I have had a hand in most of the wands in this coven, and I am asked about them more than about anything else I do. Here, for whoever wants it, is how I go about it.
The wand is the only one of the working tools that a witch is traditionally expected to make from start to finish, and the only one that starts out alive. A knife can be bought and given a new handle. A pentacle can be engraved on a disc from a hardware shop. But the tradition has always held that a wand should be cut by the person who will use it, from a tree they have chosen, and I think the tradition is right. It is the one tool that asks you to be patient in the way that trees are patient, and most of us need the practice.
What the old books wanted
Since I am supposed to be the coven's historian, I will start with the books. The handbooks of ceremonial magic from which the Craft took its tools were very particular about wands. The usual instruction is for a rod of hazel of a single year's growth, cut at sunrise on the day of Mercury with one stroke of a new knife, and then inscribed with names and consecrated with a good deal of ceremony. I have tried the single stroke. With a sharp knife and a thin rod it can be done. With anything thicker than a pencil it cannot, and I have the scar to prove it.
Gardner's witches were much plainer about it. A wand was a rod of wood, cut by its owner, used to call those powers that it would be impolite to summon with a blade. That is what the page on the working tools says, and it is what I go by.
Choosing a tree
People want to know which wood is best. Every book has a list, and the lists disagree. Hazel is the wood of wisdom, from the Irish story of the salmon that ate the hazelnuts falling into its pool. Willow is the moon's tree and the water's, and some teachers will have nothing else. Ash is the great tree of the northern myths. Rowan protects. Oak is strong and slow and very hard to carve. Apple is the tree of the otherworld in the Welsh and Irish tales, and it is a pleasure to work.
My own advice is to forget the lists until you have found a tree you know. The best wand you will ever have comes from a tree you have walked past for a year: one in your own lane, your own park, the hedge at the end of your own garden. You will know its bark, its leaves and when it flowers. Its wood will remind you of a place every time you pick it up. My own wand is apple, from a branch that came out of one of the trees Wystan planted in the orchard, when I was pruning it for him the winter before he died.
One tree needs a word. The old people of this country would not cut elder, or burn it, without first asking leave of the Elder Mother who lives in it, and there are stories of what happened to those who did not. I have made two elder wands, and I asked very politely both times.
Asking
The custom is to ask the tree before you cut, and I keep it. I put a hand on the trunk, say what I want and what for, and wait. I cannot tell you what I am waiting for, exactly. Most of the time it feels like permission. Twice in twenty years it has not, and both times I have walked on and found another tree, and I am not sorry.
A gift is customary, and people leave all sorts: a coin, a ribbon, a little water or milk. As a joiner I would say that the best gift you can give a tree is a clean cut. Cut just outside the swelling where the branch joins the trunk. Do not leave a long stub to die back, and do not tear the bark by letting the branch fall under its own weight. Choose a branch that the tree can spare, or better still one that it would be better without: one that crosses another, or is shading the centre. Cut it like that and the wound closes in a season or two. If you have no saw, take the branch from someone who is pruning anyway. Gardeners and hedgers cut good wand wood every winter and burn it.
When
In winter, between the fall of the leaf and the rising of the sap. Wood cut then is drier, the bark holds on better, and the tree is asleep and minds less. I like to cut at Candlemas or a little before, which this year I did, with three people who needed wands, on a cold bright morning with frost still on the orchard grass. By March the sap is moving and the wood is full of water and will split as it dries.
I do not hold with cutting by the moon or the day of the week, although I know people who do and whose wands are as good as mine. If it matters to you, cut in the waxing moon, which is the usual advice for anything that is to grow in strength.
The measure
The traditional length is from the inside of your own elbow to the tip of your longest finger, and the traditional thickness is no more than your thumb. It is as good a rule as any and better than most, because it makes the wand fit the hand that will use it. A child's wand by this rule is a child's size, and a big man's is a big man's, and nobody has to agree on inches. Cut the branch rather longer than you need, because the ends will check and you will trim them.
Drying
This is where people go wrong. Fresh wood is full of water, and as it dries it shrinks and splits, and if you shape a wand while it is green you will end with a crooked stick with a crack in it.
Leave the bark on. Seal both cut ends with a smear of wax, which slows the drying at the ends where splitting starts. Then put it somewhere cool and dry, away from radiators and out of the sun, and leave it. The old rule for timber is a year for every inch of thickness. A wand is less than an inch, so a summer will do, but longer is better. Turn it now and then. Weigh it, if you are that sort of person, and when it stops getting lighter it is ready.
It always takes longer to dry a wand than to make one. That is not a defect of the process. It is the process.
Making
Strip the bark or leave it, as you like. I generally take it off, with a knife, in long strokes, and then shave the wood smooth with the same knife, and finish it with fine sandpaper. Use hand tools. A wand shaped on a lathe in ten minutes is a very good piece of turning and not much of a wand.
Carve as little as you can bear to. A name, a sign or two at the grip, perhaps a band where the hand rests. The temptation is to cover it, and the wands that have lasted best in this coven are the plain ones. Finish it with a little linseed oil, rubbed in and left to dry for a few days, and then with beeswax. For twenty years I used wax from Hesper's hives, and I still have a block of it in the workshop that will see me out.
Then it goes into a circle and is consecrated, as every tool is, and from then on it is used for nothing else.
Bought wands
Shops sell wands of every kind, some of them very beautiful, with crystals in the end and copper wire round the handle. I have nothing against them, and I have known a witch work well with a wand that came in a presentation box. But I would ask anyone thinking of buying one to try cutting one first. It costs nothing, and it takes a winter and a summer, and at the end of it you will have a tool that you made from a tree you know. There is a great deal of the Craft in that, and most of it is patience.