What’s On Your Skin? This Californian Master Herbalist wants you to know.
Interview by Holly Holt
Images by Bridget Piazza & Padi Agheli
“If you’re not communicating with nature, you’re not making medicine.”
The first time I walked into Botanica Village Apothecary, all I wanted to do was sit in the antique rocking chair in the corner and breathe for about a million years. The scent of the shop is a mixture of wild fennel that grows along the American River, the deep forest of the Sierras, and the dry Sacramento sun. The dust-free shelves and amber glass bottles, the pale wood “sandy beach” floors and buff walls covered in dried herbs and vintage botanical drawings create an atmosphere that feels clean and pure, words that the corporate beauty and “body care” industries in the United States use to sell products that, turns out, aren’t so clean and certainly aren’t pure.
Our skin is the largest organ in our body. We’ve all heard this. As women in midlife, we know taking care of our bodies is important, and we tend to put particular emphasis on our skin. One might even say that skin care is nutrition (that’s what Deb says, the owner of the apothecary). And yet we slather ourselves with creams in plastic bottles containing harmful chemicals and questionable additives to look “youthful.” Even the so-called natural products have an ingredients list that no one but a chemist could read.
However, if you look, you’ll find a quiet and growing number of small-batch herbal shops around the country crafting products in glass bottles with short ingredient lists that real people can actually read. They do this by combining ancient wisdom with true “earth science,” and in the case of Deborah Jane, the owner and master herbalist at Botanica Village Apothecary, years of work as an ethnobotanist learning from teachers like Gary Nabhan and a lifetime of herbal training with teachers like Kami McBride and Candis Canton and Chris Hobbs and continuing education in fields like Biodynamic Gardening and alchemy with teachers like Harold Hoven and Dennis Klocek. Her relationship with plants goes deep.
And now in midlife, she has embarked on the steep learning curve of entrepreneurship. In fall 2018 she opened the shop in Fair Oaks Village, California just as she turned 50. Deb had never owned a business before but had been inviting people into her home for herbal gatherings for years. Over time, the idea of a shop in the village called to her. One day, she followed an intuitive hit and answered the call.
I asked her about her herbal skin oils (the ones that helped me finally feel connected to my own skin), the complexities of wildcrafting, and the ancestral bloodline that infuses her work.
Because we are about the same age, I’d like to talk about how you grew up. In my family, I was raised on canned and boxed food from the store. I wasn’t raised on fresh food and herbs grown in the garden. I imagine that my ancestral connection to plants is further back because I am so drawn to it and don’t know why. I’m curious about your family. Do you have any direct connection to plant medicine?
It’s a few generations back. I have a teacher who’s really into that, always asking, “who’s your ancestor? Who’s the herbalist?” One time she’d asked me that, and I had just come back from Sweden. One of my great-aunts came to mind. In the late-1800s, there’s a picture of her with her parents. She was a bit of a spinster, really, but she looked like a mystic. It looked like she was looking through the camera right at you with these wide open eyes, a big wide open gaze. You could just see that she was totally clairvoyant. Maria Charlotta was her name.
When I was in Sweden, and we were talking about my grandfather coming to America, my great-aunt came up. She was my grandfather’s sister. She’s a bit of a legend in the family. So, even now, whenever something unexplained happens like a door shutting, my family says, “Oh, hello Maria Charlotta.” She has special powers, and I think of her as maybe the herbalist.
My uncle Seibert still lives on the land where she lived. In the center of the land, there is an herb garden. He explained to me that this was the foundation for her home. It was this little, dinky thing, 20 feet by 25 feet or something, and only the skeleton of the stone foundation was left. He filled it with dirt and is now growing herbs there: calendula, geranium, lemon balm. He told me that she always wanted people to plant a garden on her grave, but she wasn’t given a stone at the graveyard where all the Jonsson’s (changed to Johnson in the United States) are. Maria Charlotta is not there, but she had asked for this. He wanted to honor that, so he’s growing herbs on her old home foundation.
I also have doctors on both sides of the family. Back in the late-1800s, they were eclectic. They were herbalists. My dad loved gardening. My mother was a wonderful cook. My grandmother had a garden. I remember when we were at a restaurant one time, she pointed at the parsley garnish on the plate and told me, “Eat your parsley! It’s good for you.” There was a little herbal teaching in that.
We have talked about the possibility of going on an herbal walk when I’ve come by the shop, and recently you posted on your Instagram page about wildcrafting. I’d like to know a little bit more about your stance on that, about sustainability, about respect. Tell me more.
It’s about Native people, too. I worked with Native American community when I worked as an ethnobotanist/archeologist in Santa Fe and all around New Mexico. I have sensitivity to that, to doing right by people. It’s also about sustainability ecologically. There’s really important work being done by conservationists.
I feel like I’ve been all around in the last 35 years that I’ve been doing this, but I haven’t done a whole lot of foraging although people love to take pictures of me doing that. It tends to get out there because it’s one of my son’s favorite things to photograph. I finally said, “maybe we should back off on that” because I think I’m making the wrong impression. I grow a lot of these herbs. And a lot of these herbs come into my door from people who have them wild on their private land. I don’t want to put it out there that we just go out there and pick things on public land. We have to think about this. That’s land we share, and I want to listen to that. If it feels uncomfortable, why? Maybe the land is poisoned by someone’s garden with Miracle Grow or something worse like Round Up.
