Green Wisdom, Green Thumbs, Green Blood
By Tara N. Brown
If you’ve ever visited a health food store to explore the medicinal teas, the dried bulk herbs, or the natural health books, chances are you’ve brushed paths with renowned herbalist Rosemary Gladstar. For more than 30 years Gladstar has been a key figure in the North American herbalist movement, and this year she joins us at our fifth annual natural health conference. I was able to catch the ever-busy Rosemary on a chilly January morning for a pre-conference conversation over a warming, long-distance cup of herbal tea.
Life’s path
On 500 acres of zone 3 farming land, adjacent to a 26,000-acre national forest in Vermont, Rosemary Gladstar maintains old growth plants and cultivates herbs, raises awareness of the need to protect native medicinal plants and their habitats through United Plant Savers, and offers education at Sage Mountain Herbal Retreat Center and Botanical Sanctuary. Gladstar literally thinks, breathes, and consumes herbs.
From her grandmother’s use of healing plants to being raised on her parents’ dairy farm, Gladstar has enjoyed a lifelong relationship with the natural world, so it only makes sense that she evolved into the educator, herbalist, and activist she is today. “I think I always knew,” says Gladstar. “But I never, like when I was 10, said ‘oh, I'm going to be an herbalist.’ It’s kind of what I always did.
“Like when I was in the seventh and eight grades, my class projects were about the wild plants of Sonoma County, where I grew up. I did a lot of research on the Pomo Indians that had originally been in the area—they are still there but in a minority of course,” notes Gladstar. “I was very interested in their use of native plants.
“My dad would make little burlap sack teepees in the field for me, and I would go out and gather plants and make my little plant pies and stuff,” says Gladstar. “I think the early influence of my grandmother particularly, but also growing up very close to nature guided me on the path I was meant to go on. I really see so much of this in people, in my students and people when I speak to them, so many people have that ‘green seed’ or ‘green blood’ in them genetically. It’s part of our tradition as humans.”
Rosemary is a fortunate human being. So many people struggle to find work that fulfills them both financially and spiritually. “It’s amazing to me have I never been bored or questioned what I'm doing. I keep thinking there’s got to be something wrong with me,” laughs Gladstar. “But I just love what I do, and it’s because it’s always changing. It’s cyclic and natural. You’re gardening and you’re making medicine and working with people and traveling. It’s not a career at all; it’s a lifestyle.”
Following the path
Herbalism as the profession we think of today didn’t really exist, especially not in the cultural mainstream, when Rosemary was starting out in the early 1970s. In 35 years she’s has been involved in shaping the culture of herbalism in the U.S. “At age 21 I had been doing a lot of backpacking, studying with native people, and being in the woods, and when I came back to Sonoma county, it was with the clear intention of opening an herb store,” says Gladstar.
In addition to opening that herb store, Gladstar is the founder of The California School of Herbal Studies, Sage Mountain Herbal Retreat Center and Plant Sanctuary, and United Plant Savers. She is the author of numerous popular books on herbalism and healthy lifestyles, yet Gladstar laughs at the notion of being perceived as an entrepreneur. “It’s so funny. Honestly, I have actually very little business sense. I have a grand trine in earth [planetary alignment in her astrological chart]. I think that’s my saving grace,” Gladstar says. “When I opened the herb store in 1972 I didn’t even know how to open a bank account. I didn’t know how to write a check.
“I do have good fortune when I start things, and they seem to really take off even after I'm gone. They continue to thrive and that is the greatest reward,” she continues. “They become so good that they live on when other people take them over.”
Maybe you’ve heard of Traditional Medicinals Tea company? Rosemary and a partner started the company in the early 1970s. She was involved for the first seven or eight years, but she had other experiences to pursue. Her partner took over the company and now it is one of the most popular brands of blended medicinal teas.
“This is what I think—I have developed business savvy over the years, says Gladstar. “I have run successful things so I don’t want to belittle myself, but it is silly to think of me as an entrepreneur.
“It has to do with luck and timing too,” notes Gladstar. “When it came to the tea company, there were no others. Celestial Seasonings was just being formed about the same time, so there was no competition. “If someone tried to start a medicinal tea company now, they would need to be a millionaire because there’s a lot of competition out there in the world. Luck, timing, and being at the forefront—I think that really made a difference,” says Gladstar.
“And I'm a very hard worker—I love my work, and I can work for hours endlessly doing what I do,” she explains. But there is more to it than luck, timing, and hard work. There is the dream.
“If you have a dream, and you believe in that dream with all your heart—that’s number one,” she says. “Second of all, you must be willing to work your entire butt off. Forever! You have to have a huge reserve of energy – you must love to work,” says Gladstar. There you have it—the secrets to Gladstar’s success.
