Mélissa Mahi

Mélissa Mahi is a herbalist based in Engins, a small village in the French Alps. She trained as a community herbalist at the Plant Medicine School in Ireland and is currently a final year student on the school’s Herbal Medicine Practitioner Training Programme. Her love of and interest in herbs first emerged at a time when she was living in London, working in a publishing house of natural health and wellness books after graduating from a MA in Publishing at University College London. The books and authors she worked with at that time strongly questioned and widened her vision of health and healing. This period represented a deep shift in her life, from believing that academic learning was the one and only path, to realising that trustful knowledge is best gained from the ground: from Nature, from people who are close to Nature, and from personal experience. She started going on herb walks with local herbalists, meeting and learning about the herbs that grew in the city’s parks, eventually leaving her job in book publishing so as to commit to this new path of learning. She enrolled onto The Plant Medicine School’s apprenticeship in Ireland and worked as a volunteer on a variety of eco-projects in Ireland, Brazil and Spain tending to the lands and preserving natural areas. She eventually returned to the French Alps, her native land, with the intention to settle there and weave the herbal knowledge she had acquired into the landscape of her childhood. In the summer of 2021, she founded Jardin d’Artémis, a herbal project through which she offers medicine-making workshops, visits of her herb garden and herbal consultations. She works closely with herb growers in her region, grows a small number of herbs herself, and hopes in the long run to create a strong, local network of herb people so as to increase public accessibility to good quality herbs and local knowledge.

Mélissa on LinkedIn.

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