Presenters & Workshops at the Plant People Gathering

Bay Woodyard

Bay has been studying natural dyes for decades. She received a diploma in Drawing and Painting from the Ontario College of Art in 1994. She has lived and worked on her honey and herb farm, Honey Pie Hives & Herbals,  in Prince Edward County, Ontario for 25 years. Bay grows and forages many natural dye plants and dyes yarn to sell in her farm store along with her many honey and herbal products. She teaches workshops on the farm including natural dying. She creates abstract artworks out of hand spun, naturally dyed local wool that she knits and crochets. She exhibits regularly and has recently been selected for an artist residency by the local arts council. Bay is a co-creator of Gather in the County, a modern textile market in Picton, Ontario with over 80 textile vendors, art installations and guilds participating. honeypie.ca

Bay’s Offering:

Natural Dye Project                                                                                                                                                              Bay will be providing participants the opportunity to work with natural plant dye!  You’ll have the chance to craft a dyed project of your own, and learn all about the process of working with plants to create various hues that last for years to come.

Blair Richards Koeslag

Growing in love with nature is a life long process.  After spending years and years of her life attempting to deny it Blair has finally surrendered to the fact she a forest sprite.
Blair Richards-Koeslag is a Charted Herbalist, PINA certified permaculture teacher, who has spent 24 years working with trees at the Golden Bough Tree Farm and loves the land deeply. goldenboughtreefarm.ca

Blair’s Offering: 

Tree & Plant Identification & Medicine Walk

Let’s spend some time learning about trees and some of the ways they are medicine for the body, mind and spirit. Understanding their nature gives us insight into our own. Let’s tell stories and sing songs make offerings and explore the medicine while delving into the ancient and wonderful relationship between people, trees and culture.

Dannette Steele (photo, bio & offering coming soon!)

Julie Gaia

Julie Gaia is a mother, mentor, seed saver, weaver, star seed, animist, land tender, and plant spirit medicine carrier.  She grew up on a dairy farm in southern Ontario. She studied Herbalism formally with Sage Maurer at the Gaia School in Vermont, and Pam Montgomery in California. For 10 years she created and tended a 1-acre permaculture ( fruit, herbs, bees, mushrooms, and plants) haven in the Carolinian forest. She started her herbalism journey when she was 19 years old in Saskatchewan. She worked with plants to heal her pneumonia, and her lungs healed without antibiotics. Since then, she has been dedicated to the plant path. She created the Gaia Hive to share her love of plants and create a space for living mentorships on the land. She has an Herbalism and Plant Spirit Medicine Practice alongside group mentorships.  www.GaiaHive.ca

Julie’s Offering:

Plant Spirit Journey
Each person will have the opportunity to meet the spirit of one local mystery plant and feel its medicine.   You will be offered a tea to drink and be able to explore a layer of its medicine.
Julie will drum and sing while this plant spirit moves through your body.
There will be time to journal and share your experiences in circle.

Michael Vertolli

Michael Vertolli BSc, RH
Michael is a Western traditional herbalist who has been practicing since 1986. He is the
founder and director of Living Earth School of Herbalism, which offers in-class and online
classes and workshops and a clinical diploma program in Western herbal medicine. Michael
developed Four Elements Herbal Therapy, a system of Western herbalism that integrates the
physiological approach of modern European and North American traditions of herbalism within
the broader holistic and spiritual paradigm of traditional earth-centred healing traditions. He
has also done extensive research on medicinal herbs that are native to and naturalized in
northeastern North America, many of which are no longer in common use.
livingearthschool.ca   michaelvertolli.blogspot.ca

Michael’s Offering:

Toxicity and Chronic Disease
There is a tendency these days, even among the supposedly “natural healing” advocates, to
approach health and diet in very overly simplistic ways. We are multi-layered complex beings
living in a multi-layered complex world and our current state of health is a result of a
confluence of many factors in our present and in our past. Nevertheless, toxicity—the sources
of which are also multifaceted—is one of the important contributing factors to chronic
inflammatory health conditions. In this lecture we will discuss many of the common sources of
toxicity in our lives and various herbal and lifestyle approaches to addressing the effects of
toxicity.

Monika Ghent

Monika Ghent is a Western Traditional Herbalist, Plant Spirit Medicine Healer, Distance Healer, Weather Worker and Traditional Healer in the Nahua tradition of Central Mexico. She has a private practice in Maple, Ontario where she sees clients in person and also works with people
throughout the world as a Distance Healer. She runs the Living Earth School of Herbalism with her husband, Michael Vertolli. The nature of Monika’s work is shaped by her respectful relationship with the divine natural world and all living beings. As a healer and teacher, Monika supports others in awakening to the beauty of their uniqueness and living their truth to its fullest expression in health and wholeness.
monikaghent.ca   livingearthschool.ca

Monika’s Offering:

Wild Herbs for Emergency First Aid

In this workshop, Monika will talk about common wild herbs that are excellent for emergency first aid
in the field. These plants can be readily wild-harvested, some even in the dead of winter, and have
powerful medicinal properties to address many emergency situations such as burns, wounds, bites,
strains and sprains, pain, digestive issues, and so on.

Steven Martyn

M.A. (traditional plant use), B.F.A. honours, artist, farmer, wildcrafter, builder, teacher, writer, visionary. Steven has more than thirty years experience living co-creatively with the Earth, practicing traditional living skills of growing food, building and healing. Steven created Livingstone & Greenbloom in 1986, Toronto’s first green landscaping company. In 1996, he created the Algonquin Tea Company, North America’s premiere bioregional tea company. He has given talks and run workshops internationally for more than twenty years and taught plant identification and wilderness skills at Algonquin college for 11 years, and at the Orphan Wisdom School for eight years. In 2014, Megan and Steven started the Sacred Gardener Earth Wisdom School. Steven released his first book The Story of the Madawaska Forest Garden in 2016, his second, Sacred Gardening in June 2017 and The Roundhouse in 2022. thesacredgardener.ca   

Steven’s Offering:

Treating Long Covid, Lyme and other Chronic Inflammatory Diseases

I’ve contracted Lyme disease at least twice; once about twenty years ago (which was treated with antibiotics) and then again (much more severely) about twelve years ago, which I successfully treated with herbs. I treated and cured myself of Lyme (borealis), Babesia and Bartonella. Since then I’ve treated about a hundred people with Lyme and other chronic inflammatory conditions with much success using similar protocols to those I developed through my own healing journey. More recently I had a serious Covid infection which I have been working with for the last few years and it cycles. With both these illnesses, and many other chronic inflammatory conditions, I’ve followed much of the same course of treatment. My methodology is as follows:

Herbal treatments for reducing the microbial load

Herbs and food for detoxing

Herbs and food for treating inflammation

Herbs to build the immune system (and not increase the inflammatory response)

Tamara Segal

I am thrilled to be the hostess of the Plant People Gathering!  I am the herbalist behind Hawthorn Herbals.  I run a private practice at New Moon Farm, where I wild harvest and cultivate herbal medicines, teach classes for beginner-to-advanced levels of herbalism and offer wild plant identification walks (both at the farm and in my local region).

Tamara’s Offering:

In addition to hosting the event, I’ll be happy to sit on the panel of herbalists for some interesting discourse on different approaches to the craft.