WHO WE ARE

Terra Sylva combines the experience of herbalists who’ve done their work in very different regions: Southern Appalachia and the city of New Orleans. Dave Meesters and Janet Kent tend land, grow herbs, and practice at the River Island Community Herb Clinic in the mountains of North Carolina, and also publish Radical Vitalism, while Jen Stovall was a founder of the Crescent City’s Maypop Community Herb Shop. Despite the geographical separation, this team have been partners in herbalism for almost two decades, going back to the first herb classes Jen & Dave taught together in New Orleans in 2004. The Terra Sylva School fulfilled a dream we’ve nurtured for a long time: to meld our diverse strengths and perspectives to create a comprehensive, dynamic program well-suited to equip and inspire the next generation of herbalists to practice in the 21st century. Our teaching reflects both Janet & Dave’s land-based herbalism practiced in a rural setting and Jen’s experience caring for folks in the big city.

Core Instructors - Guest Teachers

Core Instructors

  • Jen Stovall grew up in the North Georgia piedmont and spent her summers in the Southern Appalachians surrounded by the verdant abundance of medicinal plants. Although she didn’t know it at the time, some of those plants would grow to be some of her most significant allies. Driven and inspired by her thirst for autodidactic education, she left Georgia at seventeen and traveled extensively throughout the US and internationally. As the wind blew her hither and thither, she became entranced by the beauty and mysteries of plant medicine and sought more formal training with many amazing teachers including 7song, Michael Moore, Phyllis D. Light, Patricia Kyritsi Howell, and DeAnna Batdorff.

    In 2004, Jen moved to New Orleans, a city permeated by the fragrances of Jasmine and Sweet Olive, and where the plants grow in wild abandon, taking over anything in their path. She has spent the years since then learning to love the swamp and getting to know the sub-tropical plants that grow in it. In 2011, Jen opened the collectively run Maypop Community Herb Shop, which many people in the community rely on as their primary source of healthcare. She also graduated with a BSN-RN from Louisiana State University School of Nursing and obtained her NADA Ear Acupuncture Detox Specialist & Trainer license, both of which continue to inform her herbal practice.

    At present, Jen works as a Community Herbalist & Health Educator, using a blend of Southern Folk Medicine, Western Herbalism, and harm reduction in her classes and with her clients. She has found herbalism to be both a potent tool for pursuing social justice in the world, and a powerful manifestation of the ethical and ideological path she walks in her personal life. She believes that health care should be accessible to everyone and that the most powerful strategy for this is educating and empowering people to choose their own path to health. She is constantly renewed and inspired by witnessing the magic spark that occurs when people are introduced to plant allies through consultations, herb walks, medicine making, & health education.

  • Janet Kent is a clinical and community herbalist, teacher and writer. She grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, learning to love the rich diversity of regional wildflowers and herbs at an early age. She began studying the medicinal uses of plants when she moved to a rich Appalachian hardwood cove high in the mountains of Madison county, North Carolina 15 years ago. She did not set out to become an herbalist, but as she learned over the years in her forest home, if we are open, we do not change the land we inhabit as much as it changes us. The transformative healing power of the plants around her turned an interest into a call to action. The vast power to heal through reconnection is the medicine she most seeks to share. Whenever possible, she encourages her students and clients to grow their own herbs, to make their own medicine, and most of all, to experience the more-than-human world first hand. Here is where deep, foundational healing is most profound.

    Janet considers the practice of herbalism to be an important tool for empowering individuals and communities. As wealth-based health care, in both biomedicine and within the wellness industry, continues to fail so many, holistic herbalism affords us the chance to support and nourish community health for all. With this in mind, Janet works to support herbal mutual aid efforts across the continent, sharing information and collecting and distributing medicine. In the past decade, Janet has focused on working with herbs to support mental health. As we navigate these increasingly stressful times that impact our individual and collective health, Janet sees the ways that herbs can provide foundational, life-affirming support. Her personal experience of the transformative power of plants drives her desire to share this medicine with others, in school, in the clinic, and through her writing.

  • Dave Meesters grew up in Miami, Florida and attended college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He moved to Asheville, North Carolina in the winter of 1998. In 2003, his formal herbal training began with an apprenticeship with CoreyPine Shane at the Blue Ridge School of Herbal Medicine, followed by learning from Michael Moore at the Southwest School of Botanical Medicine, and since then his experience has included organizing and staffing a free clinic in New Orleans in the months after hurricane Katrina, and starting and practicing at a free clinic in Asheville’s homeless day shelter. Dave now sees clients at his clinic in Marshall, North Carolina and provides care to the mountain folks in his rural Appalachian neighborhood, most of whom would rather see an herbalist than a doctor.

    From 2013 to 2016, Dave was, with Janet, the director and primary instructor at the Terra Sylva School’s summer apprenticeship program, which was held on the communal mountain land where he resides before the school moved to Marshall.

    Dave sees herbalism as a way to provide an accessible, pleasurable, and effective form of holistic health care, and as a means to bond and integrate ourselves with plants, the garden, and the wilds. His herbalism is wedded to a life-long resistance to the forces of domination and alienation, and his practice and his teaching reflect a deep evolving holism attained by listening to, honoring, embracing, and collaborating with the whole of Nature, and by his study of the threads connecting holistic physiology, energetics, ecology, gardening, systems theory, magic, alchemy and permaculture.

