Mother Bettony’s Green Kettle in Dellriven is a witch’s apothecary on the little high street below the manticore trail, run by a broad, floury-armed woman who has mixed remedies out of her home kitchen for thirty years and this week finally has a shop. Its whole radical charm is that she will tell you exactly what is in the bottle, where the herb was cut, and why. I asked how it works and she looked at me as though I had asked how bread works, and then she told me, all of it, every tonic labeled in her own hand down to the name of the charm, because “a body has a right to know what it is drinking.” In a spring when we have all been asked to trust things we are not allowed to understand, that sentence lands like a cool cloth. “I do not deal in secrecy,” she said, tart about it. “I deal in kettles. You can see the bottom of a kettle.” The shelves hold the rest of the pleasure, charm-knots and hag-stones and iron nails the Dellriven folk were buying by the handful this week, and behind the shop she is knocking out a wall for a supper room called The Long Table, all sawdust and a half-laid hearth for now, meant to serve the plain restorative cooking of the Groves at a price she insists will be “fair or nothing,” with a few seats always kept for anyone who should not be eating alone that night. Go by while the sawdust is still down, ask her what is in the thing before you drink it, and watch how pleased she is that you did.

Rue Ashdown is the Chronicle’s new wellness correspondent for the Whispering Groves pages. Tips, openings, and a good remedy for a cough may be sent to her by owl.