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Blackthorn's Botanical Wellness: A Green Witch’s Guide to Self-Care
“Every word of Blackthorn’s Botanical Wellness is carefully thought out and deeply impactful, as Blackthorn offers in-depth information about all of the ways plants and other allies can help us care for ourselves, especially if we are among the traumatized and cast aside. There’s no spiritual bypassing here—just an ever-sweet and profoundly informative book that will throw a considerable, necessary punch into your wellness routine.” —Cassandra Snow, author of Lessons from the A Tarot Workbook for Self-Care and Creative Growth
“The best life starts within, looking outward,” writes Amy Blackthorn in this simultaneously practical and personal guide to wellness and healing. Blackthorn, a master herbalist, aromatherapist, and prolific author, explores methods of wellness management using both mystical and mundane tools and techniques.
Amy’s book features essential oils, plants, meditation, tarot, astrology, and personal sigils tailored to your own specific needs and circumstances. She also describes her own journey to well-being and shares the lessons she’s learned, including how to develop healthy mind-body habits and to stop relying on fear and shame-based rituals for self-care that ultimately produce results that are the very opposite of what is desired. Instead, Blackthorn’s Botanical Wellness supplies holistic solutions that enable you to lead your best life.
According to Blackthorn, self-care isn’t “me, first”; it’s “me, too.” In clear, accessible, friendly language, Blackthorn’s Botanical Wellness teaches the skills to put these important lessons into practice.
“The best life starts within, looking outward,” writes Amy Blackthorn in this simultaneously practical and personal guide to wellness and healing. Blackthorn, a master herbalist, aromatherapist, and prolific author, explores methods of wellness management using both mystical and mundane tools and techniques.
Amy’s book features essential oils, plants, meditation, tarot, astrology, and personal sigils tailored to your own specific needs and circumstances. She also describes her own journey to well-being and shares the lessons she’s learned, including how to develop healthy mind-body habits and to stop relying on fear and shame-based rituals for self-care that ultimately produce results that are the very opposite of what is desired. Instead, Blackthorn’s Botanical Wellness supplies holistic solutions that enable you to lead your best life.
According to Blackthorn, self-care isn’t “me, first”; it’s “me, too.” In clear, accessible, friendly language, Blackthorn’s Botanical Wellness teaches the skills to put these important lessons into practice.
240 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 28, 2026
“Self-care” has become one of those terms that gets used so frequently that it can start to mean almost nothing. It can evoke everything from genuinely necessary care to buying yourself something expensive because an advertisement told you that you deserve it, and somewhere along the way the harder realities of actually caring for ourselves can disappear beneath the bubble baths and scented candles.
Blackthorn's Botanical Wellness takes the subject considerably more seriously. Amy Blackthorn approaches wellness as an ongoing relationship with ourselves that can incorporate plants, essential oils, magic, divination, meditation, astrology, sigils, and ritual, while remaining firmly connected to the realities of having a physical body and an actual life.
One of the ideas I particularly appreciated is that self-care isn't necessarily about putting yourself before everyone else. Amy reframes it as remembering to include yourself among the people deserving of your care, which seems like a small distinction until you realize how many people have learned to treat their own needs as inherently less legitimate than everyone else's. Self-care becomes less about self-indulgence and more about refusing to continually remove yourself from the equation.
I think witches have an additional reason to take that seriously because we ourselves are part of our magical practice. Our attention, energy, emotions, nervous systems, bodies, imaginations, and capacity to focus are involved in virtually everything we do magically. We can spend enormous amounts of time cleansing our tools, feeding our spirits, tending our altars, charging our materia, and maintaining our sacred spaces while forgetting that the practitioner standing in the middle of all of it requires maintenance too.
Amy brings her botanical knowledge into that conversation through plants, teas, aromatherapy, essential oils, and plant-spirit relationships, but she doesn't restrict wellness to herbalism. Tarot, astrology, personal sigils, meditation, trance, ritual, and other magical techniques become different ways of examining what we need and supporting ourselves through it. That breadth makes the book feel less like a collection of remedies and more like a toolkit from which someone can build practices appropriate to their own circumstances.
I also really appreciate Amy's attention to safety. Herbal and aromatic practices sometimes get discussed in magical books as though “natural” automatically means harmless, but plants are chemically active things with contraindications, interactions, appropriate dosages, and circumstances in which they should not be used. Taking plants seriously as magical allies should include taking their physical effects seriously too.
There is also very little spiritual bypassing here, which is refreshing in a wellness book. Magic can support us, ritual can support us, plants can support us, and spiritual practices can profoundly change how we navigate difficult periods, but none of those things require pretending that every problem can be manifested away if we maintain the correct vibration. Amy allows magical and mundane forms of care to coexist rather than forcing the reader to choose between them.
What I ultimately like about Blackthorn's Botanical Wellness is that it treats self-care as a practice rather than an emergency procedure. Ideally, we shouldn't wait until we're completely depleted before deciding that our bodies, minds, emotions, and spirits require attention. Caring for ourselves can become something rhythmic and intentional, woven into ordinary life in the same way that we develop any other meaningful spiritual discipline.
