Botanical Revival is a queer, trans, and disabled-owned business dedicated to collective and cultural healing through working with the land. The natural world knows how to heal, and we can look to her for guidance in our own healing, whether that’s physically, mentally, socially, or spiritually. And healing happens on all levels: individual, familial, community, collective, and environmental.
Here at Botanical Revival, we discuss issues relating to all of these modes of healing–specifically through mimicking healing processes that already exist in nature. Through this business, you’ll find information about herbalism, regenerative farming, somatic experiencing, holistic nutrition, food sovereignty, death work, decolonization, and more.
Because Botanical Revival aims to shrink the accessibility gap to these areas of study, most of our content is free. This platform is ever-evolving and the goal is to provide as much information as professional courses for free or really cheap. Finances are a huge roadblock for a lot of people, so let’s work to take those barriers down!
Hey, I’m Heron, The Founder of Botanical Revival!
My name is Heron (he/they) and I am the founder of Botanical Revival. I am a queer, trans, autistic, gen z quintessential Taurus. My family comes from the Northeastern United States where much of my family still lives.
I grew up in the woods and on the waters of beautiful Maine and I am very proud of my Acadian heritage. As a kid, my family spent a lot of time hiking, kayaking, camping, and exploring the Maine forests. Today, I’m living the van life, traveling across the United States, continuing to stoke the fire of my adventurous heart.
As I travel, I am also studying to become an herbalist. Herbalism, nutrition, and trauma psychology have been my loves for much of my life and I am now exploring career paths in these fields. And thus, Botanical Revival is here!
My Professional Experiences
In my undergrad, I studied food systems at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, ME, which included sustainable agriculture, food policy, anthropology, and nutrition. I’ve worked on many organic farms accross the country, including Beech Hill Farm in Mt. Desert, ME, Adobe House Farm in Durango, CO, and as a farm manager of Witte Flower Farm in Salem, OR (just to name a few!) I also have extensive knowledge in flower gardening, most of which originally came from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor, ME. And I worked as the lead farm hand on Peace Farm in Bar Habor, a permaculture homestead.
I am currently a student at CommonWeath Holistic Herbalism where I’m working toward becoming an American Herbalist’s Guild registered clinical herbalsit. I have also studied somatic experiencing therapy with Luis Mojica at Holistic Life Navigation and will be pursuing becoming a trained somatic practitioner with Somatic Experiencing International.
What Brought Me Here
After a childhood living close to the poverty line, impacted by massive medical bills, and without much more than we needed, I was in for a surprise when I went off to college. As a first-generation college student, no one could have prepared me for the cultural shocks I would experiencing going from poor, rural, conservative America to a wealthy liberal school. Some of the changes were really hard. I was one of only six people I knew at my school who came from poor, conservative families and I was left feeling like an outsider a lot of the time. But, there were many wonderful changes.
I was introduced to a world I had been craving my whole life: a culture-rich world. Of course, there were many international students and people from all over the country attending the school which was wild to me as a white kid who knew a total of six people of color until I graduated highschool and who had never left the East coast. But there was something even more meaningful I was given: MY culture.
My family is Acadian. We’ve been in the Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia areas for nine generations. Growing up, I wasn’t introduced to hardly any aspect of my Acadian heritage. But there at school, so much of it had gifted itself to me. I was introduced to Quebecois music and contra dancing, I was shown, through my studies and the many amazing people I had met, what it was like to homestead and live off the land, and I was welcomed into a new way of life that was connected and meaningful.
The Botanical Revival Purpose
Community shouldn’t be available only to those in college. The life changing experiences I had when I was embedded in the land and in community are what I want to promote on a large scale. It’s community like this that provides to us a sense of deep meaning and belonging. At some level, it’s what we’re all longing for.
Botanical Revival: Facillitating Cultural Healing Through Working with the Land
Any small scale farmer can tell you how the land brings us together and provides more than just food to a community. Comming into relationship with the land and the people who tend it provide a sense of place. At Botanical Revival, we consciously work with this notion to help create a kind of healing that’s missing right now and that we are all in need of: cultural healing.
