Episode # 78 is a conversation with herbalist Jacquie Hill out of Somerset, Colorado.
Family loving, community enthusiast Jacquie Hill is a plant person doing planty things on the Western Slope of Colorado. After practicing her blend of story-rich, folk herbal medicine for 10+ years, she took her studies to academia, earning a bachelor’s degree in botanical sciences from Bastyr University in 2019. While there she made the most of the opportunities and gleaned from teachers, mentors, and nature taking, every field class offered and immersing herself in the wonders of western Washington. With a deep love of opposing forces, Jacquie keeps one foot in the scientific as well as the nonlinear. Jacquie has a GMP certificate from Herbal Medics which comes in quite handy as the owner and maker at her small batch herbal product company, Of the Hill Botanicals. In her free time, Jacquie spends her time exposing her children to the magick of the natural world with her husband Allon, contemplating the role of plants as myth keepers, and performing with her puppet troupe, Singing Bone Medicine Show.
This conversation with Jacquie was recorded last February on a snowy winter’s day by my woodstove in Paonia, Colorado. Jacquie and I met at the Paonia apothecary, and then wove baskets together during weekly basket club on the land where I lived and even organized a few herbalism and ethnobotany classes at the apothecary last winter. It’s taken some time to get this episode out and edited for various reasons. So much has happened since this episode was recorded, and I’d like to do another conversation with Jacquie sometime on grief and herbs, since she has been navigating that a lot in her world this year since this was recorded.
This episode is science based but also moved into the socio-political, and Jacquie considers many aspects of what it means to be in relationship with plants, and her research with Ponderosa Pine is one of them.
If you’re a listener and you’re not familiar with this Pine species (Pinus ponderosa), this episode will inform you on some aspects of how special this tree is. It’s primarily a tree species associated with western North America, spanning from Canada to Mexico with many ‘variations’ of the tree depending on the geography where it grows. It grows different depending on elevation, aspect, history of fire in the region, or whether there has been logging, and where it is in latitude and longitude. In some places Ponderosa Pine is a dominant tree species, in other places it is rare or uncommon except for tucked away nooks or special protected habitats. As Jacquie will note in this episode, Ponderosa has powerful medicine, and has been used traditionally for medicine in many cultures across the west, and the tree has an anthropogenic past that is not commonly acknowledged. We speak about the organization ‘Native American Sacred Trees and Places’ of which I will link in the show notes, which aims to advocate for historically altered trees still on the landscape and Ponderosa Pine is one of the species that was highly altered by humans for medicine extraction, waypoint marking and more.
