A former country girl living in the big, bad city – London. But not really as I’m on the edge, where I’m still lucky enough to be surrounded by trees and wildlife. We’re just missing the sheep and horses and smoke billowing out from chimneys, all the things that really make the countryside the countryside in my mind.
I was always interested in plants and herbs and “alternative medicine”. It’s cliché but I was yet another kid who whipped up “potions” in the back garden and ate more leaves than I possibly should have on a whim. In my teens I was still building little fairy homes out of walnut shells long past the age where it is endearing.
Regardless, I wanted the city. I wanted the noise and the smell and the endless rain that, as a Brit, I should have really known wasn’t 24/7, 365 days a year like they showed on the TV and in the movies. I wanted to walk where Charles Dickens and Neil Gaiman had walked and meet a million different people with a million different stories. And, not to be taken for granted, I wanted to live where I would absolutely never have need to drive or own a car.
I studied art and dreamed of making books (my dream of owning an amazing little book cave, pretty much killed when Amazon popped up one day and never went away). I moved to London in a recession and worked in retail and kept on dreaming. I studied again, this time, specifically in publishing and I kept on slogging away, trying to reach that dream of one day helping create something that mattered. I chased and chased until, one day I stopped and realised the dream wasn’t the dream anymore. The new dream was really the oldest dream, to go back to what I loved as a kid – the potions and the plants and the magic of creating something that had the power to help in a completely different way. I pretty much booked myself onto my first herbal course that very day.
Now I grow beautiful, amazing plants and learn all about how they can help the human body in it’s healing processes. I read papers on PubMed for fun, learn more of the human anatomy than I ever dreamed of and collect a million and one jars (to my boyfriend and sister’s greatest annoyance).
Herbal She Wrote 