About me

Hello! Thanks for taking the time to have a look around the website :)

My name is Jen and since I was a young one I have been really curious and fascinated about the body along with truly loving food, flavours and being mesmerised by the realisation that what we eat and drink has a huge effect on how we feel and how we move through our lives. This led me to a path of learning all about the earth and how things grow, beginning with vegetables which shortly then turned into learning herbs and how they grow.

I am lucky to come from a lineage of herbalists, with my father John starting out as a pharmacist and then becoming a herbalist. Dads from Donegal and we found out shortly after I had started my herbal medicine training thats Dads great grandmother in Donegal was the local handy-women which means she was a herbalist and midwife for her village. This inspired me even further along my path as it showed me that in so many families you don’t have to go back that far to find a grandmother or grandfather who was making cures and remedies for their family and community.

Part of my passion with herbal medicine is how it has the gentle power of bringing people back into connection with the land and waters around them. Getting to know the plants, how to forage or harvest them and make remedies from them is like gathering identities in your community, a beautiful way to learn the importance of reciprocity as well. Looking after the land that we forage or harvest from so that it continues to provide once we provide it with care and protection. Herbal Medicine is often referred to as an “alternative medicine” when in fact it is a Medicine in its own right, it is one of the first to exist and it is my purpose to ensure that it carries on for my life time and hopefully many more life times to come.

I did my Herbal Medicine training in Belfast at the Excelsior School of Herbal Medicine, graduating in 2021. The training was led by Danny O’Rawe who has a wealth of experience and knowledge and created an incredibly well rounded education which covered many angles of herbal medicine from the science, 500 hours of clinical experience, the history, how to grow the herbs, making medicine from what you grow, the personal experience and so on.

Since I was a small one, my family would go down to West Cork several times a year, a place which early on had a huge impact on me and the path I’ve taken. I now very luckily call it my home. I run a herbal practice in Clonakilty and also lead herbal medicine workshops & foraging events in different locations around West Cork . I travel to Dublin often too to see clients.

I feel like our purposes in life can shift as we evolve ourselves. My purpose at the moment is to keep the tradition of herbal medicine alive, to teach and share with people about why it exists and its importance. And finally to bring people back to the importance of looking after their bodies as our bodies and the earth are one and the same and if we don’t look after our bodies then the earth, the environment, the ecosystems all around suffer. Tending to the body is a way to create and sustain connection to the nature around us. Buíochas ages sin é mo scéal anois!

Le Meas, Jen x