A woman at the kitchen table

This began, like a lot of things, with becoming a mother.

When my children were small, I found myself wanting gentler things for them — and for the house we lived in. A salve for scraped knees that I knew every ingredient of. A warm drink for a cold evening. Something in the cupboard for winter that came from a walk outside rather than a plastic bottle. I started asking how people managed before all of that was bought, and the question opened a door I haven't been able to close.

The old ways, written down again

I grew up around the edges of Eastern European traditions — the jar of dried linden, the folk calendar, the habit of making rather than buying — and I live now with an American garden and an American year. This notebook sits between the two. Some of what's here comes from old books and older people. Some comes from my own trial and error. All of it I have made with my own hands, at my own kitchen table.

I am not a doctor or a clinical herbalist, and I don't pretend to be. I'm a student of this, and I write as one: carefully, with the sources and the cautions in plain sight. You can read more about how I think about that in On Not Calling It Medicine.

An artist and filmmaker, too

I've worked with images all my life, and I can't make anything without wanting to draw it or film it. The illustrations on this site — the forest woman, the little house on its bird legs, the plants in ink — are part of the same work as the recipes. The films are how most people find their way here.

What this is becoming

Right now, this is a living notebook: recipes, plants, the garden, the turning seasons, and films made at the table. Slowly, it is becoming two books and, one day, a small physical apothecary of things made by hand.

Mostly, though, it is something I hope to pass down — to my own children first, and to anyone else who wants to learn to make things from plants for their kitchen, their body, and their home.