Mermaid Botanicals
Myself and many of the herbs I harvest for you live in one of the few remote, undeveloped, wild places left in our country. With a small population, no industry, and almost no historical use of pesticides, these lands are deeply forested with a diverse and abundant array of wood, field, and seashore plants. There are no deer to browse, which makes for healthy and prolific plant populations (and a need for harvesting and managing their growth as browsers would), particularly of plants not commonly available or abundant elsewhere.
The plants that I offer are wild—they are growing where they want to grow. Generally exposed to harsher environmental stressors than those of cultivated plants and living in more diverse plant communities, wild plants have a different (and some would argue better) phytochemical make-up than cultivated plants. They are harvested at prime stages of growth to optimize their medicinal and energetic properties.
Between my mentor Ryan Drum and myself, we hold a cumulative knowledge of the local plant populations here for over half a century. Wildcrafting in a place so intimately known affords the opportunity to interact with the environment in a deeply invested way and help support plant populations through sustainable harvesting and ecologically-sensitive plant management. I believe it is the birthright of all animals, including humans, to interact with their environment in healthy ways, and that the way to fortifying truly sustainable ecosystems is for humans to learn how to re-integrate with them. Harvesting plants from the place where you live is one of the best ways to do this.
To be able to spend most of my time outdoors with the plants and harvest them for folks like you deeply nourishes me. This solitary time fortifies me so that I'm able to put myself out there as a teacher and in the other public ways that I share my work. One of my gifts is I have an incredible eye for detail which drives the exceptional level of integrity in the herbs I share with you. There are certainly a lot of great herb growers and purveyors of high quality herbs out there; I would humbly venture to say that the herbs I have to offer are some of the best.
For these and many other reasons, I offer my plants in small batches, and I work mainly with hand tools, slow wood-fire or solar drying, and hand processing (in the ways that Ryan Drum taught me) because I believe in the many known and unknown attributes endowed in the herbs through these traditional methods. I love this work: I am putting that love into the plants I send to you. I focus on local plants and plants that are not commonly available elsewhere because I believe it is critical to push the limits of our understanding and clinical use of local herbs, a practice that takes some tenacity in a world with so many other treatment options that we tend to put more stock in and where trending herbs are the ones that get funded and well-studied. By working with wild plants—from native to invasive—in old and innovative ways, together we are preserving herbal wisdom and building new legacies and understandings of these plants and their medicines for generations to come. Thank you for being a part of this journey with me!
Kristy Bredin, Herbalist
Kristy Bredin began her journey as an herbalist in 2009, when she began a two-year apprenticeship with herbalist Robin Rose Bennett in New York. Over the years she has studied clinical herbalism with Chanchal Cabrera, Paul Bergner, Matthew Wood, and Margi Flint. For the last decade she has worked with Ryan Drum, wildcrafting medicinal herbs and cultivating an in-depth knowledge of traditional Western herbalism and local plants and seaweeds. Since 2013 she has been sharing plant remedies of the Pacific Northwest through Mermaid Botanicals. Mermaid Botanicals now encompasses Ryan Drum’s Island Herbs since he retired from wildcrafting in 2019.
Kristy is passionate about exploring the natural world and working with wild plants in ancient and creative ways. She supports folks in re-engaging and integrating with their natural environment through wild plant medicine work. She currently offers classes locally and internationally on seaweeds, wild plants, and healing with herbs and is working on a book about seaweeds for health and healing: Marine Herbalism, to be published in 2029.
