I’m not going to lie, I tend to be very blunt, and direct. While I listen to many people wax poetic regarding their interests, I find myself blurting out the most succinct answers and replies in the shortest language possible. I feel like I am getting better at tempering my words, but I find myself verbally trapped and, many times, unable to express my emotions when it comes to the study of herbalism and my connection with plants, in general. How does one convey a connection she never really realized was present until it became her only way of life?

Beginning at a young age, I was picking herbs and didn’t even know it. Queen Ann’s Lace grew in the side ditches by the dairy farm where I grew up in west central Ohio. In the 1980s there was no cable for the farm kids (ha!) so I spent a lot of time in the summers walking the fence rows and collecting this plant as well as chicory, milkweed, red and white clover, and others. My mother taught me how to use food coloring to dye the flowers of Queen Ann’s Lace. That was my first introduction to the manners by which plants feed themselves. This moved on to my attempts to grow a window garden on my upstairs bedroom windowsill. It may have worked better if there had been running water upstairs, but being in a house built in the 1890s meant that was not going to happen. Even though Earth Day was started in 1970, I was not aware of what it was until 1989 when I begged my mother to let me have a Schefflera in my room.

In 1990 I was forced into a situation where I seriously had to address my health…using herbs. I wrecked my car on my way to school one morning in May of that year. Even though my injuries were not nearly as bad as they could have been, I feel like that was my wake-up call. After I experienced a string of what felt like nonstop illnesses and my family doctor had no idea what to do with me anymore, he told my mother to take me to a health food store. This is the turning point I always recognize.

At that very same time, I was enrolled in an Advanced Biology class at my high school. This was before the emergence of “advanced placement” classes, but this class would have been one of those. I find it ironic that one of the main reasons my mother was so concerned about my health was my amount of absences from school – specifically that advanced biology class. Once I started using herbs, my health improved immensely. And what did we do in that class? Botanical identification and classification of plants.