Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic
Like the best hybrids, the Silverton Estate’s Medieval Monastery Garden is a liminal space where growth thrives with both structure and a bit of the wild, where roots connect past to present. Where boundaries blur.
Stella, an adoptee, begins to sense her half-fae nature as her metaphysical abilities awaken, stirring longing and confusion about her place within her extended family. From her omniscient–transcendent perspective, she explores identity fracture, the ethics of adoption, the right to one’s true story, and the tension between what we observe to be true and the myths we choose to believe.
In this enchanted tale, ancient cedars serve as anchors, black roses mark thresholds, and morning glories bloom between worlds. The narrative shifts, like the Cedar Dryad herself, between clarity and lyricism, between forest wilds and manicured medieval garden, weaving botanical wisdom, fae magic, folklore, and the ache of adoption, identity, and the longing to belong.
Through the Yew Hedge is a coming-of-age story for anyone who understands what it means to live between worlds: caught between love and loss, concealment and radical truth, Stella must claim her entire inheritance.
Magical Realism and the Language of Adoption
As an adoptee, I’ve found that writing magical realism helps illuminate psychological experiences, offering a way to explore interior fragmentation, inherited trauma, and identity formation through images and metaphor. When I sat down to tell Stella’s story, I realized that the stark language of adoption law, severance, sealed records, and legal erasure didn’t capture the full texture of what it feels like to live inside that rupture. What little I know of the clinical language doesn’t hold the dislocation, the sense of being divided from yourself, the strange double-consciousness of belonging and not belonging simultaneously.
That’s when magic entered the telling.
Through the Yew Hedge is my attempt to make visible what is masked in infant relinquishment and the transfer of the child to strangers, the pre-verbal fracture that occurs when origin stories are stolen and sealed. My young adult experience was marked by identity bewilderment and fragmentation, a nonsensical state of straddling two worlds: one lacking an intrinsic bond and one entirely faceless and disembodied. Yes, that was a scary story!
Many adoptees will recognize this duality. I hope I can give a voice to these sensations where diagnoses and ordinary language fall short and can be hard to articulate to others.
The Story as Framework
When botanist Sarah Caldwell finds an infant in the fairy ring of Silverton Estate on a Winter Solstice morning, she names her Stella and raises her with love and scientific curiosity. But Stella possesses “mirror-sight,” the ability to see across time and through reflections, to perceive the thresholds between worlds that others walk past without noticing. I use this as a central metaphor for the adoptee experience: the sense of holding multiple realities at once, of perceiving fractures in identity that others cannot see, of living in a kind of heightened perception that can feel isolating.
Through Stella’s journey, the story explores several interlocking themes:
Severance and Reunion
At fourteen, Stella meets her first mother, Ellen, whose own mirror-sight shaped her impossible decision at a bus station on a winter morning. The reunion doesn’t erase the years of separation, and it doesn’t resolve the grief. But it begins the work of integration; the slow process of learning that you can love the person who raised you and grieve the person you were separated from, that these two truths don’t cancel each other out.
What I wanted to show was reunion as it actually is: complicated, tender, sometimes awkward, and necessary. Ellen is not the savior who “makes it all better.” Sarah is not the villain who stole Stella’s life. They are both women who loved Stella in the best ways they knew how, within impossible constraints. Stella’s task isn’t to choose between them. It’s to learn to hold them both. That is no easy task.
Identity and Wholeness
Stella carries three names: Ruth Ann (the identity sealed away at birth), Stella (the name given to her by the woman who raised her), and Questa (the name she chooses for herself, albeit with guidance from her fae guardians, her own reclamation). Her movement toward wholeness reflects what happens when an adoptee finally gains access to her full origin story. It’s not that one name is “real” and the others aren’t. They’re all real. They all matter.
Withholding a person’s vital information, whether for convenience, protection, or by state seal, is an injustice with lasting psychological impact. When Sarah keeps the adoption papers hidden, she believes she’s protecting Stella. But what Stella experiences is a theft of self-knowledge, a message that parts of her own story are dangerous or shameful. The book doesn’t ask us to condemn Sarah for this. It asks us to see the cost clearly.
Adoptive Parenting Across Difference
Sarah struggles to support her adopted daughter’s abilities, which she cannot fully understand. As a scientist, she measures, documents, and tries to make sense of Stella’s unusual gifts. But Stella’s mirror-sight isn’t a disorder to be managed. It’s an inheritance to be cultivated. Sarah has to learn this slowly, through watching her daughter work with Cedra, the Dryad guardian who understands what Sarah cannot.
