Following Plants

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to the invisible, and to what was perhaps once visible but no longer is because it isn’t valued by the world in which we live.

Following Plants is about my journeys following plants to reveal what we don’t readily see: stories of the people and places behind herbal products on shelves, stories that, typically, the market does not want us to see. And also stories about my journeys following plants into the invisible world of spirit. Each of these journeys reveals an insight or an inspiration that deepens and expands the work I am doing. I am sharing them here, weaving together both the literal and the imaginative, not to evaluate what is true or not. I do so to explore how the invisible can guide the visible and how that might help us to take better care.

My Backstory

I am the Director of the Sustainable Herbs Initiative, where I actively try to apply the insights gained from these journeys. I am also a distracted gardener who prefers climbing mountains to weeding, a part-time writer (Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home, and Following the Herbal Harvest: A Search for the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines), a cultural anthropologist, and a mother.