About Tina's Botanicals
My name is Tina and I am one of the faces behind Tina's Botanicals. I am passionate about growing herbs, wild crafting, and creating nourishing herbal remedies that are easily integrated into a healthy lifestyle. I make and sell products that I believe in and use for myself and loved ones. With inspiration from the plants that grow around me, I harvest herbs when they are at their peak and process them in a way that preserves their vitality, nutrition, and natural essence. Each season, each plant, each moment is a gift. I am grateful to be on this path and to share these healing gifts with you.
In the Fall of 2012, our family moved to western Illinois and we have been blessed to share the space of four and a half acres with many amazing healing plants, animals, and fungi that make this place home with us. Incorporating permaculture design principles, we tend a large annual and perennial garden and several culinary and medicinal herb gardens, and we protect an old field succession of bioregional plants on several acres. Here, we began cultivating a more respectful practice of harvesting and wildcrafting plants to make herbal foods and remedies that nourish our family and friends. As time went by, we received many requests for more and different herbal products and so came the inspiration for Tina's Botanicals, a small cottage operation, focusing on sustainable and regenerative practices that are rooted in deep nourishment, offering local and organic plant based products, and herbal education.
I have always appreciated the natural world and that affinity eventually brought me to study and earn a BS in biology at Converse College. My path continued in Peace Corps, as a biology teacher and wellness educator in Namibia. It was during this time that the previous lessons of wild crafting with my dad and Granny became even more embodied as I witnessed and participated in the power of plants and ritual as a source of healing, in various contexts in Namibia and Botswana. When I returned from Southern Africa, in 1993, I began graduate school, studying the flora along the Catawba River and learning about local plants as medicine with elders who were willing to share stories and insights on the Catawba Indian Reservation, ultimately earning a MS in biology in 1996. I then taught Microbiology and Anatomy and Physiology lab in a community college while continuing my studies in healthy living and organic gardening. At the encouragement of my husband, we began incorporating daily yoga practices as a way to complement a healthy lifestyle. In 2005, these interests led to a path of yoga trainings, which brought me to complete more than 1000 hours of teacher trainings, initially in Anusara yoga, and more recently in Iyengar inspired yoga, restorative yoga, and yoga therapy.
In keeping with my love of herbalism, I have had the good fortune to continue my studies with some amazing herbalists. My main teachings and apprenticeships have been with Linda Conroy, a bioregional and community herbalist, of Moonwise Herbs and director of the Midwest Women's Herbal Conference in Wisconsin, where she mentors in the Wise Woman Tradition of herbalism that encourages nourishing and thoughtful daily practices as a way to honor ourselves and each other, as well as the biosphere that we inhabit. Additionally, I have studied Family Herbalism at the School of Natural Healing, Bioregional Herbalism at the Resiliency Institute with Linda Conroy and I am currently studying Clinical Herbalism at the East West School of Planetary Herbology. Ongoing studies lead me to the annual Midwest Women's Herbal Conference in Wisconsin, where I have completed intensives with, Isla Burgess, Dr. Jody Noe, Whapio, Susan Weed, Rosemary Gladstar, and Margi Flint.
I offer gratitude to my first teachers, my parents and grandparents, who instilled in me a great respect and appreciation for all of life, and to all of my teachers and mentors (including the plants that grow around me) as I continue to learn and be inspired to walk the path of a Wise Woman and to share the many insights and blessings that this path offers.