Michelle Soto is a fashion forward herbalist, educator, gardener and dog lover. She runs Cutting Root Apothecary and Farm, a medicinal herb and flower farm in Butler, PA. Her dream for Cutting Root is to match the plants she cultivates with the people who need them. Whether a bouquet of flowers, a beloved medicinal for your own garden, or a personalized tincture, she wants to help make plants accessible. She is committed to strengthening our community’s health by offering herbal medicine to those for whom alternative health practice might be out of reach. She takes a harm reductionist approach, including diet, nutrition, and lifestyle changes and uses alternative methodology such as reiki, focusing and meditation in her practice. She is a trained doula, reiki level one master, and community organizer.
Jocelyn Kirkwood is a community herbalist offering sliding scale herbal consultations, Somatic Experiencing Sessions, classes and plant walks with the Stonefruit Collective. Jocelyn specializes in working with pain, mental health, chronic conditions and first aid. For over a decade she has volunteered her time at numerous free clinics around the country including the Lake Effect Free Alternative Health Clinic, the Three Rivers Free Clinic For the People and the Stone Cabin Collective. Jocelyn loves brandishing her loupe in the forests of PA squealing at the snowflaked patterns of the Miterwort flower in early spring. She has studied herbs formally at the Northeast School of Botanical Medicine and The Well Of Indigenous Wisdom School, and continues to grow her knowledge through self-study and intensives. Jocelyn believes that people can be empowered in their health care through the use of herbal medicine.
Vilde Chaya Fenster-Ehrlich is happiest laying in a damp, cushy patch of self-heal, or salty and wet and covered in seaweeds, consorting with her motley klatch of house plants or disappearing into the crooks and folds of an ancient cottonwood or sycamore or turkey oak. She loves to play games of make-believe and invention, or pour over research studies for hours, or find just the right name for a potion, make it sing with one more unexpected ingredient. She loves turning school into play and games into rituals, making high art and low jokes in powerpoints, pausing to breathe with someone and watch the movement of water. Vilde was taught about botany and medicine making by 7Song, and studied advanced therapeutics and clinical skills with Betsy Bancroft, Larken Bunce and Guido Masé. She lives somewhere in Western so-called Massachusetts and teaches throughout the northeast and rust belt. Her work is increasingly centered on conjuring honey-sweet spaces of joy, realness and holding for her darling trans community, to whom she is indebted.