Wintergreen Uses with Bevin Cohen

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It was such a delight to sit down and chat with Bevin Cohen – he has such a deep love and appreciation for plants, and so many gems of herbal wisdom to share!  Our conversation was centered around wintergreen, a plant that he has been learning with since he was a child, but also touched on so many other aspects of living a life rooted in herbalism: from the importance of being in the moment and forming personal relationships with plants, to the crossover between food and medicine – a great reminder that plants’ gifts are not solely found in salves, tinctures, and tea!

Bevin’s journey with wintergreen really illustrated the ways that we can grow as humans alongside the plants, simply by being present, listening, and giving back.  He shared so many beautiful ways that wintergreen has shown up in his life, and the many ways he has worked with it through the years – including his go-to recipe for when he starts to feel a cold coming on!  Be sure to download your copy of Bevin’s healing tea from the section below.

By the end of this episode, you’ll know:

► Why Bevin calls wintergreen tea “one of the most patriotic of all beverages”

► How to work with wintergreen to soothe sore, achy muscles

► Tips for preparing your wintergreen harvest to get the post potent medicine

► How learning the folklore surrounding plants can make you a better herbalist

► The amazing benefits of working with plants that grow near you

► and so much more…

For those of you who don’t know him, Bevin Cohen is an award winning author, owner of Small House Farm and host of the popular Seeds & Weeds podcast. Bevin offers workshops and lectures across the country on the benefits of living closer to the land through seeds, herbs, and locally grown food. He is a food and garden writer whose work has appeared in many national publications and he's the author of more than ten books, including his latest, Herbs in Every Season.

-- TIMESTAMPS -- for Wintergreen Uses

• 01:10 - Introduction to Bevin Cohen
• 02:07 - Bevin’s plant path
• 10:16 - Bevin’s personal relationship with wintergreen, plus its medicinal benefits
• 14:52 - How Bevin works with wintergreen
• 22:26 - FOREST - a Winter Healing Tea recipe
• 27:04 - Mother Nature provides; we just need to take the time to listen
• 28:46 - Bevin’s new book Herbs in Every Season
• 44:18 - Herbal skills that Bevin is currently cultivating
• 53:00 - Herbal tidbit

Get Your Free Recipe!

Connect with Bevin

• Website | SmallHouseFarm.com
• Instagram | @small_house_farm
• Facebook | SmallHouseFarm
• Patreon | Small House Farm
• Podcast | Seeds & Weeds Podcast

Transcript of the 'Wintergreen Uses with Bevin Cohen' Video

Rosalee de la Forêt:
Hello and welcome to the Herbs with Rosalee Podcast, a show exploring how herbs heal as
medicine, as food and through nature connection. I’m your host, Rosalee de la Forêt. I created
this Channel to share trusted herbal wisdom so that you can get the best results when
relying on herbs for your health. I love offering up practical knowledge to help you dive deeper
into the world of medicinal plants and seasonal living.

Each episode of the Herbs with Rosalee Podcast is shared on YouTube, as well as your favorite
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Rosalee de la Forêt:

Okay. Grab your cup of tea and let’s dive in.

In this episode, I’m chatting with Bevin Cohen, someone who truly understands the importance of connecting with the plants. We explore how wintergreen has shown up in surprising ways throughout his life and he shares some practical tips on how to work with this forest plant, whether it’s brewing a simple tea or making a salve. If you’re curious about how plants can surprise and support you, this conversation is for you.

For those of you who don’t already know him, Bevin Cohen is an award-winning author, owner of Small House Farm and host of the popular Seeds & Weeds Podcast. Bevin offers workshops and lectures across the country on the benefits of living closer to the land through seeds, herbs and locally grown food. He is a food and garden writer whose work has appeared in many national publications, and is the author of more than ten books including his latest, Herbs in Every Season.

Bevin, I’m thrilled to have you on the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Bevin Cohen:

I am so excited to be here. Thank you so much.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

We were just talking this is our first time that we’ve directly interacted, which is surprising. As I’ve been able to look into all that you offer and do to prep for this show, you do so much in so many different avenues. I love that you definitely have your hands in the soil. You are hands on. You’re doing it and that speaks so much through all that you’re offering, just that experience and heart-driven attitude in what you do. As always, before we dive into your offerings, I want to hear what brought you on to this plant path? How did all of these things come together into all of your offerings?

