How to create your own local wild tea ceremonies and celebrations for community building and wild wellbeing.
In this interview, I talk with my friend Mary Morgaine Squire on how to create local wild tea celebrations to reconnect us to plants, place, self and soil.
Show Notes
About Mary Morgaine and Hart Squire from Herb Mountain Farm
Hart and Mary Morgaine Squire came together over their passion for plants and stewarding this precious planet with tender loving care.
They recently transitioned Herb Mountain Farm into a Learning and Lodging Center and Botanical Sanctuary, after growing organic fruits, vegetables, flowers and herbs for markets and restaurants for decades.
The Farm is a learning community with overnight accommodations and event space focused on drawing in folks from all around the globe for small group retreats and gatherings. We have a biologically diverse, 138 acres with trails mostly in a conservation easement, another mile-long nature trail dedicated to Mary Morgaine’s late partner, Frank Cook, and many ornamental, medicinal, culinary and edible gardens.
Hart spent his early years in Lebanon and that rich culture of living close to the earth and being extremely generous and kind impacted him for the rest of his life. He started organically farming this land in 1973 and over the years split his time between the West Coast and the SouthEast, owning the Good Earth grocery outside of San Fransisco and opening one of the first farm to table restaurants in California in the late 1970s, called ‘The Seasons’.
Some of the other highlights of Hart’s hard-working life is that he owned and operated a distributing business called Hart Distributing in the 1990’s/early 2000’s that sold organic wine and ale, co-founded the CCOF (the USDA Organic Standard Certification) as well as Carolina Organic Growers, built several unique structures on the property that are now residential as well as our lodging-venue spaces, adopted and raised 3 special needs children, and has been a social justice activist by supporting hundreds of organizations doing the good work of uplifting humanity and our planet.
Mary Morgaine was raised in rural South Carolina and yearned to get out and see the world. She attended Fairhaven College in Washington State receiving her BA in Sustainable Living, Journalism and Creative Expression and then set out to travel the world and meet as many plants and indigenous healers as she could.
The journey has been most of all a healing one, as she peels back the layers of her lineage. She has been practising meditation and yoga for 27 years and is a certified yoga teacher, essay writer, caregiver, plant teacher and avid gardener. Now in her mid-forties, Mary Morgaine sees her biggest community role as an active earth steward, protecting and caring for the incredible land she lives on while encouraging others to do the same wherever they are. She is gifted in facilitating ceremony, making space inviting and beautiful, enticing mindfulness into the every day, and welcoming people into the walk of embracing plants as allies.
Both Hart and Mary Morgaine Squire are dedicated parents to their beautiful children, Tr?n and Makyziah, both grown and from previous marriages, and Nadia, their 6-year-old daughter they are homeschooling, who definitely keeps them on their toes and lights up their world!