So, I thought I'd show up a couple scenes of the canvas house I'm living in this summer. I own a bell tent, but since we are in Appalachia this summer, we decided to keep it packed up so it does not get moldy. Tents on the ground like that left up all season get so filled with mold and mildew, it helps to be on a platform.

I've been a little down in the dumps this Spring. I'll be frank, this pandemic has kicked my arse. I didn't have a hard time with it until this past winter. Last year, I spent all my time out in the wilderness and out hiking and exploring, at hot springs and in remote places away from people, and to be honest I'd prefer to be away from people mostly these days after years on the road and so much stimulus.

(a note. all my pictures on my posts are my own photography, unless otherwise noted. In this case, the the drawings featured are from Wikipedia Creative Commons. For podcast episodes, I use photos given to me to use by permission from the guest)

In early April, I went camping with my sweetie at the North Carolina coast. We needed to get off of my parents' farm, as they are hard to be around, and we ended up at their place all winter, unfortunately. The trip was healing, but the weather a mix of sunny days and cooler weather.

Right now, I'm back on the farm I used to live on and grow tons of food and herbs on in western North Carolina. The land is tucked into the Appalachian mountains, and is just down the road from the public national forest, with trails, free camping and old growth forest. When I lived here years ago, I was a budding herbalist, and the land here is where I began to unfold exponentially as a 'plant person.' Before this, I lived in New Hampshire studying with herbalists, and in southeast Ohio at the Goldenseal Sanctuary, where I interned with folks who wild-tended forest medicinals that are at-risk because of global commerce. I met a lot of these forest medicinals in Ohio, and when coming to North Carolina to study with Juliet Blankespoor of the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine, I got to deepen my relationships.

Juniperus virginianaEastern Red Cedar Eastern Juniper Aromatic Red Cedar Juniperus virginiana, or otherwise known by its common name Eastern Red Cedar is the familiar species of my upbringing. It is a fairly common tree of the Southeast U.S. (less so in the mountains), Midwest and Great Plains regions of the the U.S. where it can grow on a wide variety of soils. It is more abundant than 200 years ago. Like I mentioned earlier in the Juniper plant profile, this is partially because of fire suppression as this tree is highly susceptible to fire. It thrives when fire does not occur seemingly dominating the ecology of an area and sometimes overtaking other species, or preventing others from growing. This is one reason why culturally it is deemed a ‘weed tree’ in the U.S. deep South when it is actually a native species serving an ecological purpose and responding to the conditions at hand. This association with the tree being ‘weedy’ is also because it grows up as a pioneer species in disturbed agricultural fields that have been abandoned, seeming to ‘overtake’ attempts to cultivate and control fields for crops or livestock.