Our Story
A small place, slowly tended.
Montestal began with a house we couldn't quite afford and a garden that hadn't been tended in thirty years.
We pulled the brambles off the south wall and found rosemary beneath. We cleared the orchard and found bees. We opened the stillroom door and the air smelled — somehow, after all those years — faintly of lavender.
What we do now is the same thing whoever lived here before us seems to have done: grow the plants, dry them, distill them, salve them, and pass them along. Sometimes we sit at the long table with people who come to learn. Mostly we listen.
— The keepers of Montestal
The Keeper · A Journey
How the plants found me.
I did not come to this work through a lineage or a school. I came through grief, and a garden that would not let me leave it.
For years I lived a life that looked, from the outside, like the right one — and from the inside, like a slow forgetting. When the forgetting finally became unbearable, I went outside. I sat with rosemary. I sat with mugwort. I sat with the wild rose by the wall and cried into her thorns until something in me began to listen back.
That listening is the whole of it. The plants are not metaphors and they are not ingredients — they are elders. They taught me to distill, yes, and to dose, and to blend. But first they taught me to slow down enough to hear them. To sit with yarrow at midsummer. To harvest mullein under a waxing moon. To leave an offering before I take a single leaf.
What I do at Montestal now is, in some ways, very small. I tend a garden. I keep a stillroom. I make medicine slowly and in small batches, on the days the sky and the plant agree. And I open the door to those who feel the same pull I once did — the quiet, insistent invitation of the green world asking us to come home.
"The plants do not ask to be believed in. They ask only to be sat with."
In the garden · before the bees were awake
Lineage · Devotion · The Green Path
What we hold to.
Plants as teachers
We meet each plant as a being with its own intelligence, archetype, and gift. The medicine is the relationship.
By the turning sky
We harvest, distill, and bottle in rhythm with moon, planet, and season — evolutionary herbalism, lived.
Ceremony in the small
Lighting the candle. Naming the plant. Saying thank you. The little rites that turn craft into prayer.