Meet Anna Michelle, Garden Lab Founder

Hi, I'm Anna Michelle, the Community Herbalist; I love plants and plant medicines. I started this journey in my early 20s with a summer upon me and a broken foot. I was gifted a salsa seed pack, and I spent the long days on a stool in an amazing garden growing from my first compost heap siftings.  I was hooked.

 

At the same time, I was learning about healing with whole foods and also awakening to the enormity of our environmental crises.  The values of anti-oppression I was articulating in my advocacy and counseling training were also applicable to farm animals and the natural world around us. I committed to a plant based diet and embraced many practices to lessen consumption and waste in my own life.

 

Over the years, my connections to the plant world and later fungi grew and evolved; I became an organic master gardener and embraced 3 types of composting to keep as much out of the landfill as I could. Herbalism was the next step as it brings together all of my experience and passions. 

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For 3 years, I studied at the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism in Plainfield, VT. The school trains herbalists primarily in Western herbal medicine tradition, physiology and pathophysiology, phytochemistry, holistic energetic systems, and nutrition. I gained clinical skills working as an herbalist at the school's sliding scale clinic.