verdant botanica was created by Deanna Kestrel. Deanna grew up in Southern California with a deep love of the Pacific ocean and chapparal. She has spent most of the last 15 years working in agriculture, with a focus on flower farming and design. During this time she’s been informally studying herbalism alongside her love for learning and tending to the local flora and fauna of California and North Carolina.

She attended college at UC Santa Cruz where she studied Agroecology and Feminist Studies before earning her Masters degree in Geography with a focus on feminist geographies and political ecology at UNC Chapel Hill. She received formal training in herbalism at Terra Sylva School of Botanical Medicine 2 year program on Community Herbalism with teachers Janet Kent, Dave Meesters and Jen Stovall. She finds endless joy in sharing the wonder and interconnection we have with our non human communities with others.

Her first and foremost teachers in this practice are the plants and animals she observes and works with. She has a rigorous research practice, always looking to expand her knowledge of herbalism. Her commitment to this work aims to dismantle the harmful fear-based wellness trends that are anti-science and void of class consciousness and disability justice frameworks. She believes that relationship to land is inherently political in this settler state. She tends a small garden plot in so called Chapel Hill, the land of the Shakori, Occaneechi, Eno and Sissipahaw peoples. The lineage of western herbalism is steeped in the appropriation of indigenous, African, and West Asian herbal practices- respecting and acknowledging those lineages is central to her work. Reciprocation to land and lineage is enmeshed in her herbcraft. She’s committed to a vitalist approach that always considers the context of the many systems and webs we exist in.

Outside of this work she spends her time managing a small native plant nursery and on many different adventures with her beloved spouse and dog. She is always down for collaborations or trades, just reach out!