ABOUT PHYTOTHERAPEUTICS

Expertise

I have 30 years of experience coordinating, creating and maintaining community gardens. My grandmother awakened my love of plants and my mother nurtured it. I got my start in school gardening at 16, in 1994, when I served as the Campus Forestry Intern at TreePeople in my native Los Angeles. There I learned to navigate the complexity of coordinating with various city departments in concert with parents and public schools to plant gardens and trees. I established a small garden that supplemented the weekly meals that I helped distribute on Skid Row with Food not Bombs.

In 1996 after a year defending the ancient redwoods of Headwaters Forest, I studied Permaculture Design with Dave Jacke of Edible Forest Gardens, and later with Douglas Bullock. I have worked in myriad community gardens in California, Arizona, Mexico and Oregon, including at Native Seeds/Search, Ha:ṣañ Preparatory School, Jacksonville Elementary and at a juvenile detention center.

In 2000 I served as the Outreach Education Manager for the Environmental Education Exchange in Tucson, where I learned to design ecoliteracy curriculum for middle and high school learners. There I learned proposal writing, and have been writing grants for environmental and arts organizations and for individuals ever since.

I earned a certificate in Horticultural Therapy (HT) from The Horticultural Therapy Institute's program at Colorado State University. I have established HT programs in foster care group homes and a hospice. I have developed personalized programs in private homes with a focus on adaptive gardening for people with neurological disorders, and with neurodivergent individuals and families. I bring my experience as someone with a spinal cord condition myself, and as a previous case manager for people with neurological conditions at Family Caregiver Alliance in San Francisco in 2007-8. 

Through Oregon State University I am a Master Gardener, Master Naturalist and am currently enrolled in the School Garden Coordinator training. I trained as a naturalist with the Siskiyou Field Institute. I earned a certificate in Sustainable Food and Farming from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where I studied Environmental Humanities.

I am a long time beekeeper. I am eager to continue to learn about and incorporate bioremediation techniques into my practice. I first practiced bioremediation in soil contaminated by black mold in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and have continued to study phyto/mycoremediation of brown fields and contaminated home sites.

I am a keen lifelong student of botany, biochemistry and neurobiology. I am a second generation herbalist and a natural perfumer. I grow, distill and compose symphony of scents from my fragrant plants, and love to experiment with natural dyes, botanical art and cooking with spices and food that I grow. I have a fondness for propagating carnivorous plants. I am a metalsmith and love fabricating organic wearable sculptures inspired by my garden. Visit www.exnoctem.com for my metalwork and olfactory gallery.