04/17/2026
Today is NATIONAL HERBALIST DAY! 🌿
I get asked all the time how I learned about plants, herbs and traditional medicine. Its a journey.....
(I wrote this six years ago, I am celebrating 26 years this year!!)
"April also marks my 20th year as an herbalist! Well maybe I wouldn’t have called myself an herbalist at fifteen when I began this journey, but that was the year my feet were placed on this path for good. I grew up in northern California, on Forrest Lane in Royal Oaks in fact. I had the privilege of being a free child running though the woods, up and down dirt paths crisscrossing the mountain. We would crawl through the game trails of the manzanita groves and climb the highest pine trees, eating miner’s lettuce and slapping pine pitch on our cuts as we followed our beagle dog wherever she might lead us. We would pretend we were natives, I being of Powhattan heritage, got to be the coveted role of Pocahontas. We would find wild foods and grind acorns to flour, makeshift bow and arrows and send scouts to spy. Sometimes we would be gone so long and so far we had no idea where we had ended up and we had to be searched for and found! Little did I know that twenty years later I would be doing much of the same.
At fifteen I took my first trip to South America with my father. I had dreamt of becoming a missionary since I eight years old and he was willing to test the waters for that and take me there on a two-week trip. We traveled to Chile on a small coastal town, Pichilemu, which means “Little Forest”, fitting seeing how this forest theme followed me throughout life. There was a woman in our group that I didn’t know well yet, but through this trip I got to know her and what she inspired in me would change the rest of my life. Susana was a Mexican herbalist who lived her life as though plants were a natural extension of her being. She would walk down the road and pick something, save it away and gather as we went. She would show up to a house and pull our bags and bottles of plants and oils and help people who had no access to healthcare with things that grew around them. She would teach them as she worked and I had an epiphany! THIS is how I wanted to serve people as well. I wanted something practical and tangible to help people wherever I might go around the world. I followed her and learned the whole trip and when we returned to California I continued to mentor under her for two years.
When I was seventeen I graduated high school and decided to go to mission training school (Youth With A Mission) back in the “Little Forest” in Chile. Before school started I traveled to the southern volcanic region of the Andes Mountains where there is still an indigenous tribe there called The Mapuche. These people live in makeshift huts and life 100% self sustained, a lot of that of course includes using plants for food, medicine, dye, cordage, etc. in their everyday life. I was blessed to be taught by a Mapuche elder named, Juana how to forage, process, and utilize several plants for just about anything we needed. It was an invaluable experience and another milestone in my journey.
School began three months later, and it was there that I met my husband, Daniel, who had traveled from his country of Uruguay to be in the same training school. It was love before first sight, but that’s a story for another day. As I learned to serve others and how to live an extremely flexible and minimal life, staying with dozens of families while our small class traveled around Chile and Brazil serving others, my vision for serving others as a Village Herbalist grew. I saw so many people sick, suffering and even dying from things that were pretty simple to remedy with hygiene and plant medicine. I needed to learn more!
A year later I moved back from South America to California where I continued to mentor under Susana and another herbalist. I focused intently on learning plants and their properties and also the beginnings of case studies. I learned to really incorporate plants into my everyday life. Daniel and I got married in 2004 (and 2005- yet another story) and we had our first daughter a year later. We moved to Tennessee when she was just two months old and I found myself in a whole new environment, and I didn’t know hardly any of the plants! I had to start from scratch! I would spend the next decade learning and familiarizing myself with these plants. I enrolled in a school for herbal studies, I simultaneously self-taught all I couldn’t learn through school. The forest itself is a much better teacher than professors and books. I spent years in the woods, along creeks, in the mountains and fields, getting to know as many plant friends as I could- who they were and what they were for. I eventually began to teach, and write and make informative videos. I started an herbal products company in 2010 and focused on growing, wild-harvesting and procuring organic herbs for my products. I very much enjoy formulating teas, salves, creams, syrups and tinctures. I need them anyway to serve my community, so why not make them myself?
At one point we had a forty-acre homestead and raised animals, planted large gardens, canned, hunted and all other manner of self-sustained living. We then decided to sell everything and buy a forty-foot camper and travel the United States with our three children. We went from coast to coast and border to border. All along the way learning plants and ecosystems. It was another invaluable time, since it widened my plant knowledge from just the southeastern region to most regions of the continental US.
This year I am taking on about eight students for a mentorship program and opening a store front and training center here in the Smoky Mountains. We are now on our fourth child, who turns nine months today (he's almost7 now), so my love and attention is a bit divided as we homeschool, run three businesses, bought and are renovating eight shops in our arts center, and continue to follow our passions as a family. I have had the honor of working with a team of professors, rangers, doctors and scientist from around the US on a project that works with the Eastern Cherokee Tribe in learning and in-turn, teaching ancient sustainable methods for harvesting and preserving culturally significant plant species. It’s my passion to pass on not only plant knowledge but how to respect the land and honor these God-given gifts that I fully believe we were meant to utilize in our daily lives for food, clothing, shelter, medicine and craft.
It isn’t easy putting a twenty-year journey of one’s life onto paper but I do hope that this serves as an inspiration to not only learn and use the plant life around you but to also follow your own path and to honor the journey. A calling doesn’t happen overnight but it will follow you through your life and as you tend it, it will grow. In my case it grew into an herb garden. It is said that when you do what you love, you never work a day in your life. It has been hard work actually, but a fulfilling and enjoyable process. I can’t wait to continue to learn and walk this path, and meet those along it I am supposed to meet. To serve those who need help, to encourage, to inspire and be inspired. As I sit here and watch my children playing in the garden I realize this is an inheritance to pass on to my children and theirs. An ancient culture passed from one generation to the next from the beginning of time. Let us be the generation that rekindles these skills and hands them to the next little Pocahontas playing in the woods!"