This mirrors what many adoptive parents face: the reality that your child’s inner experience may remain partially opaque to you. You cannot access their genetic history, their family patterns, the invisible inheritances they carry. You can’t know what triggers might surface years later, the sensitivities that might emerge from their neonatal loss. We hope to have the space and support for naming those experiences without shame or disappointment, without them being explained away.
Patterns
Ellen’s uncontrolled mirror-sight shaped her entire life and her devastating choice to place Ruth Ann. What goes unnamed in one generation often reappears in the next, demanding acknowledgment. Stella inherits not just Ellen’s gifts, but also the weight of the decisions Ellen made under conditions of crisis.
This is where the magical realism deepens the story. The ability to see across worlds isn’t just poetic. It’s a real inheritance that carries real consequences. And learning to work with that inheritance rather than running from it or denying it becomes part of Stella’s healing.
Belonging Without Choosing
The story resists “either/or” thinking. It imagines belonging, not by choosing between identities, but by building bridges between them. To learn to hold both truths at once. Stella doesn’t have to decide whether she “really” belongs to Sarah or to Ellen. She belongs to both. She is both Ruth Ann and Stella. And when she chooses the name Questa, she’s not erasing the previous names. She’s integrating them.
This matters because so much adoption discourse forces people to choose: Are you grateful? Are you angry? Do you belong to your adoptive family or your birth family? The real answer is always more complicated. The real answer is yes to all of it.
The Garden as Sanctuary
Elizabeth Silverton’s medieval monastery garden serves as both a literal sanctuary and a symbolic container. It is a space intentionally designed: water systems, plant selection, and architectural intention for those with heightened perception. Where differently abled is not a pathology but a gift. Where unusual ways of seeing can be cultivated rather than suppressed.
I spent fifteen years working as a horticulturist, and I learned something essential: plants respond to attention, to intention, to the person tending them. A garden isn’t passive scenery. It’s a relationship. The Victorian botanist, Elizabeth, understood this. She designed The Garden not just as a beautiful space, but as a healing space, where the plants offer solace and comfort, medicine in the ancient monastic tradition. Where water channels mark thresholds, and the cedars hold memory.
Nature becomes teacher, witness, and stabilizer in the narrative. The cycles of growth and dormancy help us understand grief and healing: the slow return of what seems lifeless, from the patient roots beneath the surface. The healing that happens in the quiet tending, in the presence of something older than one’s own confusion.
For the Adoption Community
The adoptee’s dual consciousness. The simultaneous belonging and not-belonging. The feeling that you’re never quite fully here or fully there. Stella’s mirror-sight literalizes this: she can see both worlds at once, but moving fully into either one requires grounding and intention. This is the psychological reality of many adoptees: you’re always perceiving multiple realities. The work is learning not to get lost in the reflections.
The adoptive parent’s navigation of unknown, invisible inheritances. Sarah can provide love and protection and botanical expertise. But she can’t know Ellen’s story. She can’t fully understand the fae inheritance. She has to hold space for knowledge that will always be partially opaque to her. This is the actual work of adoptive parenting across difference; not trying to fully understand your child’s invisible inheritances, but creating a sanctuary space for them to be explored and honored.
The birth parents’ impossible choices were made under conditions of crisis or coercion. Ellen’s decision to place Ruth Ann comes from desperation, from the whispered promises of the fae that her baby will be safe and found. She doesn’t have access to the information or resources that would have allowed her to parent. The story doesn’t excuse the systems that created this impossibility. It honors Ellen’s humanity and her ongoing love.
What wholeness can look like when identity has been legally and emotionally severed. Not “getting over it.” Not “moving on.” But integration—the work of learning to hold Ruth Ann and Stella and Quella simultaneously, without choosing between them, without erasing any part of the story.
Sarah’s character arc, using her botanical expertise to support her daughter’s development, reflects something I believe is true: professional passion can meet personal mission when parents learn to work with rather than against their child’s essential nature. Sarah doesn’t try to “fix” Stella’s mirror-sight. She creates conditions where Stella can develop her gifts safely. She bears witness to her daughter’s integration. She learns to ask Cedra for help. This, I think, is what adoption-informed parenting looks like.
Thank you for following Stella’s journey through all twelve episodes. Whether you’ve walked through the yew hedge with Questa from the beginning, or you’re discovering the garden now, we’re grateful you’re here.
More to come on Behind The Hedge, Roots & Branches, and Seasons.
The complete novella is available as an e-book. The illustrated serial version remains here on Substack for reading at your own pace.
There’s space in the comments, if you’d like to share: What resonated with you in this story? What did you recognize as your own experience?
With gratitude,
I love your framing of both / and instead of either / or, which mirrors my experience as a first mother — and years of unpacking what happened to me and why. I love your insight about why magical realism feels like the best way to tell Stella’s story. Thank you for your words and wisdom 🩷