Yes, it is a witch hazel. It may or may not be native. The only native spring-blooming (OK, late winter-blooming) witch hazel that I am aware of is Hamamelis vernalis, Ozark or vernal witch hazel -- which occurs naturally only west of the Mississippi. (Mine have been blooming for almost a month now.) The more widely distributed native species, H. virgniniana, typically blooms in late fall or early winter, and it it's blooms are showy -- like those in your photo. I'm not sure if it is likely to be blooming now. (Is that a current photo?)

There are also non-native witch hazels that are widely planted, and I think these can bloom in either late fall or late winter .

I took that picture yesterday afternoon. It usually blooms before most other plants around here. It's on the way to the train station. I'm not sure if it bloomed this early or late last year but I know it was the only thing in bloom in the area.

However this year has been a very unusual winter and I think I noticed that a very bright yellow plant was blooming and to me that meant forsythia . None of these are in my yard or even our park just homes I pass on the way to the train station/post office. Sarah

That doesn't look like any of the intermedia (mollis x japonica) hybrids which have much larger flowers (on cold days they do recede some) and are blooming now. Looks like vernalis to me... is it very fragrant? The chinese x japanese aren't as fragrant. I saw a ton of naturalized vernalis in bloom in Orange County NY this past weekend.

I didn't smell anything. But I will go by there either tommorow or monday and see if I can smell anything. I'm assuming it smells like the astringent? I can only imagine what the people that live there will think. But you know what I have lived here for 24 years so I don't care.

Yes this is vernalis witch hazel. I live where it grows wild and also have some in my yard. : ) So I am very famaliar with it.

Why do they call Witch hazel.... "witch hazel" ?

ficus,
I've heard and read a lot of explanations of the name, but the one that makes the most sense to me is that since it normally blooms at a time when most other plants are entering dormancy, it's "bewitched"...seems silly today, but early settlers were prone to believing in such things.

They also used to use the forked branch from a witch hazel to make divining rods for dowsing.

Yes, branches are preferred for water "witching" (dowsing).

My grandfather used to use witchhazel for water witching and swore by it. Water witching is a very old technique:

Taken from the web on the issue of dowsing - "in 1949, a party of French explorers (while searching for evidence of lost civilizations in the Atlas Mts. of North Africa) stumbled upon a massive system of caverns known as the Tassili Caves, wherein many of the walls were covered with marvelous pre-historic paintings. Among the many fascinating wall murals, not only did they locate an art gallery devoted exclusively to the depictions of spacecraft and ET's, they also found a remarkable huge wall painting of a dowser, holding a forked branch in his hand searching for water, surrounded by a group of admiring tribesmen. These wall murals were carbon dated and found to be a least 8000 years old."

Perhaps it was the act of water witching that actually gave the shrub it's current name. To the Puritans that were coming to America, such a mystical act of finding underground sources of water using a stick, must have seemed like some sort of Black Magick...witchery.

Barb/knottyceltic