Auric Healing Herbs for Healers, with Arati Ursus.

Arati Ursus is a member of Herbalists Without Borders’ Board of Directors. She has been practicing Traditional Western Herbalism for about 15 years and does individual herbal consultations. Arati (pronounced Ahr uh tee) is most known for her work with tobacco cessation through her company Brown Bear Herbs.

HWB manages an annual US Seed Grant Program, where we work to intake donations of food and medicinal seeds and share them out to HWB US groups. Since 2017, HWB has been supporting getting HWB Chapters, Clinics, and Projects, to grow gardens, and we have supported hundreds of grassroots gardens. HWB groups grow gardens that:

• Grow herbs for their free clinics 
• Grow food that they distribute at free clinics or via their local food pantry
• Grow educational gardens where they host events and free classes
• Grow healing gardens to benefit local tribal communities, veterans, unhoused folks, and more
• Grow at -risk medicinal herbs for conservation and education
• Grow gardens to save seeds and create more community resilience via urban and suburban gardens in empty lots, community garden plots, and in urban reclamation
• Grow pollinator plants to support our wild pollinators and support ecological recovery
• Grow community gardens for children, elders, schools, historical societies, and others to learn more about healthy food access and health justice via botanical medicine
• Grow herbs for make and take classes and community events
• Food justice is health justice, and teaching folks how to grow their own food also supports healthy communities

This program requires donated seeds so that HWB can share seeds out by needs, size, and growing zone, to HWB Chapters, Clinics, and Projects. One of our amazing and generous donors is Earthbeat Seeds, in Vermont. Jessica Manchester took some time to answer some questions and share more about her seed business and love of medicinal plants. So, introducing Jessica Manchester, of Earthbeat Seeds. 

First, can you tell us a little bit more about Earthbeat Seeds? 

Earthbeat Seeds is a Vermont based seed company that specializes in sustainably grown medicinal herb and wildflower seed.  We utilize growing practices that encourage soil and ecosystem health, promote biodiversity, and do not synthetic fertilizers or pesticides as well as collaborate with several small scale herb seed growers that align with our values.  The sustainability of our packaging is also very important, so we source 100% recycled, unbleached, and compostable packaging and shipping materials.

What drew you to seed saving and herbal seeds?
Seeds have always been magical to me. Some of the seed I save is so tiny you need a magnifying glass to see each individual seed.  Every time I see the tiniest of plants break out of those impossibly small seeds it feels like a miracle.  Honestly all life is a miracle and being able to witness the creative forces behind life and tend to living creatures is such an honor.  Sharing herbal seeds is particularly special to me because it empowers people to take their health into their own hands and really connect with nature as an abundant provider.  

How long have you been saving seeds?
Nine years ago I applied for a job at High Mowing Organic Seeds and that began my journey with seed saving and growing.  I worked on the production and trials crew there for two years while teaching myself how to start, grow and save seeds from perennial herbs.  Two years later I launched a fundraising campaign where I offered my first collection of herbal seeds to the public.  ​

Tell us more about your gardens and how you choose which plants to grow. 
My current gardens are the first opportunity I’ve had to tend a garden for more than one season.  I have a small 1/2 acre yard that was mostly ledge, tree roots and fill when I moved here.  After 5 years of building soil, the yard has transformed from overgrown wild raspberry patches and weedy subsoil to raised beds of rich mycellinated soil that are home to over 100 species of herbs, wildflowers, edible weeds and berry bushes.  My approach is pretty simple, I buy as much hay, wood chips and composted manure as I can afford every year and layer, layer, layer along with raked leaves every fall.  Then I just let the microbes do their magic.  I build my beds on contour in free flow designs, for water retention but also because I like aesthetics of curved and meandering beds.  I also collect any mushrooms I find in the woods throw them around the garden to spread spores.  It’s fun to see flushes of mushrooms pop up through the year without much effort!  As for plant selection, besides planting seed crops that I need for my business, there's not a lot of planning that goes into it.  If I see something in a seed catalog that makes me go ooooooooh!  Then I buy it and plant it!  I have to allow space for things to be spontaneous and fun or it all starts to feel like work.  

