How to Use It
Witchcraft & Folk Magick
- Purification: add a few drops to a bowl of spring water and wipe down altar tools, doorknobs and mirrors before a new working.
- Attraction: dab the oil on the wrists and behind the ears before a date or meeting, in the old tradition of wearing lemon verbena to be found pleasing.
- Fresh-start candles: dress a white or yellow candle from wick to base to clear out stale energy after an illness, a move or a quarrel.
A Simple Working
- Set a white chime candle in a holder on a clean plate.
- Put three drops of lemon verbena oil on your fingertips and rub them together.
- Dress the candle from the wick down to the base, saying what you are clearing away.
- Ring the plate with a circle of sea salt.
- Light the candle and let it burn down completely.
- Gather the salt and wax remains and throw them out at a crossroads or in running water.
Pairs Well With
- A white chime candle: a quick, clean flame for purification.
- Sea salt: to ring the candle and absorb what is cleared.
- Lemon balm: a second lemon-scented herb for a sweeter cleansing bath.
- Rose oil: to turn a clearing into an attraction working.
What You Receive
Lemon Verbena oil in 2 dram, 1 oz and 16 oz (1 lb) sizes.
Origin & Lore
Lemon verbena (Aloysia citrodora) is a woody shrub native to Argentina, Chile and Peru, carried to Europe by the Spanish. Its leaves were brewed as a tisane, laid in linen chests and sewn into sachets, and the scent became a favourite of nineteenth-century perfumery and the cottage garden.
Crush a single leaf of lemon verbena and the scent is sharper and sweeter than lemon itself, which is why perfumers and gardeners have chased it for three hundred years.
The genus is named Aloysia in honour of Maria Luisa of Parma, wife of King Charles IV of Spain, and the plant is still sold in older English herb books as ‘herb Louisa’. Scott Cunningham’s widely used herbal places it under Mercury and Air and lists it for purification and love, which is where most modern witchcraft correspondences for it come from.
Did You Know?
In Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, lemon verbena is the scent Scarlett O’Hara always connects with her mother, Ellen.