For a witch, that makes self-care something more interesting than an occasional reward for surviving exhaustion. We are simultaneously the practitioner, the instrument, and one of the living beings entrusted to our own care, and neglecting ourselves eventually affects everything else we are trying to cultivate. Amy Blackthorn offers a compassionate and practical collection of ways to remember that caring for yourself isn't separate from your magical life; it can become one of the practices that sustains it.
Blackthorn's Botanical Wellness takes the subject considerably more seriously. Amy Blackthorn approaches wellness as an ongoing relationship with ourselves that can incorporate plants, essential oils, magic, divination, meditation, astrology, sigils, and ritual, while remaining firmly connected to the realities of having a physical body and an actual life.
One of the ideas I particularly appreciated is that self-care isn't necessarily about putting yourself before everyone else. Amy reframes it as remembering to include yourself among the people deserving of your care, which seems like a small distinction until you realize how many people have learned to treat their own needs as inherently less legitimate than everyone else's. Self-care becomes less about self-indulgence and more about refusing to continually remove yourself from the equation.
I think witches have an additional reason to take that seriously because we ourselves are part of our magical practice. Our attention, energy, emotions, nervous systems, bodies, imaginations, and capacity to focus are involved in virtually everything we do magically. We can spend enormous amounts of time cleansing our tools, feeding our spirits, tending our altars, charging our materia, and maintaining our sacred spaces while forgetting that the practitioner standing in the middle of all of it requires maintenance too.
Amy brings her botanical knowledge into that conversation through plants, teas, aromatherapy, essential oils, and plant-spirit relationships, but she doesn't restrict wellness to herbalism. Tarot, astrology, personal sigils, meditation, trance, ritual, and other magical techniques become different ways of examining what we need and supporting ourselves through it. That breadth makes the book feel less like a collection of remedies and more like a toolkit from which someone can build practices appropriate to their own circumstances.
I also really appreciate Amy's attention to safety. Herbal and aromatic practices sometimes get discussed in magical books as though “natural” automatically means harmless, but plants are chemically active things with contraindications, interactions, appropriate dosages, and circumstances in which they should not be used. Taking plants seriously as magical allies should include taking their physical effects seriously too.
There is also very little spiritual bypassing here, which is refreshing in a wellness book. Magic can support us, ritual can support us, plants can support us, and spiritual practices can profoundly change how we navigate difficult periods, but none of those things require pretending that every problem can be manifested away if we maintain the correct vibration. Amy allows magical and mundane forms of care to coexist rather than forcing the reader to choose between them.
What I ultimately like about Blackthorn's Botanical Wellness is that it treats self-care as a practice rather than an emergency procedure. Ideally, we shouldn't wait until we're completely depleted before deciding that our bodies, minds, emotions, and spirits require attention. Caring for ourselves can become something rhythmic and intentional, woven into ordinary life in the same way that we develop any other meaningful spiritual discipline.
For a witch, that makes self-care something more interesting than an occasional reward for surviving exhaustion. We are simultaneously the practitioner, the instrument, and one of the living beings entrusted to our own care, and neglecting ourselves eventually affects everything else we are trying to cultivate. Amy Blackthorn offers a compassionate and practical collection of ways to remember that caring for yourself isn't separate from your magical life; it can become one of the practices that sustains it.
July 16, 2023
I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone who has experienced trauma or chronic illness and is looking for herbal solutions (teas, oils, etc) to compliment therapy and medication. As someone who has experienced both childhood trauma and chronic pain herself, Amy integrates knowledge (and belief) in modern medicine with folk magic wisdom. She provides contraindications for the herbal remedies she recommends, and has a very real-world attitude in her writing and approach. This is a book I will go back to over and over again.
December 3, 2022
Some helpful advice and information, but not a universally engaging book. If you are into tarot, astrology, interacting with plant spirits, magical rituals and uses for essential oils, or developing magic sigils, this book may be great for you, especially if your interest in plants leans more towards those popular for use in commercial essential oils.
December 25, 2023
Overall had some useful information about the medicinal and magical uses for plants and their essential oils. My biggest issue was that it was supposed to be a book about BOTANICAL wellness, but only half of it actually ended up being about plants. The other half was chapters about numerology, astrology, trance ritual, and tarot.
November 20, 2022
I just received the book today and am looking forward to studying it. It is absolutely packed with useful information and organized in a simple, easy-to-navigate format. The illustrations are also quite helpful.
October 30, 2023
Definitely a book to keep on hand. I'm only just learning how important self care is. As Amy explains in the book, if we don't stop to care for ourselves, our bodies will do it for us. I'm eager to start the 28 day lunar self care routine and use the tarot spread that she had recommended!
November 16, 2022
Jam packed with usefuk, detailed information and infused with Amy's humor, I highly reccomend this book!
February 6, 2023
cute :) really affirming discussion of chronic issues and disability in the front, reminded me a lot of being a kid making potions with my friends in the church parking lot lol
September 15, 2023
Really enjoyed the recipes provided
January 21, 2024
This book is good but somewhat repetitive if you’ve read herbalism books before.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews