I’m Laurel Birch (they/she), a bioregional herbalist, medicine maker & visual creative residing on unceded Coast Miwok land. My practice supports people of all genders and levels of access to care. I operate within an anti-oppression, liberationist framework and invest in structurally competent, trans-affirming, trauma-informed and harm reductionist language and principles.

I have supported people from all walks of life seeking to build relationships with plants and work with herbs in various ways. I offer respectful, non-judgmental space free of hierarchies of health/illness. Some of the ways I have supported folks include: shifting physical & energetic patterns of sleep, digestion, musculoskeletal pain, anxiety, respiratory care, histories of grief, trauma, sexual violence and intergenerational harm.

I have an apothecary of handcrafted and ethically sourced herbs from local farms & herb growers. I also have a medicinal herb garden and steward native plants. I have a wide array of 100+ environmental flower essences I’ve crafted over many years. I listen and tend to plants to foster regenerative and reciprocal relationships with the deep magic of human and more than human worlds.

My plant path started with my first teacher — the land. What began in childhood as climbing trees in the Wabash River watershed in southern so-called Indiana later became a deeply felt sense of place when I first experienced the Sonoran Desert bloom in 2012. Over time, I have committed to nurturing relationships with lands, waters, their protectors, and weaving those teachings into my medicine and work.

My herbal path began in small, unglamorous ways by blending and brewing loose herbal teas and slowly learning the magic of water infusions, one herb at a time. Ms. Tea started as a play on words, a slippery pun, an ode to our primordial origins in water. The ancestral memory held in streams, rivers, oceans. It’s also about telling the Truth as a white person who actively benefits from oppressive hierarchies, dismantling those unjust systems and rooting my practice in collective liberation.

As a white herbalist, part of my lifelong work includes dismantling power dynamics of white supremacy. Whiteness has shielded me from being incarcerated, houseless, or having to confront injustice in my daily life. I understand and accept the distrust that many Black, Indigenous & people of color (BIPOC) may have for me. In terms of racial equity, my practice falls short in many ways. I am committed to listening to feedback and learning from BIPOC experiences. My intentions around this work are to build more relationships with local BIPOC communities and their elders while staying humble and accountable to the ways I can make my practice more equitable.

The question I hear from my teachers and that drives my work is: who am I responsible to? I offer sliding scale consults for BIPOC, queer and trans folks, disabled and low income folks as a way to repair injustice, but that alone is not enough. Other aspects of my work entail: redistributing herbs & funds to frontline organizers, land defenders, uplifting BIPOC herbal education and land sovereignty. Joining my nearest community clinic to offer free and low cost herbs to local folks. Those who pay at the top of the scale help support an economy of care that benefits folks living at vulnerable intersections of race, class & gender.

In 2016, I began shifting my herbal practice towards mutual aid and organizing by sending herbs to water protectors at Standing Rock. This work is in solidarity with the original inhabitants of the stolen land I occupy and those displaced by my white settler ancestors: Indigenous land defenders, water protectors, Black people, migrant farmers, sick, disabled and unhoused folks. Collective care is a cornerstone of my practice, not as an act of generosity, but as a way to cultivate more resilient communities. My product line is part of a creative practice, but also a way to subsidize community care.

I am committed to ethical sourcing and education around the harms of wildcrafting and appropriation. Ninety percent of the plants I work with are sourced from local farmers and plant folk within 100 miles of where I live. Some I grow myself, along with stewarding California native plants. I work within many lineages and invite an open awareness of my own ability to perpetuate cultural and spiritual theft. I am not one to shy away from shedding light on the harms of colonial herbalism and the violence of white “wellness” spaces.

My personal healing work includes dismantling colonial frameworks in my own education and practice, as well as gender essentialism, trans-exclusion, and cis-white gatekeeping that run rampant in mainstream health & wellness spaces. I aim to make my work accessible to those impacted by injustice, as well continuing to learn from folks already working within the lineages of health & disability justice, abolitionism, antiracist feminism, mutual aid relief, and so on. In doing this work, I recognize the contributions of teachers, organizers and practitioners: Audre Lorde, Sonya Renee Taylor, Mia Mingus, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Resmaa Menakem, Dean Spade, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mariame Kaba, Disability Justice Culture Club, Sins Invalid, Zena Sharman and many others.

I currently work with other herbalists in my local community as part of Bay Area Herbal Response Team (@bay.hrt) to help further their mission to connect low income folks and communities impacted by systemic injustice with herbal consults and education. I also try to support other solidarity projects like Herbal Mutual Aid Network (HMAN), Pacific Northwest Herbal Resilience Network (PNWHRN) and various grassroots organizers. If you’re in need of herbal donations, please feel free to reach out!

My ancestors migrated through Mohican, Haudenosaunee, Warraskoyack, Nansemond territories & across northern Appalachia by way of Ahr valley, Orne, Friesland, Scotland & British Isles. The lands that raised me belong to native Kiikaapoi, Shawnee & Miami tribes. The waters that raised me are part of the Mississippi River watershed & Wabash River watershed.

2015-18: Vitalist Herbal Practitioner and Energetic Plant Medicine independent studies

2019: Trauma Triage and Embodied Tools for Healers with Deborah Bragg & Erynn Sosinski

2019: Herbal Boundary intensive with Rachel Burgos

2020: Practitioner Skills & Holistic Protocols with Blue Otter School

2020: Course series with Ember Peters: Herbs and Hormones; A Constitutional Approach to Chronic Pain

2020: Herbs for Fire Season with BAHRT

2020-21: Holistic Protocols, Herb & Drug Safety, Ethics with Wild Current Herbalism

2021: Clinical Mentorship with Ember Peters, Stascha Stahl & Vilde Chaya

2021: Chronic Digestive Disorders with Linden de Voil, Herbal & Somatic Support for PTSD with Kelly McCarthy, A Client-Centered Approach to Diabetes with Ember Peters