by Marissa Myers

Marissa has been drawn to the world of aromatics and plants since she was a child. Certified in aromatherapy, Reiki, and meditation, she actively changes lives using these healing practices. Additionally, she is a holistic life coach, and works towards helping others heal while simultaneously getting in touch with their spiritual side. As Herbstalk's Market Manager & Community Engagement Assistant, Marissa draws upon years of experience to oversee vendor relations, event management, and social media outreach. As a longtime attendee and member of the Herbstalk community, she is beyond thrilled to be a part of the team! ​

by Jade Alicandro Mace

This time of year both the gardens and my kitchen start to get a little crazy with the sudden realization that the wheel of the seasons is turning. This is one herbal preparation I can't do without- Winter Immune Honey.  Basically, I stroll through the garden and harvest what's in season and looks good! This season's batch included Echinacea flower, Calendula, Bee Balm, Blue Hyssop, St John’s Wort, and Tulsi. Just thinking about getting to curl-up with a nice spoonful of this in my tea mug makes the on-coming seasonal transition less ominous and- dare I say it?- even a tad-bit exciting....​

Combine any combination of the following herbs, fresh (my preference) or dried.  I’ve included some suggested percentages below (and of course many of these plants could go into both categories!).  The idea here is to pull from the lists and make your own unique honey, based on your favorite herbs, what you have access to, and the specific herbal actions you’d like your honey to have.  Your result will be a honey with a wide range of herbal actions, so you can effectively treat the vast array of winter ailments you might come across in the coming months.  And remember- many of these herbs can be procured at your local grocery store or farmers market (especially the culinary herbs), and can tolerate some frost, often hanging on in the garden well into fall. 

Steph Zabel, MSc, is a practicing herbalist and the founder of Herbstalk. For over a decade she has combined her passions for herbalism, education, and community outreach. She holds a Master’s degree in ethnobotany and began her professional career working in the botanical collections of the Harvard University Herbaria. Her current work focuses on teaching practical & inspiring herbal classes and offering dynamic wellness sessions through her business Flowerfolk Herbs. As the founder of Herbstalk she helps create accessible educational opportunities for all plant enthusiasts in the Boston area.

by Jenny Hauf

I am sitting in my kitchen on a Sunday morning, having luxuriously slept in to the seventh hour. There are herbs neatly (well, relatively neatly) placed on shelves and in the brand new stillroom that we created from the worn out walk-in closet that used to house unused tennis rackets and jumbled canning materials. On the kitchen table are the remnants of wreath-making: sprigs of rosemary and thyme, dried gomphrena, statice, and strawflower stems, bits of wire and pliers. My last market of the year is in a few hours and I won’t be selling anything freshly harvested, only the fat of summer and fall’s harvests. There will be the green salve created with lush comfrey leaves of September mornings and the beautiful calendula of hot afternoons. Spilanthes tincture from when that magic eyeball plant was bounding over the edges of the bed, finding more soil to root in and land to spread eagle in. The wreaths are made of grapevines trimmed during my friend Coco’s prunings of fall, the flowers from her daughter Mal’s dewy harvests at the flower field at First Root Farm. ​

This is the unthinkable: a morning spent at home before leaving at 10:15 to get to Harvard Square. Listening to the radio in my bathrobe. Barely thinking about the field, as the field’s asleep, covered in the comforts of straw and cardboard. The energy is all underground as winter slowly (too slowly) comes in. 

I’m going to a concert tonight, a pleasure rarely afforded during the months of tendriling, weeding, and harvesting. I’ll be seeing Joanna Newsom, who may sing a song of “the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating. Joy of life,” and to which I raise a glass of nettle beer and holler, yes! To life, but also to farming! To all of it trapped in jars and bottles and bags for winter. To the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating JOY of it.

All the pain, all the hours spent doing one movement over and over. All the sun and all the sweat, the rain and the water, the gas station food, the butterflies. To the summer sounds of cars driving by, the leaves everywhere, the trees surrounding me in their shimmers of transition, their eventual undressing, their standing as sentries with such blessed bones and bark. To the moon lighting up a scene that made me guffaw when it was finally too late to work and I realized again that this place, ever so briefly, was mine to harvest and sow. To the crabgrass everywhere and the hands that helped me pull it, to the hands that helped me plant the white cloves of garlic, the huge bulbs of daffodils, the hands that shared picnics and sumac lemonade on long afternoons.

