Path.

Balms, unguents, potions, tinctures.

Oils that take you into Faery.

The Alabastrum of Magdalene.

Back to that night….

As soon as Orphea started to walk, the Foxgloves became a worry.

They were swaying everywhere, bright like candy – and she was curious.

They could be deadly poisonous, but I didn’t have the heart to destroy them.

She knew not to eat them, but of course tiny fingers wanted to touch.

We warned her off so that she never went near them…until…

One day, she toddled in with a big bunch of foxgloves in her hands.

She beamed with pride, as their roots dangled down and dirty.

I didn’t want to make a big negative reaction about it,

As she was holding the stems and not the dangerous bells.

I decided to make it a game and a magical ritual.

I took them out of her hands, and into the kitchen.

Then asked her to wash her hands with soap and water.

Next, she pulled up her step stool as I got out a large decorative bowl.

I filled it will water and took a wooden stick to stir it with.

One by one I pulled each fairy bell away and dropped it in the water,

Chanting a made-up rhyme of honor to Lady Foxglove,

And stirring the potion round and round with my stick,

Until Orphea grabbed it and stirred too, chanting along.

We continued making our pretend flower potion….

The Witches Microdose of death….

And the air shifted, that strange shimmering arrived.

It was dark by now and Orphea’s attention had moved on.

I quietly took the potion and poured it out in a dark corner of the garden.

When I came back inside, I noticed my heart was beating fast and strange.

I knew Foxglove was poisonous to eat, but I had picked them before for Spring bouquets, with no ill effect, and I did not think there was any harm in just touching the flowers.

I did not know that fairy bell by fairy bell as I had picked them, and slid my fingers into those pink and purple pouches, chanting and charming, that I had been slowly poisoning myself and had only gone and called the Great Lady to me.

My condition started to deteriorate, until eventually Azra called the toxic plant hotline for advice, and was informed that I was probably not at risk of death, and just to ride it out.

I felt her with me.

This is the thing to know about Feminine Magic, and the witch traditions and faery craft.

In the modern world we hear a lot about psychedelic medicines from the plants of Equatorial places.

These plants are edible (in the right preparation and dose) and bring a seeing of visions and images.

The old boreal forests of Europe and the near east do not take you on such a wild visual ride.

Their roots grab you, and trip you over, and bring you down into the cathonic (cath-olic) underworld.

It is meant to be dystopian and strange and enchanted, like Alice in Wonderland. You are micro-dosing death.

In the Witches Ointment the poisonous plants are applied in oils onto the skin – through touch.

The dose is everything. Entire lineages of women guarded these recipes.

They were there silently working at every great religious scene.

Stooped over the brew at Eleusius; in the cave with Jesus.

Poison. Death. Rebirth. Vision.

New eyes to see. World bridging.

To die and come alive again.

A primeval mystery of the plants.

Guarded by Poison Priestesses.

Devotees of the Great Lady.

A Meeting with a Grande Dame….

With my vision fading, my heart racing, my mouth utterly dry and my body shaking, I knew there was only one thing to do.

I walked out into the cool night air, and stumbled through the moonlit darkness towards the dense Foxglove patch.

Slowly, I laid down on the cold, damp earth, with my head near to the roots of the flowers and closed my eyes.

I’ll be honest, I was scared. Cold, shivering, alone. It was dark. Poison was inside me, and I was afraid.

I knew that she had called me, or I had called her, and that the only way out was….through her magic.

The silence was fibrous, and stretching like threads in my head and I was softly singing to her and humming.

Maybe it was my eyes, or the dark light, or a mirage, but those Foxglove grew a lot taller and shinier. Like giants.

Then she arrived. She was dressed in silver and pink and starlight.

You don’t see her with your two eyes.

My god, she is an Enchantress.

I had never felt such a ravishing, magical, presence.

A magical vision granted….

There was a problem in my life I had been worrying like a bone.

We had been called to live in the ancient Appalachian mountains…and yet.

For over a decade we had not been able to find the right land to buy.

I dreamed of a white farm on vast open land with a river in the valley.

