My path into plant medicine started in the woods. Growing up, my summers were spent in the forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where I met my first plant allies and made my first herbal preparations from plants I gathered myself. At home, my grandmother taught me gardening, soap making, and a whole-body approach to care that felt as natural as breathing. That early knowledge never left me; it just kept growing.

In my teens, I found my way to the writings of Rosemary Gladstar and Jethro Kloss. By my early twenties, I was running an herbal soap and body care business—formulating, making, and realizing I wanted to understand not just how to use herbs, but why they work, and what they're really doing inside the body. That question led me to earn a Master of Science in Herbal Medicine, where I studied clinical herbalism, medicine making, nutritional biochemistry, pharmacology, and field botany. Some of my primary teachers were Bevin Clare, James Snow, Andrew Pengelly, Simon Mills, and Bhodi Tims, among others. I also mentored and worked for ethnobotanist and author Dr. Jim Duke at his Green Pharmacy Garden in Fulton, Maryland during that time and later pursued additional graduate study in Appalachian ethnobotany and agroforestry at Virginia Tech and Penn State.  

Over the past fifteen-plus years, I've worked as an herbalist, educator, and botanical research scientist in the herbal products industry. I've traveled the world learning traditional medicine systems in Europe, India, China,  Central America, and North Africa. I have also navigated my own health challenges, including an autoimmune diagnosis that shaped how I show up for clients and students today. My work now brings all of this together—clinical herbalism, botanical research, nutritional science, field botany, and sustainable growing practices as interconnected ways of understanding plants, people, and the living systems we're all part of.  If you're here, something is pulling you toward this too. I'd love to help you follow it.