Bevin Cohen:

This is such a thought-provoking question. For me, my plant journey began long ago when I was very young. I was raised by my grandmother. We lived in a small apartment on the edge of town. Our little apartment butted up to hundreds of acres of woods. I spent all my days like a good kid does, playing in the woods and having fun, doing Tai chi and all that sort of stuff. I was really into Tai chi as a kid. That’s a different story for another day.

I was out in the woods, doing my thing. When we’re out in the woods, we pick berries, climb trees and stuff. There was a plant there that just really caught my attention the most: this little wintergreen that grew all along the forest floor. I was so fascinated by the shape of the berries and the scent of the leaves. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever—I couldn’t even believe there’s such a cool little plant. It’s just this little tiny thing in this big forest, and it was so beautiful and wonderful. I feel that that was the moment that the seeds got planted in my mind about the wonders of the plant world. If this tiny, little plant could exist in this big forest, right here, this useful plant, imagine how many incredible plants there are in the whole wide world.

It just really triggered that curiosity in me, which became a lifelong obsession with the wonders of plants of all shapes and sizes, whether they be the little wintergreens or the towering trees. It didn’t matter. I wanted to know everything about all of them everywhere. It really just became like my personality. I wanted to find all of the plants and learn about them because it’s just so wondrous to know that just right outside of our backdoor, wherever you live, wherever you’re at, right outside your backdoor is something wondrous that the plant kingdom has offered you. Just getting to know more about that was special to me, and then later in life, being able to talk to other people and teach other people about the wonders of the plant world is also special to me. That’s just really kind of a funny story, but the rest is history, I guess they say.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

And you do a lot with gardening? Was that also an early on passion for you? When did you start actively cultivating plants?

Bevin Cohen:

Growing up with my grandma, we didn’t have a garden. We had a balcony. I had little flower pots on the balcony and we would grow things, little flowers and radishes. I loved to grow radishes when I was little.  They’re fast, it’s instant gratification almost, growing radish. I had a little flower box garden growing up, but it wasn’t until I got older and had a place of my own where I had a yard that I could till or some places for pots that I got more into trying to learn about cultivating plants as opposed to wild plants. A lot of my journey early on was with the wild plants around me. Once I got a chance to cultivate some plants, there’s just something special about that. Being able to plant a tiny seed into the soil and watch all the wonders that unfold and all of the incredible things whether it be food or medicine and then eventually, seeds again. That cycle, just fascinating to me. We moved out here to the homestead that became Small House Farm, it would have been in 2013, so really not that long ago. That was when I had the first opportunities to really work the area, really till that soil and grow plants on a much larger scale, which has been a wonder. I probably had my first garden maybe in my early twenties or something like that. I’ve always been interested in gardening, but I’ve never been able to do it to the scale that we do today.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

It’s always fun to hear the journey, even just that—I mean, 2013 is not yesterday or anything, but still the “before.” There was a time before you had a big garden. It’s been a journey for you learning, processing in terms of—go ahead.

Bevin Cohen:

A lot of learning, a lot of challenges whenever you get into something, especially when we’re able to scale up here. Whenever we want to scale up to the largest possible thing that I can, which is always taking on more than you can, and then the challenges that come with that. Part of that, the failure is the learning process. They’re tied together really well. We’ve learned a lot in the short time that we’ve been here. You said 2013 wasn’t yesterday, but sometimes it feels like it was just yesterday.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I hear you on that, for sure. In terms of learning about medicinal plants and foraging, did you have some mentors or people who have influenced you along the way?

