Medicinal Landscaping
Would you like me to help you grow a healing garden?
This is a minor aspect of my healing work in terms of hours, but one that’s immensely important to me.
I truly believe that plants are the best medicine. But this means more than taking herbal remedies, and eating fresh, locally grown organic food. For all of our human history, we’ve been intimately connected to the earth and especially to the plant beings around us. Our ancestors used plants as food, as medicine, as fibre, as sources of spiritual wisdom, and for shamanic purposes, to pierce the veil between the natural and supernatural worlds. This is our history, our tradition and our birthright - all people everywhere deserve access to the earth, to gardens both productive and beautiful, and to medicinal plants, and when we can connect with the plants and offer them a home in our gardens and hearts then powerful healing can occur.
I offer inexpensive medicinal and edible landscaping consultations, in which we define and discuss and clarify and co-create a vision of a healing garden for you. You can ask any and all your questions about garden design and installation, seed and plant cultivation, and the healing plants themselves - what to grow where, how and when and why to grow it, which herbs, vegetables, fruits and flowers have medicinal properties that may be supportive of specific disease states, how to use these to make your own plant medicines, and anything else you like. I aim to empower you to design and grow the healing garden of your dreams yourself, but can also refer for specific design/installation services if you prefer (owing to time constraints, I can sadly no longer offer these services myself). I work mostly with western medicinal and Mediterranean herbs, heirloom and open-pollinated vegetable crops, and Australian native plants, but I’m happy to help you create whatever your vision of a healing garden may be. For me, this is any garden that connects people and plants and place and provides ancient and local food and medicine for all.
By way of experience, I owned and operated a two-acre organic farm (growing 60 different vegetable crops) for several years; worked in a boutique nursery assisting national award-winning garden designers; and have completed two Permaculture Design Certificates and additional training in regenerative agriculture and therapeutic horticulture. My clinical and landscaping work intersect and reinforce each other; I encourage my landscaping clients to grow and use plants as medicine and I encourage my naturopathic clients to grow a garden of their own. Even in the face of great health challenges, I have often found the act of growing a garden and tending to plants to be very powerful medicine.