The people on our paths
There are always mentors along our paths to becoming. “My grandmother was my greatest influence and my first teacher,” says Gladstar. “My other great teacher, who I’ve been friends with since my early 20’s, is Juliette de Bairacli Levy. She has had a profound influence on my life as well as thousands of other people’s lives.
“I found a book by her in an obscure section of the library, not in earth/botanical section—I don’t think they even had an earth section back then,” observes Gladstar. “Anyway, I was so moved by her book that I wrote a letter to her publisher and they forwarded it to her. Several months later, I received a return letter from Juliette, and we were pen pals for many years until I went to Greece to meet her in my late 20’s.”
Juliette was a special guest, accompanied by CCNH graduate Janice Dinsdale, at our second annual conference. Everyone who had the honor of hearing Juliette tell her stories and share her experiences agrees with Gladstar’s assessment of Juliette’s wide-reaching influence in the natural health culture.
Other influences on Gladstar’s work include Norma Myers and Dr. John Christopher, with both of whom she studied. Gladstar also cites Russ and Mary Jorgensen as “tremendous teachers” for her not just in the plant world, but more on “living well.” A couple of other teachers include Adele Dawson and Tasha Tudor, who Rosemary describes as “an amazing gardener and liver of life.”
The learning didn’t stop when Rosemary founded The California School of Herbal Studies. “I had the really great—I think—foresight, again in my 20s, to start an herb school,” says Gladstar. “All of my contemporaries—people who are now my age, but who were then 20 and 30—came to the herb school as speakers. I learned so much from them as well—people like Cascade Anderson, Michael and Lesley Tierra [who are also presenting at our conference this spring], James Green, and Jeanne Rose.
“That list is incredibly expanded. I learned little tidbits sometimes, maybe just a recipe or other times just a little bit about life, and sometimes I learned a whole lot from these people,” Rosemary concludes.
Plants on the path
Read any of Gladstar’s books and you will instantly know that her goals include educating people about the gifts and life that exist beyond the medicinal use of plants. She wants us to understand the greater role plants play in their own plant-communities and on the environment as a whole—the web of life.
“We are all here because of plants. We wouldn’t even be alive without them. We need them for the air we breathe. Regardless of whether one is a carnivore or herbivore, the food chain from which you eat begins with plants. Every source of food we have comes from plants,” explains Gladstar. “On a much deeper level, regardless of beliefs about how the earth came to be—creation, evolution, or whatever—every single story lets us know that the plants were here far longer than humans.
“Our life is dependent on them and their life is dependent on ours to a degree,” says Gladstar. “But nowhere near to the extent that our lives depend on theirs,” she finishes. Perhaps that is a black and white truth environmental policy makers need to acknowledge.
When it comes to human beings’ impact on the environment, Gladstar says it’s much like the traditional family unit. “Humans are the youngest species on the planet. We are acting out like the youngest member of a family. We haven’t matured as a species.”
Plants have learned to evolve and create a community over a period of billions of years. “There is succession of course,” says Rosemary, “in forests and gardens. Plants will come and take over other plants, but it’s always in support of the community’s relationships. It’s never just a member that’s coming and going—it’s this incredible biological and very healthy life force that’s happening.”
Speaking of relationships, I wondered if Rosemary had an affinity for any specific plants. “It changes through the years, she says. “I would say the primary plant I love now has become a popular herb among herbalists. Nettle – the great nettle.
“I have loved of nettle since I was very young and my appreciation for it only increases as I grow older. I love it because it is a fabulous food, grows prolifically in most parts of the world, especially Mediterranean Europe and the U.S. It’s very hearty and it has its preferences but it can grow in all kinds of situations.
“It’s a delicious food; it has the best greens. So you have a delicious, useful, tenacious, widely available plant, and it’s a powerful medicine for many systems of the body.
“I love that it’s prickly. It’s healing and delicious, but treat it well or it will get prickly with you—like a menopausal woman,” laughs Gladstar.
She continues, “Also, I have great respect for my namesake, Rosemary. I love that plant. It is very hard to grow it up here [Vermont] but I do have a couple of really old plants. I have one really old plant and some younger ones that are struggling along. It doesn’t like to be inside.”
It is a fitting namesake, indeed, for Rosemary Gladstar.
Saving the plants along the path
One of the many hats Rosemary wears is that of activist and environmentalist. Rosemary is the founder of United Plant Savers (UPS), non-profit education corporation dedicated to preserving native medicinal plants.
In the mid-1980’s the herb market was going off the charts, and nobody was asking where these plants were coming from. It was common practice for companies to label products as wildcrafted. At the same time all this wildcrafting was taking place, huge amounts of herbs were being shipped to the European and Asian markets and had been since early in shipping history. American ginseng had been shipped to the Asian markets since the 1700s. Even when the American public was not aware of the healing benefits of Echinacea in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, it was being shipped in tonnage amounts to Europe.