Guest Teachers

  • Kelly McCarthy

    Kelly McCarthy is a clinical herbalist, RH(AHG), Somatic Experiencing practitioner, teacher, and gardener. I've been seeing clients since 2014, and I especially love working with folks on mental health, trauma resolution, and the gut brain axis. Growing up, plants and alternative medicine were not part of my life - I first got into herbalism through DIY punk subculture, seeing tinctures in collective houses and reading about herbs in zines. I live and garden on Abenaki land in central VT, and split my work hours between seeing clients and teaching classes. I cofounded and run the Philly Herb Hub with Desiree Thompson, a mutual aid project providing free herbs and herbal education to Black folks in Philly. I also love learning more about my Irish and German ancestral healing practices, fermentation, quilting, and seed saving. You can read more about my work at www.atticapothecary.com

  • Jennifer Patterson

    Jennifer Patterson is a grief worker who uses plants, breath, and words to explore survivorhood, body(ies) and healing. A queer and trans affirming and centering, trauma-experienced herbalist and breathwork facilitator, Jennifer offers sliding scale care as a practitioner through her private practice Corpus Ritual and is a member of The Breathe Network. She has facilitated workshops at healing centers, LGBTQ centers, a needle exchange and harm reduction clinic, online with the Transformative Language Arts Network and Sounds True One, sexual violence resource centers, at colleges and universities, veterans hospitals, the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do? and a Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish healing center. Jennifer was the creator and host of BreathWork, a 4 month multi-teacher immersive with Sounds True. She is also a teacher in training programs with The Breathe Network, Breath Liberation Society, and Breathwork for Recovery’s breathwork clinician program. She is the author of LOVE WHAT SURVIVES Substack and The Power of Breathwork: Simple Practices to Promote Wellbeing (Quarto, 2020). Editor of the anthology Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti- Violence Movement (Magnus Books/ Riverdale, 2016). Jennifer is finishing a book project focused on translating embodied traumatic experience through somatic practices and critical and creative nonfiction.

  • Ellenie Cruz

    Educator, Poet, Student Midwife, Doula, Asc3nding Herbalist, Reiki Master, Food Literacy Educator, Artist, Designer and Founder of Ac3nsion Art LLC- Ellenie Marie Cruz uses her given and learned talents to promote the art of ancestral practices to heal self, family and community. Motivated by social justice, she has shifted from being a high school English teacher to a free agent and entrepreneur promoting radical change through holistic wellness, self-care and community building.. Ellenie serves and impacts her community through birthwork work and Atabey School of Cultural Healing by offering courses and care that centers Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. She is a full time birth worker with Birthmark Doula Collective and the SOUL Organizer of the NOLA Herb Gathering, and author of the poetry book Saturn Return I: Glimpses of the past. Ellenie teaches with the Wild Ginger Herbal Center and travels to teach and lecture on the subjects of radical full spectrum birth work, herbalism, community care, and more in small intimate group spaces and larger conferences.

  • Patricia Kyritsi Howell

    Patricia Kyritsi Howell is a clinical herbalist, educator, and author based in the mountains of North Georgia. She is the author of the newly revised and expanded book Medicinal Plants of the Southern Appalachians: Second Edition. She recently closed her school, the BotanoLogos School of Herbal Studies, after 30 years and now offers aspiring herbal practitioners support through her hybrid course, Crafting Your Herbal Practice. Learn more at patriciakyritsihowell.com

  • Rowan Walker

    rowan walker (they/them) is an herbalist, writer, facilitator and somatic bodyworker committed to nourishing queer aliveness as we build the world to come. they are a trans person of Irish, Lithuanian, Scottish and Sicilian ancestry living on unceded Abenaki land (so called vermont). rowan is chronically ill and lives with long c. they love to swim in cold waters, sing to plants, make zines and read old books.

    rowan supports queer trans folks with herbal & somatic queercare 1:1 and in small group programs through their private practice, wild aliveness apothecary & bodywork. through their business of hawthorn and yew, rowan supports folks of settler descent on Turtle Island/N America to reconnect to ancestral lineage & reweave plant kin connection for the sake of a world beyond whiteness.

    Find them at ofhawthornandyew.com or @hawthornandyew on IG

  • Max Ruin

    Max Ruin (they/them) is a white, queer, trans, neurodivergent, mad, disabled, chronically ill herbalist, therapist, tattoo artist, mediator and crisis intervention specialist living on occupied Lenape land. They are a bookworm, love to ride their bike when their body allows it, and are always happy to nerd out about nature, plants, all things queer, mutual aid, DIY, disability justice, ritualized tattoo and body reclamation, and what role spirituality can play in anarchy. Their work centers queer, trans, and gender expansive folks, is adamantly anti-racist, anti-zionist, and anti-capitalist, and they have a dedicated practice of dismantling white supremacy and oppressive ideologies both in themself and in any space they facilitate. They operate through a lens of interspecies connection, abolition, and harm reduction. You can find out more at www.anywaywecanherbs.com and www.expressyourselftherapynyc.com/max

  • Evan Cohen

    Evan is a full spectrum doula and herbalist living in Asheville, NC. She comes to this work with deep care and intention, and a passion for advocacy and helping people see how powerful they truly are. Living in these mountains her whole adult life, she has a strong connection with the abundance that this land has to offer, as well as the community at large. As an activist and animist, she strongly believes that everything and everyone is connected, and all of our actions impact one another and the earth. With the values of harm reduction, trauma-informed care, gender inclusivity, and a dedication to anti-racism work, she aims to create a safe and comfortable container for anyone who enters. To learn more about her work, find her on Instagram at @bigcatbirth and www.bigcatbirthbotanicals.com.

  • More Guest teacher bios coming soon!