What do you love most about what you do?
I love that the work cycles with the seasons.  There's the typical cycles of the farming season, seeds starting, planting, tending, and harvesting.  But then as the work moves indoors, there’s seed cleaning, inventorying, seed packing, website maintenance/marketing and finally order fulfillment.  Then it starts all over again.  The work is constantly changing so it’s hard to get bored, and every year there’s a chance to reflect on the previous year and evolve.  I find being able to step away from a specific process for a full year to let it all sink in, allows me to come back to it with a fresh perspective and new ideas.  

What is your favorite medicinal herb?
That’s a hard one but arnica comes to mind as an all around favorite.  It’s so easy to grow and establish a patch that needs very little tending.  Harvesting the flowers is a joy and making a very useful oil is incredibly simple.  I guess being a gardener and very active person, I have an affinity for a herb that helps with all the aches and bruises that come with the work!

What is your favorite pollinator/native?
My favorite plant is Milkweed.  I have fond memories as a kid of the sweet nectar like smell, running around with the pom pom like bursts of tiny star flowers, watching the wind blow the silky seed parachutes into the wind and wondering where they would land, and being covered in the sticky latex after playing with the seed pods.  Milkweed is my favorite seed harvest for sure, I still love breaking open pods to release the seeds.

Any tips for people growing medicinals and native plants? 
All of the plants are so different that I would have to say that keeping an adventurous mindset is the best advice I can give.  There is definitely much more of a learning curve when it comes to growing perennials and wild plants.  The seeds need more specific conditions to germinate compared to vegetables which have been bred to germinate easily and quickly.  I find growing these plants from seed really helps cultivate a closer relationship with them.  You have to consider and understand their wild nature and environment a bit in order to tend to them properly and to mimic the conditions they would be exposed to that trigger germination.  But the benefit is that perennials come back every year, so while the initial time investment may be greater than an annual plant, you will get to enjoy, work with and harvest from that plant for a very long time.

Thank you so much, Jessica, for giving us a peek into your life and seed business with your words and photos. Your space is beautiful, and we are so grateful for your support!

For the month of March, Earthbeat Seeds is offering 25% off all species on the United Plant Saver's At-Risk List to encourage the cultivation of these sensitive and threatened wild medicinals. Cultivation by seed increases the populations of these plants and ensures the medicine you are using does not come from wild harvested sources.   

Denise Cusack serves as Chair of the HWB Board of Directors and as the US Seed Grant Program Coordinator.  Denise grows over 150 medicinal herbs at Lunar Hollow Farm, a UpS Botanical Sanctuary, where she also grows herbs to donate for HWB US Free Clinics.  
Find Denise at Lunar Hollow Farm.
Facebook | Instagram | www.lunarhollow.farm

African American Herbalism: A Practical Guide to Healing Plants and Folk Traditions
by Lucretia VanDyke, Ulysses Press, 2022

-Review by Arati Ursus
I loved this book! VanDyke starts off by looking at the history of African American herbalism, including prominent herbalists and midwives and the roots of their practices. Later on in the book she shares the work and wisdom of modern day, African American herbalists. This book includes how-to’s on medicine making, a materia medica including herbalism for physical wellness, warnings, and magical uses of the same herbs, and many of enticing recipes. It isna wonderful addition to my herbal knowledge and would be a great first herb book for any new herb enthusiast. The best part was hearing VanDyke’s way of expressing her connection with the plants themselves. They offer a tender, intelligent, & magical interconnection. It is sweet to hear those personal experiences described poetically.

VanDyke looks back to African roots, including sound healing, hoodoo, plant medicine recipes that inform African American herbalism, past and present. In their early years in the US, African Americans often provided herbal healing and midwifery to their enslavers. There was an interplay between those in power being fearful of their herbal knowledge, resulting in trying to dominate their practices, and dependency on their ability to heal and catch their babies. You can’t understand “traditional western herbalism” without learning from African American herbalist ancestors and the way the law restricted the practice. Many people are thirsting for more resources, more voices in herbalism. I wished only for more information about all the herbalists she introduced! It provides the beginning of a journey. 