These historical practices, combined with poor logging practices and urban sprawl, are the main reasons Rosemary cites for the demise in the abundant availability of wild medicinal plants. Around the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was this growing concern among herbalists, primarily wildcrafters, people who were making medicines, and some practitioners, about the demise of some of these native plants, and the question was being asked, “I am not seeing much of this plant in my area anymore, are you?”
“We were all kind of recognizing that maybe there was a problem,” says Gladstar. “That was what prompted me in 1993 to look at these issues—that combined with having just returned from travel in Europe and Southeast Asia. I did these wonderful plant lovers journeys where I traveled people around the world to study plants. As I traveled, I would see cultures where the herbal tradition was still very rooted in the people, but the plants that the tradition was based on were not very apparent. You would not see fields or forests of the plants at all, except in places like the tropics and South America, and that is changing as we speak.
“So, I came home one day from one of these trips, and was out walking around my land and I realized that plants like ginseng and goldenseal, which are zoned to grow here, were not growing in my forest at all,” says Galdstar. “Then I started thinking about the less common plants, like Cohosh, black and blue, and the bloodroot, all of which should be growing in my woodlands and weren’t.”
Gladstar heard the earth speak to her, “You should plant here.” So the next summer she ordered ginseng and goldenseal to plant on her land, and that was the beginning of United Plant Savers.
A year later Gladstar was organizing the 1994 International Herbal symposium and realized the great opportunity to create a small organization and put forth the question among herabalists. She put together a 8 1/2 x 11 flyer that said “Join United Plants Givers, an organization dedicated to the conservation and cultivation of medicinal plants.”
What started with a simple question and following her intuition for a solution has become one of the most active voices for plant conservation in North America.
The path of future herbalists
When it comes to training the herbalists of tomorrow, Gladstar has some strong opinions. “First of all, don’t get lost in books and classrooms,” she says. “I get a little concerned that people are not connecting with the plants.
“They will be good healers in the sense that they will know how to use the medicines, but Herbalism comes from the plants, and, ultimately, you can’t get it from books alone.
“The healing messages, the medicine comes from the plants. Grow the plants, sit with them, make medicines with them. Learn to speak to them and listen to the plants—practice the shamanic work.
Even though Gladstar herself is an author of books on herbalism, she is insistent on this message. “It is so wonderful that we have the opportunity to have books on this, but some of the greatest herbalists evolved without any of that,” she says. “Go on retreats. Go on vision quests. Get out of your mind and into your heart. I do believe in studying, but students need to get their feet wet and experience it.”
“You never see a grumpy gardener–they are in communion, in a relationship with their plants,” proclaims Gladstar. Now that I think about it, she’s right.
When it comes to practicing as an herbalist, Rosemary’s advice is simple, “Keep your heart open. Have love and compassion. Listen with your heart. Love what you are hearing. I think that is really the most important thing.”
To learn more about Rosemary Gladstar, visit http://www.sagemountain.com/index.php.
Gladstar – United Plant Savers
Native species, plants that have very specific habitat requirements that are very slow growing, like root crops, perennials, are very specific about where they want to grow. They are not like nettle, dandelion, or burdock that can grow in a wide range of areas, and they are also very slow in maturing and developing seeds. Often times that seed is not really viable – it takes a lot to get the seed to grow—and those are the plants that we are most concerned about right now. Plants like ginseng and goldenseal are the most in demand with pharmaceutical companies and herbal companies. Some of these plants are very slow to mature, they can grow for 40, 50, 60 years. Black Cohosh Root can grow 30 or 40 years old. You know, we laugh sometimes – a wildcrafter goes out to pick these plants, and are younger than these plants are. They don’t realize that this plant is an elder and has been growing for 20, 30, 40 years. They just take it out, chop it up and make medicine out of it, and it may be the seed supplier for future generations.
This consciousness is growing and it needs to grow a lot more. We always like to say that herbalists have the least amount of impact on this; there is not a lot of over-harvesting. Some plants, yes, but mostly it is habitat destruction, overpopulation, which is probably the number one concern for all environmental organizations, but the reason that we target herbalists is because when you love something, you will defend it, you will make change, you will fight for it.
Herbalists have the great opportunity to be a voice here, and we were a big voice in changing the face of American health care, you know by introducing alternatives again. We made a lot of noise about the very grass roots, organic way, and we have the same responsibility to now that we have restored herbalism in this culture, we have maybe a greater responsibility to ensure that those plants have the tradition that it’s based on. We say it is for future generations of plant lovers but truthfully it is for the great web of life, it really has a little to do with people more to do with the web of life.
