Uncover your Herbal Ancestry

I am a clinical herbalist, educator, and lifelong student of ancestral healing traditions. For more than two decades, I have studied plants as healers, storytellers, and bridges between people, place, culture, and history.

I am of Swedish and British ancestry, yet I grew up in Northern California with very little access to the traditional medicinal knowledge, folklore, and healing practices of either lineage. Like many descendants of immigrants, much of that knowledge had been lost through migration, assimilation, and the passing of generations. I knew where my family came from, but I did not know the plants they had relied upon, the remedies they made, or the ways they understood health, land, and spirit.

That absence has shaped much of my work.

In 2010, I traveled to the Arctic Circle in Sweden, where I met with a Sámi herbalist who spoke openly about the loss of traditional medicinal wisdom within her own community. Her experience was culturally distinct from my own Swedish ancestry, but her story of disrupted knowledge affected me profoundly. I left Sweden with a desire to return and help document medicinal plant traditions that were at risk of disappearing.

I later moved to Tanzania, where my relationship with ethnobotany deepened through documenting traditional knowledge with the Maasai. Living alongside a culture in which medicine, land, spirituality, livestock, food, and community remained deeply interconnected showed me what it can look like when healing traditions are still held within a living cultural landscape.

That experience also brought my own lack of ancestral knowledge into sharper focus.

My own eventually brought me back to Sweden and into a much deeper exploration of my Swedish heritage through medicinal plants, folklore, foodways, traditional healing practices, spiritual ecology, historical records, and conversations with contemporary herbalists.

This research has grown into an ongoing Swedish herbal book project exploring traditional Swedish plant medicine, ancestral memory, migration, and the loss and reclamation of cultural knowledge.

Through my teaching at Land of Verse I invite students to explore that question within their own lives: to investigate the plants of their lineage, seek out traditional knowledge with humility and reverence, and build relationships with medicine that honor both ancestry and the lands where they live today.

For me, herbalism has become much more than the study of medicinal plants. It is a way of recovering relationship to ancestors, to land, to culture, and to the stories that tell us where we come from. It is a practice of remembering what was carried forward, acknowledging what was lost, and finding thoughtful ways to bring that wisdom into relationship with the present.