no recommendations
Photo: susan belsinger
I had planned on doing a blog about favorite herbal products for holiday gifts, however this is an even better time to post some of these amazing creations–for the new year–and to help get us through the cold and dark days ahead. I want to extol the virtues of some herbal businesses that I know and use on a regular basis from growers, purveyors, bloggers and creators of delicious and delightful herbal products. Be well and take the time to pamper yourself during the cold winter months ahead.
These herbalist folks are doing great work and I support them and use their products on a regular basis–many of them daily. Although I cultivate many herbs, dry and preserve them, as well as formulate them into everything from cleaning products, spritzers, scrubs, salves, lotions, bath salts, oils, shrubs, syrups, bitters, tinctures and elixirs; I appreciate and support my fellow herbalists and am inspired by their formulations. I also go to them for ingredients that I do not grow enough of, are hard to find, or ones that I need to make my own preparations.
Rebecca Altman of Kings Road Apothecary is an inspiration for me. Her products are creative, delightful, imaginative and most important, useful and effective. I love her blogs, which are quite informative, sometimes quirky, real, honest and heartfelt. Her surprise boxes are like Christmas once a month and her creations vary from bath salts, herb-infused oils for kitchen and boudoir, bitters, hot cocoa mixes, smudges, incense herbs, syrups, elixirs and much more. Her kava surprise box is still holding me in a dreamy state; the reishi and cordyceps hot chocolate is fortifying and delicious; her cacao and burned caramel digestive bitters are downright scrumptious; and her rose elixirs and tinctures are so good for the heart and I have also given many of them as gifts to help loved ones through the grieving process. Rebecca also has great links to other people, sites and herbal info in her blogs. www.kingsroadapthecary.com
Thanks to Kiva Rose for turning us on to Rebecca–Kiva has also linked me to many other incredbile healers out there–and she too, is an inspiration. Kiva is a practicing folk herbalist and forager living in the Gila wilderness in New Mexico; she is a good writer, teacher, and is full of herbal knowledge. Her website The Medicine Woman’s Roots is at http://bearmedicineherbals.com/ and along with her partner, Jesse Wolf Hardin, she co-edits, publishes and writes Plant Healer Magazine (http://planthealermagazine.com/), which is an online herbal zine full of so much herbal information, each one tends to run to hundreds of pages in length “Featuring experience-based & adventurous writings by teachers, practitioners & plant lovers, combining inquiry, inspiration & skills in artful celebration of the evolving folk herbalism culture”.
Although…