What is Cultural Healing?
Healing is a big-ticket topic today. Pop magazines and news outlets are full of articles about protein, workout routines, meditaion, and self care. Although some of this pop-culture health is problematic, the fact that so many of us are normalizing our health in more holistic ways is amazing. In the past decade, therapy has become dramatically more normalized and many modes of holistic healing and self care and finding their way into the public eye.
There are many areas of healing we’re all pretty familiar with: physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual, relationship, and environmental. But did you know there are more? At Botanical Revival, we focus on the bigger picture: social, collective, and cultural healing.
Culture = Our Relationship to the Land
And the poorer our relationship with the land, the weaker, less fulfilling, and more corrupt our culture.
Think about any Indigenous culture from around the world. Their language and music mimic the sounds of their landscapes. Their food is grown or harvested directly from the land, which is made into their cultural cuisines. Medicine is also gathered and worked with in this way and is often incorporated into their food. The clothes they wear were created using materials from the land as are their houses and shelter. The stories and spiritual practices are nature-based, involving the spirits of their landmarks. And their dances are like the water, the birds, or the other elements of the land. And, even though Indigenous peoples make up about 5% of the world’s population, they protect about 80% of the world’s biodiversity (Fleck, 2022).
The richer our relationships with the land, the richer our cultural landscape.
Now think about white culture in America. It’s largely centered on massive wasteful consumerism, symbols of capitalism and patriarchy (Santa Clause, for instance), and big industries that dictate the food we eat, the music we listen to, the clothes we wear, and so on. And those who control this culture sit at the top economic 1%. This culture is, arguably, the sole cause of climate change, poverty, and every social issue we face in the world today.
That’s a big statement to make. Future essays and posts (which will be linked here once they’re up) will explore these topics in more depth with better scientific backing. For now, it’s easy to understand how creating better relationships with the land–at individual and cultural scales–would heal the collective patterns creating widespread devastation.
Cultural Change Starts with Us
Most of us–in fact, more than 99% of us–aren’t directly resposible for the widespread devastation colonialism has caused. However, almost all of us are responsible for upholding it in some way.
Here at Botanical Revivial, we offer practical ways to create healing–both in our personal lives and, especially, in the collective. We exlpore ways we can gain agency over our communities and develop healthy, healing relationships to each other and the land. What makes humans human isn’t just our apposable thumbs and fire. It’s the way we have created thousands of sustainable, interdependent communities that know how to take care of themselves and one another. Strengthening the health of our cultures in America is what will save us.
About Botanical Revival’s Content
There are so many topics to explore under the umbrella of collective and cultural healing–I’ll be writing about this for the rest of my life! Botanical Revival is the brainchild of all of my areas of interest, so we’ll be diving into a lot of areas of study. Here are some:
- regenerative farming and gardening practices
- holistic herbalism and original medicine
- holistic, place-based nutrition
- somatic experiencing and movement
- food and community sovereignty
- holistic death work and death integration
- the land back movement and following Indigenous leadership
- land-based and functional art
- poetry and personal stories from me and many others
- holistic and practical spirituality
- and more–whatever else you and I wish to explore!
I won’t just be sharing my content, but also the content of other creators, healers, artists, and more who are doing work to create a culture of healing. There are many ways you will be able to explore and engage in the content Botanical Revival creates. Here are some:
Botanical Revival’s Free Content
Because part of our goal as a business is to decrease the accessibility gap to educational opportunities, most of Botanical Revival’s content is free. The goal of this platform is to provide as much information as professional schools for free or really cheap. (For more information about how Botanical Revival makes money, see “fueling Botanical Revival” below!) Here’s how we do it:
Free Blog Content
The Botanical Revival blog is set up to act like a course. For every topic, there’s one big article that discusses everything you need to know. Then, there are many smaller articles linked to that article to help you explore subtopics in more detail. Each of these major topic articles can be found in the photo carousel at the topic of this page, the home page, and the blog page.
