Uma Thurman's Witch-Adjacent Wisdom: Maya Hawke's Garden Remedies

Forget everything you think you know about celebrity parenting. Stranger Things star Maya Hawke didn’t grow up around red carpets and paparazzi—she grew up with her mother, Uma Thurman, barefoot in a garden, harvesting stinging nettles for soup.

On the Thursday, June 4 episode of NPR’s“Wild Card”podcast, the 27-year-old opened up about the unconventional life lessons her mother passed down, describing them as delightfully“witch-adjacent.”And she’s not talking about eye of newt and mysterious incantations. Instead, Thurman taught her daughter to respect nature, embrace herbal remedies, and lean on plant-based solutions when illness strikes. When Maya caught a cold? A pineapple skin tea courtesy of the enzymes in the rind. Feeling under the weather? Her mother would suggest stinging nettle soup—which, Maya notes, is practically impossible to find in New York City except at Union Square farmers market during the right season.

What’s striking isn’t that these are old-fashioned remedies (they are), but how earnestly Uma Thurman centered her parenting around nature.“She’s extremely, like, nature-focused, and she’s a gorgeous gardener,”Maya recalled. The actress spent so much time with her hands in the soil that her daughter barely registered what her famous parents did professionally. Nettle soup has become Maya’s favorite dish, and she credits this philosophy—what she calls“a kind of witchy love of nature and a love of herbal remedies and kind of different sorts of medicines for what ails you”—as foundational to how she moves through the world.

Her father, Ethan Hawke, brought different magic to the table. He wasn’t witchy, Maya explained, but he was crafty: treasure hunts with handwritten notes, watercolor maps cut into puzzle pieces. Magic in a different wavelength.

It’s a portrait of a blended family that rejected the typical Hollywood script in favor of something earthier, messier, and infinitely more memorable. In an age of Instagram-perfect parenting, there’s something refreshing about a household where the most important inheritance isn’t fame or fortune—it’s knowing which wild plants won’t hurt you and how to turn them into something nourishing.