Bevin Cohen:

That’s a good question too. I’ve read a lot of books. I’ve always been a big time bookworm my whole life. Even when I was young and we first discovered these wintergreen out in the woods, my grandma would take me to the library every week and we’d get stacks of books. My books slowly started to evolve from storybooks into books about plants, then the history and folklore, the cultural connections--all of that is just fascinating to me, so I’ve read a lot of books over the years. I’ve also really tried to spend time with people more experienced than I am with plants. Elders, we could call them folks that have been doing the work, have been out there in the fields and in the forest, and spending as much time with them as I can to learn. It’s a lifetime of learning. I’ll never learn everything there is out there, but if I could spend my time with folks that already know these things, it speeds the process up a little bit. I’ve just spent many years in the shadow of herbalists and plant people greater than I.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I can tell most likely learning from the plants themselves as well just with your very hands-on experience. There’s so much to learn by doing.

Bevin Cohen:

I’m a person that learns by doing, for sure. I do like to read. I know folks really like to—YouTube is very popular. People like to watch on YouTube. It’s cool to see all the different ways that people learn, but I’m a tactile learner. I like to get right out there, get my hands dirty and really just get into the soil. The plants will tell us everything. If we could just slow down and be quiet for a minute and listen to Mother Nature, she really does offer us everything that we need. Nature can guide by example, many life lessons outside of the garden, things that apply to other aspects of our life as well if we can just learn how to observe that.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

It seems like that’s what you’ve done from a very early age because you were there to listen when the wintergreen popped into your field of consciousness. You didn’t keep walking. You were there listening. I recently heard this concept just put in a certain way that our dreams want us as much as we want our dreams. I often hear with herbalists is we feel like we’re called on this plant path. Thinking of those two things as you tell your story, Bevin, because it’s like the plants, obviously, called out to you in a very real way. You listened and in some ways, that just kept this feeding process of you listened more. It called out more, listen more. It’s this dual reciprocity of growth in that.

Bevin Cohen:

I like that! I think that’s a really good way to put it. When I try to teach people about plants, I try to teach them to listen, to be open to observation because I think that so much can come from that for people. You’re right because that’s really how it started for me and it continues to be like that for me. Learning to get out of my own way and let nature play its course, that’s a lesson that I’m learning every year, for sure.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

You’ve mentioned before we started recording that you had a deep relationship with wintergreen because I was telling you I’m really excited. This is the first time wintergreen has been on the show. It’s not a plant that really grows around me, so it’s not a plant I have a lot of connection to. Embarrassingly, I’ll admit though that I know it through my toothpaste. I prefer the taste of wintergreen to peppermint, just in the essential oil category. I often choose wintergreen out there, but in terms of having a connection with the plant and really understanding the plant on that more whole level, that’s new to me so I’m personally excited to hear what you have to share about wintergreen, especially since you’re coming from this deep relationship.

Bevin Cohen:

I’ll say this first: My kids are the same way. They much prefer the flavor of wintergreen to peppermint as well, so we can totally relate to that. That’s a big thing. Wintergreen and I, I’m going to tell more of the story. As a child growing up in the forest, I learned about wintergreen and that’s how we are going to say my journey kind of started, but it really continues on from there. If we were to fast forward from that moment in time, 10, 15 years into the future where now I’m an adult, that forest that I used to explore has been developed now. It’s been turned into houses and homes, that sort of thing, but a small section of the woods was preserved and it became a little park, a nature trail or something. They call it “Huron Park.” It’s a beautiful place and still butts up to those apartments. As a man in my early twenties, I lived in those apartments once again and I met a young lady there who was to become my future wife, Heather.

We met. We met in this little apartment. I wanted to impress her. The only skills that I had was, “Let’s go out in the woods and I’ll identify plants for you.” That’s the easy way to woo any woman, I thought. We packed a little picnic and we went out into the woods. I was showing her plants and that sort of thing. We sat and I showed her the wintergreen. She was familiar with wintergreen from commercial toothpaste or mints that you could buy or whatever, but she’s never seen the plant before so she was definitely intrigued by it. I thought I’m in like Flynn with the wintergreen from the same forest. Cool story. 

Now, fast forward all the way until today where we’re here at Small House Farm. Across the street from us where I live here with Heather, my wife and our two children, it’s 1100 acres of woods across the street called, “Huron Forest.” It’s the same name as the park. I take my wife and children out there and we gather wintergreen together. It’s really an herb that has been with me from the beginning. We’re like best friends now. We go way back.

