The end of a kayak trip down the beautiful, Buttahatchie River…
“Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods
nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.”
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves
I’m feeling nostalgic about the 5 years I spent in Mississippi before moving back to California last year. I left Mississippi, originally, when I was 22, right after I graduated college. I went on a journey that took me to Ukraine, Prague and then San Francisco…where I stayed until I was 32.
I returned to the South, by way of Southern Appalachia and the Pisgah National Forest in Western North Carolina… I decompressed from city living in the mountains for about 3 years and then headed deeper into my roots, back to the red hills of east, central Mississippi to grow a wild-crafted apothecary with a friend.
It was at this time in my life that I got to know the land of those red hills in a new way…a way that I had barely begun to understand in my youth. The rivers and creeks called out to me…the plants were speaking with me…barred owls kept me company…Southern cultural creatives became my closest friends… …I experienced Mississippi in a way I had never imagined.
There is so much more to this area than meets the eye. To encounter its uniqueness and soul whispers…you have to slow down, listen, soften your eyes, and appreciate the profoundness of the mundane. Thank you, Mississippi, for helping me get back home. I will take this with me everywhere I go…
Aristilochia seed pod
Yellow passionflower
Unripe pawpaws
A special creek with a lot of petrified wood and ochres…
Down my other favorite creek to find petrified wood, appreciate pileated woodpecker calls, and to look at plants…
Petrified wood, Indian paint pots, and ochres…
Red ochre…
Honey locust thorny branches
SymmeTREE at Malmaison Scatters…tupelo gum and cypress trees…
My friend, Robin’s, art studio in Grenada, MS…
My friend Robin’s collection of nature treasure…
Picnic after kayaking around Malmaison Scatters in the Delta…
Looking for duck feathers at Malmaison Scatters in the Delta…
The entrance to Mother Mound in Nanih Waiya…
A canoe trip down the mighty Mississippi River with John Ruskey and the Quapaw Canoe Company
Trail marker tree…
My favorite trail marker tree…and one of my favorite places to sit…just down the road from where my great, great grandparents are buried…
Plant-dye workshop with Patricia Brown in Greenwood, MS…
Yellowroot flowering
A local anemone species
Fringe tree
Chickasaw plum
Gulf fritillary exploring the bear’s foot plant growing in my back yard at my old place…
Bayberry berries
Beauty berry berries
Butterfly weed seeds
Crossvine climbing
Lion’s mane mushrooms…
The otherwordly Southern Prickly Ash…
Prickly pear growing out of a stump in my backyard…
Magnolia
Mayapple
Sumac harvest
Pawpaw harvest…
My first honey pull from the honey bees I used to take care of at a neighbor’s house…
Chanterelle hunting…
Watermelon rind pickles
My annual tradition of making muscadine wine…
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Melondala — created for Summer Solstice one year ❤
Egg harvest when I took care of a neighbor’s chickens…
Acorn, my neighbor’s goat that I milked when she was out of town…
Hickory nut “tea”…
Teaching at BTC Grocery
…harvesting yellowroot…
…attending Matthew Wood’s intensive at Darrell Martin’s place in SE Mississippi, Blue Boy Herbs…
Teaching with folks at Maypop Herb Shop in New Orleans
Herb walk at Foraged Farmacy in Clinton, MS…
Wild herb pesto and yellow dock crackers…
Some of my students at an intensive presenting about Yaupon
Foraged Farmacy intensive
One of the seasonal, herbal CSA offerings from the apothecary… The CSA ran for about 4 years, starting in March 2013 ❤
My old apothecary shelves in Mississippi…
Our apothecary’s first offerings to the public >> bioregional kyphi incense, herbal tea blend, herbal house cleaner concentrate, liver & lypmh tincture, first aid salves, queen of hungary water, red cedar & rosemary massage oil, vitality balls…
hawthorn flower essence
…making Iron Woman Syrup for the apothecary…
Squirrel tail paint brushes that my artist friend, Robin, and I made with elder branches and beaver-chewed, mud-cured river cane…
Red ochre art
Passionflower blooming and fruiting in my backyard…
My old front yard
One of the peach trees I started from seed that I planted in my backyard in Mississippi… I planted it right by my bedroom window so that I could see the blooms in early Spring ❤
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Lindsay Kolasa 
It is nice that you were able to go back. Many of us do not have that choice, if our homeland was destroyed.
Hi there Tony…could you elaborate more? …the amount of human-caused-destruction in this day and age is crippling to the soul… I’m glad you’ve been able to keep close alliance with plants…they are good neighbors and not destructive.
My home is in the Santa Clara Valley, which is nothing like it was just a few decades ago. It was formerly famous for vast orchard, or like we say, fruits and nuts. It is now completely filled with urban sprawl. There are now more than a million people in San Jose alone, which is the tenth most populous city in America. There are a few fruit trees literally in a tree museum (just like in the song), that is known as the Heritage Orchard. It is still a great place, but not at all in the same way. There are a few reminders of what was here before, but in some ways, I would prefer them to be destroyed as well, just to put them out of their misery.
I’m sorry to hear that Tony…. …fruit trees in a fruit museum…INSANITY! It is really terrible — how quickly California’s landscape is changing both from intensive, monocrop agriculture AND development… It’s a nightmare, really. It is an old wound in most of us to get rubbed…displacement…loss of land…loss of homeland… A very old wound.
I know there is no way to bring back that land…but, I’d like to share some about my friend Mehmet near Sequoyah National Park is about to plant 300 sequoyah saplings ❤ — http://www.wildplaces.net/