Meet Deb & Lauren

Herbalist & Founder of Avena Botanicals

Deb Soule, born and raised in rural western Maine, began studying and growing medicinal herbs over 45 years ago. In 1985, after graduating from College of the Atlantic, Deb founded the herbal apothecary Avena Botanicals in West Rockport Maine. For 40 years she has been tending a few acres of medicinal herbs with organic and biodynamic practices and preparing many herbal tinctures, elixirs, oils, salves and cremes with herbs from her gardens. Deb also founded The Herbal Hummingbird Hub, a non-profit learning project dedicated to hands-on learning, and gifting many herbs to Indigenous and Black and Brown communities.

She is the author of the books Healing Herbs for Women, How to Move Like a Gardener, and The Healing Garden. Deb honors her main teacher, Rocio Alarcon, and ruby-throated hummingbirds who she has been studying and learning from for 33 years.

Community Herbalist

Lauren began studying and growing medicinal herbs nearly 20 ago and for the past nine years been a practicing herbalist. In her practice, Marigold Healing Arts, she weaves together elements of Western herbalism, Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, reading the body, pulse diagnosis, Plant Spirit Healing and food as medicine.

She works in relationship with plants as dynamic living beings whose vast wisdom and generous allyship is essential to healing our bodies, hearts and spirits. She offers gratitude to the plants, to her teachers Pam Montgomery and Margi Flint as well as to Deb Soule and a generation of herbalists before her who so fiercely trail-blazed a path, tended seeds, wrote books and broke down cultural barriers. She is a mother of two young sons, a painter and a devotee of the ocean in all the seasons.