Meet Liz Earnhart

me as a child (1)I have been enchanted with the plant world for a very long time. I have a photo of myself as a very young child, crouched in a meadow picking flowers. I have another photo of myself last year in almost the exact same pose. I have gardened for years and felt most relaxed and at peace when I was out among the leaves and flowers and with my hands in the soil.

After years of working as a nurse and experiencing a mounting frustration with the failure of the western pharmaceutical approach to cure chronic illness, I gradually began to come to a realization. We, as a modern population of humans, have forgotten what our true nature is. No wonder the pills that are manufactured in a lab often don’t help us or only help us short-term. Pills do not have the ability to remind us of our true nature and help us find our way back. Pills keep us focused on our disease states, when instead our true nature is to be in a state of balanced wellness. That’s when I realized that in order to remember our true nature, we need to go back to nature! We need to get out in to nature and to use plants as our healing remedies, because plants can remind us of what we are meant to be. The way of the plants precedes our pharmaceutical industry by thousands of years, after all.

I love being among the plants, whether in my garden or your garden or the forest. And I love bringing you their medicine. Plants really do want to help us in more ways than we realize. And they want us to help them since we are all part of an interdependent whole. I love the plants and they love me. I talk to them, sing with them and pray with them. Call me crazy, but the medicine that arises from this relationship is potent and alive.

Cottonwood Bud Harvest.jpg photo credit Joe AdrianI completed a 2 year course of study at the School of Traditional Western Herbalism in Portland, gaining exposure to many of the top herbalists in the country. Among them, Hanna Jordan, Chris Smaka, Jim McDonald, Paul Bergner, Elise Krohn, 7Song, Chanchal Cabrera, Scott Kloos, Larken Bunce and Debra Frances. I have studied with many others at various conferences around the country and have also studied herbal medicine making at the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine.

I live with my husband in the beautiful, green city of Portland, Oregon. We are surrounded by the Cascade range to the east and the NW Coast range to the west where many medicinal plants grow in profusion. May we all reconnect with the Earth and open our arms and hearts to the healing wisdom of our green relatives!