To the stripping of chamomile flowers from stems on CSA mornings, to running around with an apron and a clipboard, to drinking coffee for the first time in months. To Paula Poundstone for making me laugh as I put the bags together, to Car Talk for cracking me up on the drive to Somerville, to Ira Glass for making me misty eyed in Jamaica Plain. To the bees singing around tulsi inflorescences while I weeded and harvested in heaven. To the way that the swamp milkweed burst from its buds and silently waved its beauty of pinks and whites on the 4th of July. 
​
To sleeping too little and driving too much. To singing really loud in the car and alone in the field. To never having clean knees and crabgrass seeds getting in my hair. To wrapping California poppies in butcher paper and taking one thousand pictures of honeybees. To podcasts. To wildcrafting plantain and goldenrod, to climbing ladders to get to elderflowers. To wearing big boots and short shorts. To not showering. To dressing up and scrubbing almost all the dirt off. To meeting beautiful people. To slinging fertilizer in a good straw hat. To growing and dying and growing back. To resting all winter. To all of the defeating, the repeating, the outrageous Joy of it.

​To all of it, I give thanks. To all of it, you’re forever in my heart and the dirt of my knees. I’ll drink you in winter; I’ll see you in spring.

by Patrice Green

Fall is a time to traditionally hunt and harvest mushrooms, and an appropriate time to learn more about a specific group - the medicinal mushrooms.  Specifically, let's take a closer look at Reishi and Chaga.

Reishi: (Red Reishi / Ganoderma lucidum / Ling Zhi)

Known as the King of all medicinal mushrooms, Reishi is well known for its immune-enhancing properties.  An herbal adaptogen, Reishi's goal is to restore the body to homeostasis. Safe to take daily over a long period of time, Reishi is one of the most revered herbs in Traditional Chinese Medicine, earning it the nickname The Mushroom of Immortality.  Known to help balance the endocrine system, Reishi helps with thyroid disorders.  A powerful Shen tonic, Reishi has a profound affect on the nervous system, calming the spirit and helping the mind to focus.  Reishi grows on decaying trees, preferring maple.   Not recommended for use in conjunction with chemotherapy or other treatments designed to reduce the immune system, Reishi is particularly suited to helping re-build the body, mind and spirit post-treatment.

by Debra Bluth

On the brink of the spring equinox in the Northeast, we’re hovering at a thaw.  It’s cold, there’s still lots of snow, the ground is hard.  It’s not easy to imagine the roots of the plants under there, gathering energy in the darkness in order to push their way through to the light, but they’re there.   They know what to do and they do it, unfailingly, every Spring.  Soon enough, we’ll see the green world peeking through, exquisitely ordinary and miraculous all at once.

by Jenn Falk

“The entire Universe is concentrated in the garden. The garden allows us to become one with nature. And when we meditate we cannot separate ourselves from nature.”

I took this quote from a snippet that I saw in a little docu-piece online about Japanese gardens. Isn’t it lovely? It’s the essence of what Pepperand I will be getting at when we teach our special Yoga/Herbal-infused/Mindfulness class this year at Herbstalk! I’m super grateful to my dear friend, Steph, for welcoming us as the first ever yoga class to be taught at this event.

In reality what this class offers is a meditation on friendship. You see, once you start a mindfulness practice such as yoga or meditation, your lifestyle changes. It’s inevitable. We learn to become better friends with ourselves, and with other creatures and life on this planet. This can manifest in a variety of different ways. One amazing friendship that can be forged on this path of inner growth is each and every one of our relationships with plant life. You might begin to take in your surroundings more, noticing the changing seasons and with that the types, colors, and energy of plants around you. You might start to crave owning more houseplants and then truly pay attention to them. You might attract more friends who are gardeners, herbalists, nature explorers. What you put on or in your body changes as you put more reverence into the idea that we are a part of nature. I see it happen all the time! It’s a lovely thing to witness happen to friends and family who begin dedicating time to their yoga/mindfulness practice. We begin to transform our lifestyles and welcome the healing and open energy that can come from nature.

This is why Herbstalk is such an amazing creation for those of us here in an urban environment. We are able to learn from some of the best in their field about how to engage closer with the plant world. There will be all varieties of classes, teachers, and business owners to take it in from. Everything from learning how specific herbs can support your nervous system, to how plants can aid in your spiritual process, to creating and sustaining an herbal/natural beauty routine.

For me, discovering and staying open to the magic of plants and herbs has always been a feminine and spiritual experience. As teenagers, Steph and I would head out into the parks, climb trees, create our own rituals in our backyards…and this created healing that allowed us to forge a deep friendship — one that still remains my oldest and dearest to this day. I believe the fact that our friendship is still going strong is due to this weaving of our spirits with how we take care of ourselves through our belief in and our love for the natural world. What occurs when you pay attention to your own day-to-day mindfulness or healing process is a respect for and honoring of our own bodies, and thus with nature. You don’t have to become a plant expert/healer/herbalist extraordinaire, or a yoga teacher/wellness practitioner to reap these benefits or learn more.

All you have to do is stay willing to open up your senses. Possibly watch the lunar cycles, and enjoy each season. Try and see where your interests in plant-life comes out! It could be in consuming tea, using herbal tinctures or elixirs to boost your system in some way, planting a garden plot, or even just taking trips to local gardens for enjoyment. The options are endless in how slowing down through mindfulness and yoga can connect you deeper into what surrounds us via plant wisdom and medicine.

