Wakefield Herb Gathering
Johanne Fontaine
In 1993, Johanne began her adventure with herbalism, this changed her life. It quickly became a passion and turned in to a life’s work. For many years, she had a medicinal plants garden open to the public and started the educative aspect of a passion. She is now professor in two different schools, she gives lectures and she is also a professional therapist where she specializes in women’s health.
Steven Martyn
M.A. (traditional plant use), B.F.A. honours, herbalist, artist, farmer, wildcrafter, builder, teacher, writer, visionary.
Steven has more than thirty years experience living co-creatively with the Earth, practicing traditional living skills of growing food, building and healing. Steven created Livingstone & Greenbloom in 1986, Toronto’s first green landscaping company.
In 1996, he created the Algonquin Tea Company, North America’s premiere bioregional tea company. He has given talks and run workshops internationally for more than twenty years and taught plant identification and wilderness skills at Algonquin college for 11 years, and at the Orphan Wisdom School for eight years. In 2014, Megan and Steven started the Sacred Gardener Earth Wisdom School. Steven released his first book The Story of the Madawaska Forest Garden in 2016, Sacred Gardening, in June 2017 and The Roundhouse in 2022.
Kelly McDowell
Kelly McDowell is a Community Herbalist of Afro/Indig/Welsh ancestry who practices in Michi Saagi Territory (Peterborough, Ontario) where she founded and coordinates the Peterborough Community Medicine Garden. She has been a healing arts practitioner for over 20 years and has studied under numerous herbalists across various traditions. As an apprentice to the natural world, she sees it as her mission to recollect ancestral memory of the plant world and to bring herbal wisdom back into the Commons.
Megan Spencer
Megan is the co-creator of The Sacred Gardener where she shares her divine food creations, made from wildcrafted and cultivated herbs and vegetables. She is a visual artist that works in the local community, the chair of Green Burial Ottawa Valley and a lover of stories, ideas and wild people. She is passionate about sharing how to preserve food through fermentation and integrating herbs and wild plants in our daily lives.
Abrah Arneson Cht RH
Abrah Arneson has been practicing herbal medicine for 18 years. Abrah believes most people have an essential question in their life. This question is their beacon. Some would even say this question is their karma. Abrah’s question is: how can life’s intoxicating beauty co-exist with chaotic mess life sometimes is? This question has led Abrah to work in hospice supporting the dying, train as doula to hold women while they labour, travel to all continents on this planet and spend a year in retreat in the Yukon wilderness. Abrah’s practice of herbal medicine has nourished this question and deepened her understanding of transformation from illness to health, from despair to hope and from disconnection to connection. Abrah is the author of The Weaving: Plants, Planets and People, The Herbal Apprentice: Plant Medicine and The Human Being and the Herbal Apprentice Workbook. She just recently released The Vessel: Women, Plants and Contraception.
www.abraherbs.com and on Facebook at Abrah Herbalist in the Woods
Nicholas Kielback
I'm not a mycologist, but a self-taught mushroom enthusiast who set out to overcome the common affliction of mycophobia, (the fear of mushrooms) over a decade ago. I now connect with the mycelium wherever I go, foraging mushrooms in rural settings and near my suburban home in Gatineau.
Let’s walk and talk about fungi! Topics I will touch on; Where, when and how to look, cooking tips, and safe ingestion of new species.
Alberto Carbo Cht RH
Alberto Carbo is a people person - someone who loves to connect with fellow human beings to talk, share, joke, laugh, and learn.
At some point, in his desire to connect with others through the sharing of food, Alberto sowed seeds in the Earth, and tended to a vegetable garden, not knowing that this was the beginning of his relationship with Plants.
Extensive travels, with lots of time spent in farms and rural areas, solidified his bond to the natural world, and after personally experiencing and witnessing the power of Plant medicine in the Amazon, Alberto realized that the influence of the Plants had unequivocally changed him.
Today, Alberto is a practicing clinical Herbalist in Ottawa, serving his community in English and Spanish, and utilizing his abilities to connect with others as a bridge for those who could benefit from connecting with the Plants.
