Patricia Mitchell
While I thought my career as an herbalist began in childhood, in fact it started long before I was born. As a girl growing up outside of Philadelphia, I concocted "huckleberry finn water," an infusion of tap water and wildberry-flavored life savers, and made "honeysuckle dew elixir" for my dolls. While living in Alaska in the '80s, I infused the yellow buds of the cottonwood tree in olive oil to make the analgesic Balm of Gilead oil. As a gardener, backpacker and trained forager, I learned to find, grow, and use plants to make natural food, beauty, and health products. But not until traveling to a small village in what is now the eastern Slovak Republic did I realize that my passion for botanicals was bred in the bone.
