Heidi is an experienced naturopath and medical herbalist with a passion for wild medicinal and nutritional plants.

She has lectured in nutrition and herbal medicine at  Endeavour College of Natural Health (Brisbane) where she was also a clinical supervisor, and in nutrition at  University of the Sunshine Coast and RMIT University (VIC)

She is a regular speaker at conferences, seminars and community events.

She was involved in the menopause program at The Women’s Hospital (Melbourne), and has participated in original research into the effects of herbal medicine on breast milk.

Heidi regularly runs popular workshops on herbal medicine and foraging for wild plants.

She is the author of Wildcraft: The science and spirit of wild plants for food and medicine (2019) and From the Wild: An essential companion to identifying, cooking and enjoying common wild plants for health and healing.(2024)

She lives on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.

My mother introduced me to the idea of using wild plants for food and medicine long before I had any concept of herbal medicine or wild crafting. It was just something she did.

My mother was a hippy and a gypsy so we moved constantly when I was a child, I can’t even tell you how many times, it was just a constant thing. We lived in houses, flats, squats, communities, and often in tents. Sometimes we stayed in campgrounds but just as often it was in wild places that took days of walking through the bush to get to. Sometimes we stayed a week or two so we supplemented with food that we found around us on the land. I have memories of eating dandelions, thistles, berries and other foraged foods.

One time we lived on an island off the coast of Tasmania for a few months and ate mainly fish from the sea and some greens from the island and a bit of food that the ranger would pick up for us when he went to town.

So I grew up with this concept that you could use the plants around you and that you could survive on them if you needed to, which sometimes we did.

When I was 12 I was in the basement of a friends house with a group of neighborhood kids and I was badly burnt when someone lit a cigarette next to an open drum of petrol. After I got out of the hospital my mother took me to see a naturopath. I saw her off and on as I grew up and she had quite a profound impact on me.

Then in my late teens I read a book called The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley in which she describes the lives of the priestesses of Avalon. They would go collect herbs and use them for healing and magic. This book woke something up in me. I wanted to be some kind of modern day version of an Avalon priestess.

I guess all of these factors combined drew me into my journey as a herbalist or maybe they were just sign posts to remind me what I was supposed to be doing here.

In my naturopathic practice I use herbs and supplements from companies who manufacture and package them because they are consistent and available, but I felt like something was missing. I still wanted to feel like a priestess of Avalon. I wanted to wander across the fields, looking windswept and interesting, gathering mists and wild herbs. Some times I would take bags of wild plants from my garden into work and give them to my patients to use but supply was always limited.

About 8 years ago I had a patient with very advanced breast cancer who was refusing conventional treatment. She didn’t even want to use supplements she just wanted to use meditation and wild plants. She asked me to show her all the wild plants she could use in her neighborhood.

As a practitioner this was a very challenging case in just about every respect but it also got me back in touch with the wild plants. I learned heaps of new wild plants from my time with her. She died but there was no defeat in it. She was in total control of the whole process. She rattled my bones and transformed the way I perceived illness, life and death and bought me back to the plants.

I started doing wild crafting courses after that, first in Melbourne then when we moved to the Sunshine coast in 2012 I started doing them up here on the Sunshine Coast. Now I run them once a year usually in June or July when it’s not too hot.

It was a big transition, as I had to learn all the plants that are up here that I didn’t know. They felt like strangers and it’s taken a few years to get to know them properly. Like with people it takes years to know a plant properly in all its seasons and variations.

My favorite thing about working with herbs is that they work on many levels and many body systems simultaneously. They have an energetic aspect that you can work with as well as the physical and scientific aspects that we can study and verifiy.

There is a potency to making a fresh plant tincture when you go into a place and connect with the plant and make a tincture from it. It feels like a gift. You have a sense of ‘who’ that plant is, not just it’s active constituents but its personality as well. The plants will give you a gift, it maybe lightness and joy or strength or cutting through bullshit or transformation.

Then when you see a patient who needs that tincture not only for its medicinal properties but also for the energetic qualities of the plant, you give it with the knowledge that you are using something very powerful. Working with wild crafted plants adds a dimension to working as a herbalist that is hard to get when working with manufactured herbs.

We try to live simply and to tread as lightly as possible on the Earth as we can. I believe that we need to see the sacredness in all life forms whether it’s a planet, a plant, an animal or a person. When we justify cruelty or ‘rights over’ a group of people, another species or a place on the grounds that it is ‘less important’ than another groups interest, we make way for a culture that allows atrocities to happen.

While I believe we all need to walk our own path in our own way I think there is a lot we can do to educate people about how to live in ways that are supportive to human health, humane to other species and environmentally sustainable. A big part of the work I do both as a herbalist and a nutritionist is about helping people to regain their trust in nature and know that everything they need is provided, we just need to know how to find it and use it. I am only now coming to realise the privilege it is to share this work with people. I am still so in awe of it myself.