Cascade Anderson Geller
I’ve taken a hiatus from this blog recently as I work on my own writing – which I’m not able to do while also trying to stay current here. I wanted to break my silence by honoring, Cascade Anderson Geller, the beloved American herbalist, educator and environmental activist who died on HerbDay, May 4, at age 59. I didn’t know Cascade well. But I interviewed her once, many years ago at the Green Nations Gathering and below I’ve included some of what, to me, are the highlights.
I asked Cascade about her relationship with plants and how she came to know what she knows about them.
She talked about how her relationship with the earth was embedded in her everyday life, that her parents believed in an equity between life forms, a belief that the earth was saving you, not you saving the earth. Our responsibility is to do what we can to help the earth do its job, she said.
In school as a kid, they would press tree leaves. She didn’t get it. Even if you know the leaf of a tree, she told me, you don’t know the tree. They would never go deeply enough. Or take conservation: they’d go out in those groups and plant white pine trees: planting trees, not planting a forest, you can’t plant a forest, only nature can… over and over, she said, we’re missing the forest for the trees.
As a child, she said, she harvested dandelion with her grandmother, cherry bark, things like that. She grew up wildcrafting and learned to never take more than would grow back. It’s really easy to know how much is too much, she said, when you know a place really well. You know suddenly what is missing…
When gathering wild plants with her parents and her grandmother, she learned that sustainable wildcrafting involved more than not taking more than the plant could reproduce. It also means doing things to the surrounding ecosystem to help those plants stay healthy. For example, to keep a nettle patch healthy and fresh you need to chop up the rhizomes a bit to create new places from which the root can start, creating new growth at the margins.
Motherwort by Ann Armbrecht
Or dogbane, which grows best after the ground is disturbed in a flood. To encourage a wild patch to keep growing, you need to disturb the area as if a flood had come through.
Cascade Anderson Geller rootstalkfest.com
Cascade calls this work feminine gardening, which she said means paying attention enough to see what is needed to care for places, not just extracting what you need. She learned to garden in this way from mother and father, looking closely to see where you should cut something. A knowledge from and of the land. She talked about needing to educate people about wildcrafting, how to take care of places, not just about extracting… so that they understand what the plant needs is available for the plant to keep growing and to grow well. She says we have to look over seas for real education in what to do.
There we can learn about the importance of tending… often in the west, people will just plant and walk away when the right thing to do is to stay involved. In other countries, there is the recognition that if you don’t pay attention to a plant, if you don’t tend it and care for it, that plant will disappear, and so there is more active involvement in the plants that are wild harvested.
Everything, Cascade said, is in the details. When she sees plants grown in beds with plastic, weak plants… she thinks, of course they will die. If pay attention and do well the first time, plants will grow well. We are dealing with life, so we need to treat it with respect and care and attention…
Rosalee de la Forȇt has a beautiful tribute to Cascade along with a collection of other tributes to Cascade at Methow Valley Herbs. She has also included links to video clips of Cascade speaking and teaching.
With sadness… and in celebration of such a well-lived, fully committed life that can inspire us all to pay attention more closely and to tend the places where we live with love.