I enjoyed learning about new uses for familiar herb friends. My new adventure in herbalism will be exploring the spiritual bath recipes and intentions for ourselves and spaces. I am already a lover of bathing with flowers and gemstones and love having this resource. I am also eager to try out the Fried Dandelion Flower Fritters recipe. I love seasonal recipes and this sounds like it will soon become a summertime tradition.

These pages offer many introductions to plants and people. Let their wisdom remind you to honor your own bloodline, as well as to help you find new chosen ancestors and sources of nature magic. Without these connections we are lonely people. Through the practice of learning plant medicine, healing ourselves, and helping others heal, we develop interconnectedness, a sense of oneness with the world. Oneness with the plants that speak to us, and oneness with those bodies we communicate with and connect to plants. As we nurture oneness it becomes easy to see how much more we have in common than things that separate us. It is so easy to see how we can make great healing magic in our global community by setting our intentions for increasing health and lifting each other up together. 

In the words of Alice Walker: 

“To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before.”

Thank you for the introductions to new ancestors, Lucretia VanDyke, and directing us to the magic of the many ways to “work the roots”: hoodoo, literal roots of plants, and delving into our ancestry. 

Black History Month: Black Herbalists and Their Legacies through Books
By Carolyn Jones

Black herbalism has a rich history that is rooted in the Motherland. Although enslaved Africans were forced to survive under extremely inhumane conditions, they continued their traditions of using teas, powders, and salves made from plants and animals-- also incorporated into their spiritual lives with charms, prayers, and conjurations. Their sociopolitical perspectives were shaped according to where their captors docked their ships. 

The treasure trove of books by Black herbalists is exhaustive, offering a scholarship that weaves the traumatic history of a people together with the botanical medicine that sustained them.

In Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors , author Carolyn Finney acknowledges that Africans believed in “good use” of the land and the connection between the health of the land and their community. 

Working the Roots: Over 400 Years of Traditional African American Healing by Michelle Elizabeth Lee offers a walk down memory lane with interviews of African American healers, illustrating how Black people survived the tests of time by merging their knowledge of healing and medicinal practices with Europeans and Native Americans.

In Secret Doctors: Ethnomedicine of African Americans, author Wonda Fontenut links traditional African beliefs and practices with current African American traditions. 

Certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide, Kimberly Ruffin, explores a theory of “ecological burden and beauty” in her book,  Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions. She chronicles ecological insights from the antebellum era to the 21st century, documented by novels, essays, celebrated artists, and the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narratives. 

Clara Adams, a woman who was enslaved in Alabama, is resurrected in this passage:

“…I wants to see de dawn break over de black ridge and de twilight settle…spreadin’ a sort of orange hue over de place. I wants to walk de path th’ew de woods…an’ see de rabbits an’ watch de birds an’ listen to frogs at night.”

Sticks, Stones, Roots, and Bones: Hoodoo, Mojo, and Conjuring With Herbs by Stephanie Rose Bird brings it all home by introducing the reader to jiridon, the science of the trees. Masters of jiridon are herbalists and adept ecologists, tree whisperers who understand, live with and study a single tree and soul.

Bookshop is an affiliate link and purchasing a book from Bookshop.org not only supports small, independent bookstores, but a small % comes to HWB. Thank you for your support. 

Carolyn Jones
Brooklyn, New York, USA
Carolyn Jones is a Holistic Health Educator and Chaplain who teaches the art of self-care and practices a ministry of presence. She is licensed by the New York State Chaplain Task Force and serves the community as an herbalist, a certified aromatherapist and reflexologist. Respected by her peers, she embraces and is supported by a strong community of traditional and non-traditional healers who follow uniquely different paths that merge at the crossroads of community health. Carolyn is the Coordinator of The Healing Project, a Project under HWB: The Healing Project and is on the HWB Board of Directors as Secretary. 

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