We have to be careful about what’s coming into that land. Maybe there’s a hill with that house on top, and it’s depositing those chemicals onto the land. We don’t want to pick the herbs at the bottom of the hill. But I’ve found my little places that feel amazing. I have indications that come to me from wild animals and my intuition that tell me, “It’s okay, today” or “This is not the time to do this.” In order to feel that, I have to be living with the energy of the plants year round and certainly during the time they are peaking in their vitality for making medicine. Sometimes, I’ll literally be dragged out of bed at 6:00 am thinking, “Oh my god, the nettles are calling me!” This is the medicine, and it’s talking to me. I feel like that process is sacred, and it’s a big part of what happens here.
It’s energy medicine. The plants are energy. We are energy. It’s about trusting that, the energy of people, the plants, of life. That was such a great post because I had that impression that you were out there all the time wildcrafting. So if I don’t have certain herbs at home, where can I get the others that I need without taking them from places that don’t want me to take them?
You might get this hesitation, feeling that “yes” or “no.” You are communicating with nature. If you’re not communicating with nature, you’re not making medicine. So right now, I’m growing most of the herbs at my house. Mostly what is calling me out that I don’t make at my home is tree medicine like cottonwood, a couple different pine trees I work with from a couple different elevations, and cedar. Cedar is so abundant. Western Red Cedar, you can find it in the National Forest. It’s such potent medicine, and it’s right there each year. But the others, that’s tricky work. I may not have pine resin salve or Balm of Gilead, which I make from the cottonwood, for a couple of years. You have to find it; it shifts. It’s a matter of finding it at the right time. It's fine-tuning, and I love it. That’s one of my favorite parts of doing this work. What is rising in the plants and how can I tune into that? And then it just gets all sparkly one day.
One last thing I wanted to say…about a year ago people started coming into my shop and asking for the same three bulk herbs: mullein, mugwort, and lavender for smoking. I finally asked them “what gives?” They answered, “It’s on TikTok.” In terms of wild harvesting, this is what can happen. You put yourself out there as a wild forager, and suddenly it's on TikTok and you’ve got 300,000 views. What’s going to happen? Everyone is thinking, “Oh, that looks so romantic!” I feel a sense of responsibility. Yes, it is romantic and amazing, but let’s be careful.
And speaking of being careful, recently you reformulated some of your skincare oils. What learning prompted that?
I just reformulated four items in my facial care line. I did two things at once. One was to be PUFA-free, Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids. PUFAs are unstable oils. They are unstable in our body and on our body, but I hadn’t gotten the part about “on the body” yet. My love was rosehip seed oil, which, turns out, is a PUFA! I had to go back and replace the rosehip seed oil in those four products, and now I’m using jojoba and olive oil. The scrubs and the body butters were good, but I changed all the facial oils.
The second change was that I took essential oils out of all my facial products and replaced them with whole botanicals. Now, I have PUFA-free, whole botanical facial care: a cleansing oil, a gentle cleansing foam, the Reishi Facial Oil and the Moisturizing Facial Oil with marshmallow, calendula, and violet, which are all whole plant or whole botanical oils. And one other thing about PUFAs, they are really hard to digest. These unstable oils oxidize. This oxidation releases free-radicals. Free-radicals cause inflammation, which can cause leaky gut. And they are in everything that’s in a package. Say you go to Trader Joe’s to pick up a snack for your kid and think, “Oh, it’s all natural and organic!” Uh uh. Everything has sunflower oil, safflower oil, canola oil, and good luck feeding the olive oil popcorn to your kids.
“That’s one of my favorite parts of doing this work. What is rising in the plants and how can I tune into that? ”
Oh, this is a whole thing. I don’t know what I’m going to eat now…
Think about it. It’s big. Coconut and olive oils are great, but something like grapeseed oil is a 'no.' Almond oil is another favorite in the beauty care industry, but it has a very short shelf-stable lifeIt’s almost always rancid and masked with an essential oil. You should get to know how to identify a rancid oil. It has a very distinct smell. The problem is that once the oil turns rotten, it’s really bad for your body. You don’t want to touch that. That’s oxidizing on the skin, too.
And what did you learn about essential oils and skin care? I have heard about this, but why?
Essential oils do all this great stuff—they’re anti-inflammatory, they even out the skin tone—but they should only be used as a temporary treatment. They are too strong and unnecessary for daily use. While there’s a special place for them, they are overused to the detriment of our health because they can be toxifying in the long-run.
I might do a treatment like placing a drop of essential oil on my temples, but sometimes I’ll be out in the sun and realize my oils or my minerals are “off” and those spots will turn dark brown. You want to get the body balanced, you want your minerals balanced and your fats up, so that your skin can handle some sun.
What about sunscreen?
I don’t even want to talk about sunscreen. Wear a hat if you’re outside at a swim championship or on the beach or just get your 15 minutes a day to condition your skin to receive that wonderful vitamin D. Now we’re getting into controversial things.
That’s why I want to talk to people like you who aren’t in the mainstream. You are pulling your knowledge from something more ancient. Everyone takes what they are going to take from it, but maybe they will want to look into it. Maybe they’ll get curious.
If people want to know more, I can point them to a few places. Let’s see…
-Kymber Mauldin does very powerful work with the pro metabolic diet for women.
-Carly Rae does women's health massage incorporating a pro metabolic diet.
-Katya Nova has a series of talks called The Confessions about modern matriarchy in every way, but a lot about pro metabolic diet for our hormonal and emotional balance and skin health, too.
-Amber Magnolia Hill is an herbalist who has a podcast on Spotify called Medicine Stories where she talks about pro metabolic diet, mineral balance, and so much more!
These aren’t academic papers but a good place to start for those who are curious.
Holly Holt is a writer, depth facilitator, yoga teacher, and musician whose greatest passion is supporting sublimely sensitive women writers as they dive into their deepest longings, honor their melancholy, reclaim their truth, and heal their stories. Occupation: “Story Tending.” Find her on Instagram @hollyholtwrites.
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