Many of you know me because you come to the shop in person. For those of you who don’t: Hi 👋🏼! I'm Lisa.
I started working with herbs in the late 1990’s out of necessity. I was living on my own and had no health insurance, so I began looking to herbs for help. Soon after, I moved to Ireland and started to delve a bit deeper into herbalism.
I experimented with herbs from books, with guidance from a mentor and visits to local health food stores, and after two particularly amazing interactions with calendula, I was officially hooked!
One of my favorite places to visit in my city was a tiny little herb shop hidden in the back of a “chemist” (a pharmacy). You had to walk through the chemist shop, then through a door, and there it was, walls covered in jars. It was a magical little place, right on a main street but hidden away (does that sound familiar 💛?)
One night I had a dream about practicing herbalism and knew that’s what I “wanted to do with my life”. At the time, I didn’t really know what that meant. I found a homeopathy school nearby and completed one year of training, when I was searching “herbalism” at an internet cafe and the zia (the sun symbol of the Zia Pueblo, and the state symbol of NM) caught my eye. It was my sign to move to New Mexico for herb school.
I moved to the tiny town of Silver City, NM for an intensive 9-mo clinical herbalist program in 2000. I fell in love with it and I dreamed of opening an herb shop “someday”.
I spent the next ten years studying clinical aromatherapy, reiki, chemistry, geology, until *officially* founding my first love, Wunder Budder, in 2010.
I focused on skincare and Wunder Budder while slowly finding my way back to herbalism though life-changing herb conferences, workshops, online training, and books, until a moment during a particularly intense acupuncture session when I knew it was finally “someday”.
A series of events later, which included randomly running into a friend and roommate from herb school (someone I hadn’t seen in 20 years!), and with lots of help from friends, family, and a huge leap of faith, I opened Alchemy & Herbs in Nov 2019.
We had a rougher than average first few years because of the obvious world event that began in early 2020! But I'm so happy to be here.
Xo,
Lisa