If Kat Maier were a plant, you could say she has released her seeds all around Charlottesville. She’s been here since 2005, teaching and practicing herbalism, so at this point she has many former students and clients in and around town. Her Belmont home, also the site of her apothecary, classroom, and garden, is a node where all these people—and many plants, from the weedy to the endangered—have gathered. The place itself, you might say, is a kind of tincture, or concentration, of our area.
On a visit in late spring, the garden is bursting with fragrant azaleas, plus the foliage of low-growing plants like goldenseal, trillium, and bloodroot. Maier is warm and welcoming, with intense blue eyes and a ready laugh. She sits in a shady backyard spot and explains that her new book, Energetic Herbalism, distills wisdom gleaned not only from her years of work in Charlottesville, but the two previous decades she spent in Rappahannock County. It’s a guide to several world traditions of herbalism and 25 of the most essential medicinal plants. She’ll give a book talk at New Dominion on May 13.
“I never went to herb school,” she says, summarizing a life history that she details more fully in the book’s introduction. “I really apprenticed to the plants. I taught myself by spending incredible amounts of time in Shenandoah National Park.”
She also trained as a physician’s assistant—a grounding in Western medicine that shows, for example, in her requirement that students bone up on anatomy, physiology, and the Latin names of the plants they use. But one senses that herbalism, for Maier, is really a matter of the spirit. “For me, the foundation is that relationship with the plant,” she says.
“I feel like she has been studying it and living it constantly for all these years,” says Katherine Herman, who completed the three-year herbalism course at Maier’s school, Sacred Plant Traditions, in 2013 and went on to found Gathered Threads, an herb farm in Nelson County. “It’s not just book knowledge. It’s just amazing the amount of wisdom that she has.”
A quick dip into Energetic Herbalism hints at the breadth of that wisdom; you might be looking for basic information on the uses of calendula, say, and find yourself reading about how the history of colonialism relates to our sense of disconnectedness from nature. Maier advocates for a lifelong practice of curiosity and humility toward plants. “Often when I lead a plant walk, people ask me whether this plant or that one is ‘good for anything,’” she writes. “Imagine if someone introduced me to you and, after greeting you, I wondered aloud whether you were good for anything, or how I could use you.”
Besides running Sacred Plant Traditions, Maier has also been deeply involved with United Plant Savers, a group that aims to protect native medicinal plants. A growing market for medicinals has threatened certain wild species, like black cohosh and ginseng. Maier’s city garden is, she says, a sanctuary for some of these plants and, she hopes, a model for others. “People are talking about how to rewild the urban areas,” she says. “We have to have many different people planting the plants. The time is now.”
She grows delicate natives—on this day, a colleague is transplanting wild yam along the side of the house—but that doesn’t mean shunning the plants that Europeans brought to North America and that usually get labeled as weeds. “Our major medicines are chickweed, dandelion, cleavers—all the plants on the Roundup label,” she says, adding that dandelion’s genus name, Taraxacum, means “remedy of all disorders.” “They were brought over as a primary food and medicine,” she says. In the age of climate change, she advocates for an inclusive view of the plants we find ourselves living with now, rather than a strict division between native and invasive.
At an earlier point in her career, she enthusiastically gathered medicinals from around the world, but she’s settled into a belief in bioregionalism—in her definition, “trying to have your food and medicine from the region where you live.” That’s why the book lists the characteristics and uses of just 25 plants. Choosing these, Maier says, was “one of the most agonizing parts of the book,” since she has knowledge of so many others. But working with a small number of plants, she says, is a mark of folk herbalists the world over. The book presents three different energetic systems—vitalism, ayurveda, and Chinese medicine—based on the idea of elements that make up the universe and the body. During her training, Herman says, this approach “gave us a well-rounded approach to the human body and how to look at herbs.”
Along with the publication of Energetic Herbalism, Maier has closed her clinical practice in order to travel and teach, as well as redesigning her clinical training. Her former students are carrying on her work in various ways—a local ecosystem of seeds she sowed, now blossoming.