Kayoki Whiteduck
Kayoki Whiteduck is an Algonquin anishinaabe who is passionate about plants, gardening, sustainability and herbal teas. He planted his first garden when he was 15. He has studied Horticulture, Western Herbalism and as a Tea Sommelier. in 2016 he started a business called Mitigomin Agriculture where he grows and sells herbal teas.
Jennifer Gillean
Jen(@inthemomentwithjen)supports people willing and wanting to learn how to nourish their mental and physical health for enhanced vitality in their daily rituals, rhythms, and relationships. Through a multilayered and personalized approach, Jen’s work often weaves narrative and plant-based medicine with self-care and self-regulation skills through embodiment, mindfulness, and earth-based practices.
Jen brings a wealth of experience, with a Bachelor of Education and specialized training in Birth and Bereavement and Yoga Therapy for folks experiencing grief, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, addiction, and persistent pain. Jen is passionate about supporting folks working through the impacts of sexual, birth, and pelvic-related trauma to restore a sense of well-being and wholeness.
She is completing her requirements to practice consulting as a registered Clinical Herbalist and loves making herbal medicine for her clients.
Marianne Beacon
Marianne Beacon is a Registered Herbalist, in professional practice as a Clinical Herbalist since 2008 and as a Bowen Therapist since 2002. She also practices Reiki at the Master level. Her training in these fields go back as far as the early 90’s. Nestled in the heart of Peterborough in the Charlotte Mews, Elderberry Clinic offers the opportunity for individuals to use these modalities to address their health concerns. Marianne is fully engaged in this practice, from growing and wildcrafting herbs, to making herbal products, to consulting with clients and teaching. She has specializes in preparing Spagyric tinctures and flower essences, and maintains a full apothecary.
Marianne teaches herbalism, Bowen Therapy and Reiki and approaches her practice with heart, and the breadth of decades of experience.
www.mariannebeacon.ca
Eniid Goodman
ENiiD aka Carol Goodman is a visual artist, musician, yogi, teacher & farmer. She resides at her farm in Wakefield, Quebec with her husband & blended family of 5 adult children & growing number of grandchildren. They all come & go from 100 Mile Farm which is lovingly tended by Eniid, her husband Tiki & her fairy friends & otherworldly cohorts. They are passionate about hosting guests for get a
ways & events at their farm through airbnb. Eniid also teaches courses & one on one classes to fellow art, music & yoga lovers with a particular fondness in working with people with special needs.
Christina Benoit
Christina Benoit is graduate of a third year Herbal Apprentice with Abrah Arneson. Christina is also Registered Nurse BSCcN practicing in Critical Care, Acute Care and Community Care for over 16 years.
While caring for others in the health care field, she was witness to the health challenges people continually
face. Christina noticed significant gaps to health promotion, wholistic medicine and feelings of wellness.
Working alongside conventional medicine Christina is passionate about how plant medicine supports and improves health and wellness. Christina is also yoga instructor and a Reiki Master and has been teaching individuals and groups for 7 years.
Mariane Desjardins Roy
Mariane Desjardins Roy is passionate about regenerative agriculture, the local economy and especially the return to the land and self-sufficiency.
After graduating as a herbalist in 2011, she founded the project she had been dreaming of for several years: Herboristerie La Fée des Bois, a unique business that produces all the medicinal plants used to make herbal teas, tinctures, body products and agri-food products produced on the farm. Since then, she has worn many hats: farmer, entrepreneur, herbalist and new mother and participates in conferences on agriculture. At the farm, she gives herbalist workshops, offers consultations and trains interns in herbalism.
In addition to being an educational agro-tourism destination for the whole family, now offering lodging, the farm is also a micro-farm, where a mixture of vegetable crops are grown for the purpose of self-sufficiency for the farm's residents and where animals are raised, including chickens and sheep, for the regenerative farming aspect in addition to the autonomy that the animals offer.
Diane Perazzo