Biography

While working as a computer graphics artist in Los Angeles, Ariel began to fall in love with the medicinal plants. Through self-learning, online courses, and inspired by hikes and workshops with expert outdoorsmen and foragers Christopher Nyerges and Pascal Baudar, this relationship with plants began to take over. With encouragement from a friend, she started her own postage-stamp sized garden for food and medicinal herbs, secreted away behind her apartment building in the midst of the urban sprawl. Here she grew the plants and food to use as medicine, and as the prime ingredients for many experiments in fermentation. It was also in this tiny oasis that the inspiration came to move across the country to rural Ohio and to delve deeper into the art of herbalism. Making her home on the edge of the forest among the plants she loves, she works on honing her apothecary skills, blending herbal cordials, elixirs and oxymels, and wooing the spirits of fermentation.