Pepper and I met this past year in Elena Brower’s Art of Attention teacher training, and immediately hit it off through (what else) learning about our love for plants/herbs/the natural world! Our class for Herbstalk will go deeper into this idea of weaving together how we discover wellness with our relationship to plant life. The 2-hour class will involve: meditation, some kundalini kriya, some yin postures, hatha flow, prolonged restorative shapes, sampling herbal elixir, flower essences, aromatherapy, and short discussion.

It is on Sunday morning, June 8th at 9:00am at Herbstalk at the Somerville Armory on Highland Ave.

We look forward to seeing you there!

“The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.”
-Hanna Rion

Submitted by Larken Bunce of the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism.

Spring is coming to the forest. Even as gale winds continue to blow and snow remains a constant presence in the far Northeast that I call home, the birds have started to sing. The sun is higher in the sky, sending strong shafts of light glancing through branches swelling with leaf buds. On a recent day, I’m sure I heard the rushing whisper of sap rising.

In the people around me, I sense a kind of readiness, even an impatience, to burst forth, start moving, rise up, make a plan, get gardens in the ground. Many folks are getting antsy. I’ve even seen t-shirts and shorts when the thermometer approaches 40 degrees! And then there are those who are still enjoying the hibernation of shorter days, richer meals, warm fires. They might be feeling a bit nervous, even fearful about the coming activity, the expectations to jump into action, know the path and get to work on another season of growth. These folks might be getting a bit irritated in their own way, too, as when being asked an important question just a little sooner than you’ve arrived at an answer.

So, there’s early Spring in a nutshell: the dynamic tension between moving ahead into expansive, decisive action and staying wrapped up tight in rest and unknowing, between rest and productivity, solitude and community. You’ve probably noticed that you lean one way or the other, towards wanting Spring to hurry up and arrive in earnest and wishing Winter would stay a bit longer. And since the seasons acquiesce to no one, you might notice that either way you lean, you are not satisfied. Except, of course, if you’re content with just exactly what is, right now–if you’re comfortable being flexible, letting life flow through you, just as it is.



Because the truth about Spring–at least the face it wears here in the Northeast–is that sometimes it’s warm with promise, other times blustering and harsh. The constant, especially now, is change. If you’re one of the folks able to stay present and navigate this time of transition, you may find that you are able to bend gracefully, not break in frustration under these mutable conditions. Like the young maples in the forest, you might find that as the day is warm and night cold, the sap in you rises just as it should, pulsing in rhythm with the fluctuations, even dependent on them. At exactly the right time, your leaves will burst forth, extending toward the light, and arch skyward into the song-filled air.

These are some of the core teachings of Spring. Flexibility. Ability to respond at the perfect moment. Reveling in change. Channeling inner treasures, discovered and accumulated during deep rest, into powerful manifestations of who we are. These are Spring’s requirement of us, as well as its invitation.

Though Chinese medicine can sometimes seem to be a maze of abstract theory to those not accustomed to its language or concepts, in the Five Phases (or Elements), the Chinese elegantly captured what I’ve found to be timeless insights about life on this planet. Essentially, they recorded how the landscape is reflected in the bodies, hearts and minds of humans in an analogous, inner terrain. While this particular tradition is rooted in Taoist alchemical, even shamanic, philosophies and practices specific to China, we can see that the essence of this system bears truth in multiple bioregional and cultural contexts. Identifying the core features which resonate with our own rich experiences and diverse locales, we begin to craft a modern, living, breathing medicine, rooted firmly to place.

No matter where we are, we can see the teachings and invitations of each Phase present in the cycles of our lives. We see ourselves as glints in our parents’ DNA, becoming infants and children, young adults, parents, and then elders, preparing to transition back to the earth. We see the dark of midnight, sliding into dawn, noon-day sun, afternoon’s glow, evening, and night again. We see the plants as they move from seed to sprout, to flower, to fruit, to making seed and letting it fall, beginning the cycle anew. We see our fears, our hopes, our passion, our care and tenderness, and our solitude with spirit. We can universally recognize these cycles as expressed in ourselves and the land, though Spring in one place might have a different face than in another, just as we are each a singular terrain with unique stories. Regardless of place, this living system affirms that Nature, in all its complexity and diversity, is a perfect, self-sustaining whole. In answering Nature’s invitation to become attentive to our inner landscapes, we can experience the same complex, diverse and imperfectly-perfect wholeness. In essence, it is an invitation to dynamic health and to belonging.

So, as the snows recede and ever more green peeks through, as creatures begin to emerge from winter dens and our seed packets start to call to us from wherever they’ve been tucked away, consider apprenticing yourself to Spring. How can you flow gracefully into this season embodying all at once the lithe sapling, the bursting bud, and the birdsong that fills the sky?