The goal of this blog content is to provide as much information about Botanical Revival’s topic areas (permaculture, herbalism, etc) as professional certificate schools and courses. After some years of developing this site, you’ll be able to learn as much from our blog as you would an expensive course.
At the time I’m writing this, there isn’t much content yet because this business is so new. However, I’m working every day to build more material to give to you and the site is growing very quickly. I’m so excited to see how the blog evolves over the next few years!
Free Downloads
As I create bog content, I’m also creating an abundance of free downloadable material. This material is meant to supplement to blog and help you to further explore the content. These free downloads include workbooks, recipes, guides, journals, meditations, and more. As I said above, there isn’t much there yet. But I’m adding new free downloads every month so be sure to keep coming back!
In the near future, I will also be creating courses that will be an addition to the other materials on the website. It’s too soon to tell which format the courses will be in, their cost, and their topics. But courses are on the horizon!
Botanical Revival’s Virtual Assistance Services
A virtual assistant is a professional who offers assistant services remotely. These services can include email and task management, social media management, scheduling, tech support, etc. VAs are private contractors, which means you don’t have to worry about hiring them and dealing with taxes. Their help is easy to access and they help you free up time so that you can get to doing what you love!
Small businesses supporting smal business: we thrive together!
Because Botanical Revival is a community-oriented business, I offer general VA services to other small businesses that align with my values and mission. It’s my goal to help other small businesses thrive, especially those that are supporting a holistic vision of the future.
Learn more about our services and how we can work together here:
The Future of Botanical Revival
I have big plans for Botanical revival, all of which I’m chipping away at day by day. This business is the manifestation of many years of dreaming, scheming, and work. And the dreams continue.
A Free Educational Site
I’ve said this a few times already, but it’s worth mentioning again. Botanical Revival will be more than just a blog. It will be an educational site where people can take professional-quality courses for free or very cheap. We will have online courses for permaculture, holistic herbalism, community death work, somatic experiencing, and more. I imagine having our own certificate courses that are accessible to everyone who wants to take them.
A Regenerative Community Herb Farm
This is the big goal for this business. I picture a remote farmstead nestled in the Cascade mountains. Here we’ll grow a variety of fruits, nuts, perennial veggies, and lots of herbs for the community. The farmstead will be a permaculture oasis and a gathering place for community events, classes, gatherings, and more. This is many years down the line, but it’s the vision I am keeping in mind as Botanical Revival evolves.
Fueling Botanical Revival
Although I aim to provide information here on this site as accessible as possible, I, unfortunately, still need to make money. Botanical Revival is my livelihood so I have created a few ways to generate money to make this business sustainable.
The first is via affiliate sales. There are many affiliate links throughout the website where, if you click them and make a purchase, I make a small commission at no extra cost to you. To stay true to Botanical Revival’s values, I will never support businesses that do not align with them. Instead, all of the businesses I promote on this site are working to support collective well-being and are businesses I regularly buy from in my personal life. If you’d like to learn more about Botanical Revival’s affiliate partnerships, click here.
The second is through Patreon. If you’re looking to more actively support us here, Patreon is the best platform to do it. You have the option of supporting for $10, $25, $50, or $100 per month. By becoming a patron, not only are you helping create the content here at Botanical Revival, but you also get all of our content for free (plus some extra gifts, too!) Learn more about becoming a patron by visiting our Patreon page.
Join the Botanical Revival Community
If you’d like to stay involved with us, then subscribe to our email list! When subscribed to our email list, you’ll be updated on all of Botanical Revival’s new free content and all other community happenings.
You can also subscribe to our Patreon. By becoming a patron, not only are you helping to support the creation of all of the content here at Botanical Revival, but you will also be the first to be updated on all of our new free content plus you’ll get all of our paid content (courses, workbooks) for free! Check it out now.