It was nowhere to be found and now I had a baby and a root to plant

Instead, we’d been renting our small old log cabin for almost a decade…

It was beautiful, but not big enough, not spacious enough, not dramatic enough.

It was a sweet homestead on 18 acres, with only 5 of them immediately at hand.

It rested on a bony ridge, above a cove, at an awkward angle, turning away from the world

No river, not even a proper creek, inside a tree womb – with a neighbor behind the bushes

That night as her glittering mauve-light descended into me….she showed me a possibility…

It was a wonderous place, an elphame of walled gardens, small corners, nooks, crannies, gates.

Like an ancestral English garden taken root in Appalachia, where stone walls stood still and spoke…

Wild flowers waved, and crooked pathways snaked around labyrinth plant paths of soft leafy scents

It was a place to get lost in, not to find yourself, it was a place of imaginal fancies and forbidden tea

I had always seen ‘retreat’ places or magical lands as….big, open, empty, vast, impressive, expansive.

She showed me something different. The beauty of small, secret, hidden, walled, private, contained.

With a glamourous demeanor she laid out for me the vision of a Wytches Garden (spelled that way)

They were lost she told me, in the vast, empty expanse of forgetting and needed to take root again

I could feel through her petalled eyes the magical medicine of enchanted spaces of feminine magic

Unseen by prying eyes, a door opened into a marvel of small treasures and pleasures with no expectation for big visions, over epic ranges and far-flung views, but with wily eyes of a witch with near sight who stares right into you.

I then mounted her glitter-pink-silver stead and rode with her into the enchanted gardens of Otherworld to learn some more.

Funnily enough, I later discovered that the women of magic in Yorkshire, my motherland, used to drink a special Foxglove tea blend and go out into the forest for insight together.

Lady Foxglove has been whispering to my kin for centuries.

Sacred union of magic….

After Orphea was down to sleep, my husband came out to sit with me a while….the moon was slit silver in the sky

From my supine position amongst the moss and the Foxgloves, I said to him “can you feel this…can you feel her?

“Yes” he replied, sitting down near me, transported into his own reverie, where fairytales are lore not fantasy.

He was amazed that I was somehow pulling him into this in-toxic-ated realm of poison magic, earth’s secret stash.

We sat there for a long while, palpably charmed, until the beautiful haze started to fade, and I got a headache and needed a hot drink.

I stumbled up to bed feeling like I had been hit by fairy lightning and a strange new way of looking at the world.

I tossed and turned all night, with my nervous system riding an elemental roller coaster of terrible highs and lows.

I woke up the next morning, feeling fine but a little jaded and tired. Like I’d been wired into another dimension.

But the vision was clear for me of the Wytch’s Garden – and that somehow, Lady Foxglove had personally chosen our humble abode to make herself at home, and spin into being this very feminine space for a very fine frequency to return to the world.

So later that year, we finally bought our ‘new’ home after ten years of loving her and living with her, and set about to see if we could create an Appalachain enchanted garden from this small patch of humble soil and a tiny woodland of trees.

I remember Lady Foxglove today, as I look around and think “what were we thinking of?” as the muck and mess of creating something (always so much longer than you thought) is all around me as this garden very slowly starts to take shape…

We have named it “Wisewood” – where my mum was born and raised in Loxley, as was Robin of Loxley, more famously known as Robin Hood with his magical Maid Marion, who made a world in the forest and practiced the old, wise magic.

I want to create a haven for magic, the wonder of enchantment, for the breath of nature, and a world that is beautifully small, contained, curated.

This is the heroine’s place, where we don’t look out onto the horizon for answers, but open the doors inside our own self.

The world is getting so big we are unravelling at the seams and falling apart, and spilling out. We must claim our terrain.

As I write this, I see in my mind’s eye my maternal grandmother, bent over, wringing her hands with the words “humble, humble, mustn’t grumble,” she is smiling, small and shyly but also wily, with big knowing, inviting, whirlpool eyes.

Women have always hidden their magic.

It’s our nature. It’s our body.

Come inside, if you dare.

The pathway is dark and constricting…

It can also be enticing…

You may want to turn back,

Think you went the wrong way…

You are on the right track my dear,

Walled gardens contain worlds.

And birth worlds.

In secret.