Selina Sapworthy

Chapter 50

Image credit: here Selina Sapworthy is an award-winning author for her published texts relating to both the herbological and divinatory fields. She was born in Tutshill, England and attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Sapworthy was known to be an avid fan of Quidditch since her family regularly attended matches when the Tutshill Tornados were playing. She played for four years on the Gryffindor Quidditch team as a Keeper during her time as a student at Hogwarts. Although she loved the sport, Sapworthy eventually found a passion for herbology. She often spent extra time in the greenhouses after her Herbology class, helping the professor tend the plants. After graduating from Hogwarts, Sapworthy fully embraced her career as an herbologist. She had a particular interest in exotic magical plants and often travelled to study them. While she was in East Africa, Sapworthy stumbled upon an entire collection of water plants in the Rift Valley lakes that belonged to Sir Winogrand, a wealthy herbologist who kept his water plant collections in numerous African lakes. The enormous collection surprised her, not only in the diversity of the types of plants that grew in the habit, but also the magical potential that these water plants had. She spent roughly two months travelling from Ethiopia through Malawi, studying, sketching, and taking samples of the plants. Eventually, Sapworthy travelled back to England with some plant specimens for further study. All of this work resulted in Sapworthy authoring her most famous book, Winogrand’s Wondrous Water Plants, a book on specifically the water plants in Sir Winogrand’s collection that also became a required Hogwarts textbook for around 25 years. Her career in herbology naturally also led to an interest in plant-based divination. Sapworthy sought and worked with seers who were experts in that particular field of divination until she became more confident in her own abilities. She eventually published Xylomancy, a book on divination of the same name that involves divining using twigs. Towards the later half of her life, Sapworthy couldn’t let her love of Quidditch go, often getting nostalgic just from the mere thought of the sport. She ended up volunteering to help with the International Quidditch Team, which consisted of players from all over the globe. Typically, her duties included tasks such as managing the team’s schedule and providing the team with water during practices. Sapworthy did this as a hobby alongside her work in herbology, however, she treated her duties to the International Quidditch Team as if they were her main job. Sapworthy’s portrait was hung near the sixth floor landing in the Grand Staircase at Hogwarts after her death. She is typically either observing a pattern of twigs with a contemplative expression on her face, or she is busily jotting down notes in her journal, presumably on plants. Either way, the portrait subject is often in a pleasant mood, even when interrupted, and occasionally will attempt to read the viewer’s fortune from the twigs if asked politely.