Many plant people wax poetic about building relationships with plants before they could walk. That’s lovely and all, but I didn’t grow up that way. My immigrant parents didn’t understand camping and preferred family vacations in major cities. Plants found me much later in life.

As a kid, all I wanted to do was live in New York City and work in magazines. I did do that and loved it, but city life started to feel stifling. In 2011, my partner and I scrimped and saved and quit our jobs in NYC to backpack around the world. That was when I first went camping and on major hikes.

We did another burn-it-all-to-the-ground in 2019, when we left our jobs and rental in San Diego to road trip through the American West with our dog, freelancing along the way. So much of our trip focused on National Parks and National Forests, and something clicked within me. Specifically, it was learning in Rocky Mountain National Park that the precursor to synthetic aspen was derived from aspen trees. Whoa!

By the end of the road trip in late 2019, we made good on a long-held dream to move to Ojai, California. Exciting! But that was also when I began to develop symptoms of an autoimmune condition. Allopathic medicine helped, but stress was a trigger for this inflammatory arthritis, so I wanted to expand how I was thinking about it. I started working with a local herbalist to address things in a deeper, whole-body kinda way. (I also feel ridiculously grateful that my rheumatologist is so welcoming of other modalities and was willing to speak with my herbalist so they could be on the same page about my care—this is not common!).

I could feel the herbs shifting something in me. The stress didn’t vanish and I wasn’t an evolved Buddhist being, but I felt a noticeable, gradual change in my mood, awareness and my symptoms, too. It’s like I was a fuller, more balanced, more complete me. I was hooked. I had to learn more. So I enrolled in and graduated from my herbalist’s two year training program at the Ojai School of Herbal Studies, while working full time at a corporate company.

Through it all—from my 2019 road trip to moving to Ojai to being a student again at age 40—something kept bugging me. It felt like so much of the messaging around herbal medicine was that you had to look a certain way, spend a certain amount or talk like a faux Nobel Laureate poet. The exclusivity and narrow-mindedness annoyed me. So I wanted to use my education and excitement for plants to open up the party to everyone, whether you work a traditional 9-5 job, have never tried fresh chamomile or think you can’t “do plants” if you also, say, “do pop culture gossip.” (Plants contain multitudes, and so do we.)

With All of Us Herbs, I’m helping open up the conversation around herbal medicine because herbalism is and always has been for all of us.

Education

Ojai School of Herbal Studies (2023-2025)

Northwestern University, Medill School of Journalism (2003-2007)

Courses + continuing studies

Plant Synergy with David Winston (2026)

Clinical Forms in Herbal Practice: Informed Consent and Disclosure with Erika Galentin (2026)