It is Martinmas, the old beginning of winter, and the bees have gone into their cluster for the year. I am writing this at the kitchen table, where I have written everything that matters, with the window on the orchard and the hill.
There was a hive in the van when Wystan and I came to the Marches in 1981. I have said so before, and people always laugh, but it is true. It was wedged between the kitchen table and the tea chests, with the entrance stopped up with a rolled stocking, and it travelled a hundred miles without complaint, which is more than can be said for Wystan. I kept bees from the year I was initiated until two summers ago, which comes to fifty years, and I have been asked to write something about them, and about the garden, before I forget it all. I shall try.
The garden by the back door
A witch's garden is not a special kind of garden. It is an ordinary one, kept by someone who pays attention. Mine is a strip of ground between the back door and the orchard wall, about the size of a good carpet, and in forty-five years it has fed the coven's altars, its cakes, its cleaning and a great many of its colds.
There is lavender on both sides of the door, because I like to brush against it going in and out. There is rosemary, which I was given as a cutting from my mother coven's garden and which has outlived the woman who gave it to me. There is sage and thyme, and marjoram for the bees, and mint in an old sink where it cannot get out. There is a bay tree that I have been told for thirty years is too big for the space. There is vervain, which nobody uses but which I keep because it was always there. And by the gate there is the rowan that Wystan planted in our first autumn, because he said that a house of witches without a rowan at the gate would look as if it had something to hide.
None of it needs land. I have known a witch keep the whole of the Wheel on a balcony in Birmingham, in five pots and a window box. What it needs is attention. If you grow even one plant and watch it for a year, you will know more about the festivals than a book can tell you, because you will have seen the year happen to something you are responsible for.
Lavender for the house
People ask what the herbs are for, as if each had a job. Most of them are for looking at and cooking with, which is as good a use as any. But the lavender works.
When the house has had a bad time, I cut four good handfuls of it, flowers if there are any and leaves if there are not, because the leaves do just as well whatever the books say. I put it in a bucket of hot water and leave it to steep while I clean. Then I wash the floors and the doorsteps with it, from the back of the house to the front, and throw the water out into the lane. I did it after Wystan's funeral. I did it after a coven meeting in 1994 that I do not propose to describe. I did it the week a young man came to the outer court with an argument in his heart and went away with it still there. The house smells of lavender for a day, and then it smells of itself again, which is the point.
I do not say it is magic in any sense that would satisfy a scientist. I say that a clean floor and a sweet smell and the act of doing it on purpose have never yet failed to make a house feel like mine again. The younger members have written all of this up properly on the page about protection, and have been kind enough to leave in the bucket.
The bees
I took up bees because my first High Priestess kept them, and she said that a witch ought to have something in her life that cannot be hurried and does not care what she thinks. She was right on both counts.
The bees taught me the Wheel before anyone else did. They fly at Candlemas on any day warm enough, to see what is about. They swarm in May, usually on the one afternoon you have arranged to be somewhere else. They are at their busiest when the lime trees flower at midsummer, and the honey is taken off at Lammas, which is when it should be, at the first harvest. By Samhain they have thrown out the drones and drawn in for the winter, and by Martinmas they are a quiet hum in a box, and you leave them alone and hope.
The honey went into everything. There is a tablespoon of it in the recipe for the crescent cakes on the page about cakes and wine, and for forty-three years that tablespoon came out of my hives. The wax went into candles, and into the polish for the altar, and Corwin has used it on every wand he has had a hand in. When I gave up, two summers ago, because my hands would no longer manage the frames, the hives went to one of the coven who farms in the valley, and they stand at the bottom of the orchard where they always have. I still go down to them.
Telling the bees
There is an old custom, which was kept all over England and the border country and which I have kept all my life, that the bees must be told of everything that happens in the family: births, marriages and above all deaths. If they are not told, the saying goes, they will take offence and leave, or pine and die.
When there was a death, someone would go down to the hives, knock gently three times, and say quietly who had died. In some places a scrap of black crape was tied to each hive, and in some the hives were turned round as the coffin left the house. There was a whole etiquette to it, which varied from parish to parish, and I learned it from an old beekeeper in the Midlands who had learned it from his mother.
Wystan died in January of 2016, in the early morning, in the worst of a hard frost. When the doctor had been and the house was quiet, I put on my coat and went down through the orchard. Everything was white. The hives were silent, the way they are in winter, with a little frost round the entrances. I knocked on each one three times and told them that the master was dead, and asked them to stay, and tied a strip of black ribbon to each roof. Then I stood there for a while, because I did not want to go back into the house.
They stayed. They came through that winter, which was a bad one, without losing a colony, and in the spring they were out on the crocuses in the orchard as if nothing had happened. I do not know whether they heard me. I know that it was the right thing to do, and that I was glad to have something to do with my hands that morning that had been done before me by a great many people standing in a great many frosty gardens.
What the bees are told now
I still tell them things. I told them when Elowen and Corwin were given the coven. I told them when the website opened, which I suspect they thought was a great deal of fuss. I told them on my eightieth birthday, which they took calmly. The young woman who keeps them now has taken up the custom without my asking, and I hear she tells them the news of her own house.
When my own time comes, someone will have to go down to the bottom of the orchard and tell them. I have asked Tamsin, who is the best at saying difficult things kindly, and she has promised. I have told her to knock first.