Meet Alexandra

My fascination with plant-facilitated healing stems from a childhood immersed in nature - for much of my upbringing, Yosemite was our second home, and “harvesting” my neighbors flowers was my favorite past time activity. I loved gathering bouquets in my little suburban neighborhood of Davis, CA, and giving them to my mom. Somehow, while everything has since changed, the roots of it all remain.

I grew up in the Methodist church and had my first spiritual awakening experience with Jesus at age 14, shortly after my dad died from brain cancer. While I never felt at home in the structure of the church, the feeling of belonging to the greater divine has been with me ever since.

After finding herbal medicine in the midst of a healing crisis in 2012, I directed my life towards forging relationships with the plants that brought me such profound, multidimensional healing. I courted Saint John’s Wort, Calendula, and Chamomile, and felt my soul sing with a brilliance & levity I hadn’t felt for many years.

My practice of getting to know the plants involved working with them on every level I could, from gardening and tending to the plants in their home, to taking every class I could with my hometown herbal teacher Leslie Gardener, to making medicine and developing my relationship with food as medicine. Somewhere in there, in 2013, I started a kale chip company Kaleidoscope Foods as a means to meet people and share good food with them. In 2015 I began studies at the Berkeley Herbal Center in Berkeley, CA, where I developed my craft in the Foundations, Therapeutics, and Clinical programs under the guidance of master herbalist Pam Fischer. In Spring 2019 I began to serve as a supervisor for first year clinicians, meanwhile offering classes to the public and through BHC’s long-term programs.

Much of my process in the last decade of study was guided by questions of resourcefulness and community & individual resilience. What is true wealth and how can I cultivate a life that is profoundly rich on all meaningful levels? I explored the story of economics and the distribution of wealth in my studies at UC Berkeley before graduating in 2010 with a degree in Political Economy. Swiftly after graduation, I realized my most meaningful experiences would be created with my sweat and hands. I turned to gardening, handicraft, herbalism practice, sharing archetypal stories, learning and sharing stories of the place I live, learning stories of my ancestry and their daily & seasonal rituals - all in a rewarding effort to become more inextricably linked with the life that grows through and around me.

I am a strong advocate of self-awareness, nurturing, and love as keystones to personal health. I would be honored to work with you on this plant path. Send me a line for inquiries; email and text message are preferred, and I will get back to you as swiftly as possible.

Alexandra Hudson
Los Gatos, CA 95030

AlexandraEvansHudson@gmail.com
510.816.3468

Inspiration

ODA A LA JARDINERA, BY PABLO NERUDA

TRANSLATION BY BEN BELITT 

Yes: I knew that your hands were a blossoming clove and the silvery lily: your notable way with a furrow and the flowering marl; but when I saw you delver deeper, dig under to uncouple the cobble and limber the roots, I knew in a moment, little husbandman, your heartbeats were earthen no less than your hands; that there you were shaping  a thing that was always your own, touching the drench of those doorways through which whirl the seeds.

So, plant after plant, each fresh from the planting, your face stained with the kiss of the ooze, your flowering went out and returned, you went out and the tube of the Alstremeria there under your hands raised its lonely and delicate presence, the jasmine devised a a cloud for your temples starry with scent and the dew.

The whole of you prospered, piercing down into earth, greening the light like a thunderclap in a massing of leafage and power. You confided your seedlings, my darling, little red husbandman; your hand fondled the earth and straightaway the growing was luminous.

Even so, your watery fingers, the dust of your heart, bring us word of fecundity, love, and summon the strength of my songs. Touching my heart while I sleep trees bloom on my dream. I waken and widen my eyes, and you plant in my flesh the darkening stars that rise in my song.

So it is, little husbandman: our loves are terrestrial: your mouth is a planting of lights, a corolla, and my heart works below in the roots.