Following Plants

Essays on plants, people, and the invisible work of care

Following Plants is a space for people who sense that something essential has been stripped out of how we talk about plants, healing, and responsibility—and who want to listen more closely.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to what is invisible, or to what was once visible but has faded from view because it isn’t valued by the world we live in. When it comes to herbal medicine, that invisibility often takes the form of hidden labor, erased cultures, damaged landscapes, and forms of knowing that don’t translate easily into markets or metrics.

Here, I share personal essays that grow out of my journeys following plants. Some follow literal paths: supply chains, harvesting grounds, and the people and places behind herbal products on store shelves—stories the market typically does not want us to see. Others follow less tangible paths, into memory, imagination, and the invisible world of spirit. I weave these journeys together not to sort what is true from what is not, but to explore how the invisible shapes the visible—and how attending to it might help us take better care.

I write reflectively rather than prescriptively. These pieces are not how‑to guides or position papers, but invitations to slow down, pay attention, and think differently about what responsibility to plants, people, and place might ask of us.

I publish here once or twice a month. This Substack is separate from my work with the Sustainable Herbs Initiative and is meant as an optional, personal space for deeper reflection.

Why Subscribe

You might feel at home here if you:

• are curious about the role of imagination, spirit, and the unseen in guiding ethical action.

• feel uneasy about how herbal medicine is shaped by markets and extraction.

• want writing that sits between fieldwork, cultural reflection, and lived experience.

• work with plants and want to understand the human and ecological stories behind them.

My Backstory

I’m the Director of the Sustainable Herbs Initiative, where I try to put many of these insights into practice by working toward more ethical and transparent herbal supply chains.

I’m also a cultural anthropologist, a writer (Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home, and Following the Herbal Harvest: A Search for the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines), a distracted gardener who prefers climbing mountains to weeding, and a mother. All of these ways of being shape how I listen to plants—and how I try to tell their stories.