For me, wintergreen represents a couple of things. When I teach folks about plants, when I talk to folks about plants, I want to talk about relationships. Everything in life is based on relationships including herbalism. When we learn to work with plants, whether we’re crafting medicine for our families or for our communities or whatever it might be, it’s just a series of relationships. For me, wintergreen is the perfect example of that relationship. Over these many years that we’ve spent together, I’ve been able to learn a lot about this plant. We want to know when we study plants many uses for one plant as opposed to many plants for one use.

Having this time together, I’ve learned about the history of the plant. I’ve learned folklore of wintergreen. It’s one of the most patriotic of all beverages. In early America, we had a little bit of a riff with the king and we didn’t want to drink his tea anymore. I’m sure you’re familiar with the story, they tossed the tea over, the Boston Tea Party. Since we weren’t drinking tea anymore, a lot of folks turned to drinking wintergreen. Wintergreen tea as the alternative. So, a true patriotic American drank wintergreen tea. The folklore, understanding the cultural connection the plants have to people in certain places is really the best way to understand not only the plants themselves, but the people and the place as well, that intersection between those three things.

We’ve also learned how to use wintergreen medicinally, the methyl salicylates that we can find in the leaf is wonderful for not only as a tea for headaches and that sort of thing, but topically, it’s fantastic for pain relief, for sore, achy and tired muscles. We can use this plant in the kitchen. We can use this plant in the apothecary. We can use this plant as just the fun way to meet new people and impress significant others or whatever it might be. Wintergreen checks so many boxes for me. Like I said, we go way back. We’re best friends now.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I would love to hear about some of the ways you work with the plant. You go out and harvest the whole plant and bring it home, and then what happens?

Bevin Cohen:

Often, we dry it. We’ve got a number of drying racks in the pole barn. I’m pointing this way because on the other side of this wall is a big pole barn with a lot of things happening where we dry the herbs. Wintergreen, if you’ve ever worked with it, if your listeners are familiar with it, it’s got a very thick, glossy leaf, so I really like to break it apart, cut it open. It makes for a much more potent extraction if we could break that leaf open, especially if we’re doing a fat extraction or for infusing the herbs in oil to make a topical salve or whatever it might be. You’re going to get a much more potent extraction.

The methyl salicylates, the compound that’s in that, which is similar to what they used to make aspirin, which leans into those uses, like I said, pain relief and headaches and that sort of thing, it is what smells like wintergreen. There’s more wintergreen aroma that you can get in your products and in your extractions, that’s the signal that you’ve really gotten a good medicinal extraction. You can also find the same scent if you would have worked with birch bark. If you make a good birch bark extraction, it kind of has that wintergreen smell. It’s the same thing that we’re extracting there. It’s fat soluble and it’s water soluble, so we can make it into a wonderful tea. I like to work with wintergreen the leaf, most often. The berries will get in there, but I really work with the leaf the most. Stems will get in there too. That doesn’t bother me. That’s not going to affect your tea in any way. When we’re doing—commercially, if I’m making a tea blend, I’ll remove as much of the stem as I can just most for the visual effect or for packing it into tea bags so you’re not poking holes into it. Having the stem isn’t going to hurt anything by any means. Or we infuse it in oil.

Wintergreen, when we first started offering products commercially here at Small House Farm—herbal products—when we started that, it was really as a value added bonus on our table at farmers markets. We got started here at Small House Farm cold pressing seed and nut oils. That was how the adventure began many years ago--sunflower oil, hemp seed oil, that sort of thing. We set up at farmers markets all over the state and we’d be selling our bottles of oil.  That did well for us and that was nice, but I was trying to find new ways to help people understand how they could use the oils outside of the kitchen.

Here at home, we were already making a number of different products with the oils. We were using them in our salves. One product that we’d make was a sore muscle salve. We work in the garden all the time. We got sore, aching muscles. We’re making salve. It was very, very simple.  It had wintergreen leaf and cayenne peppers. We were always joking it was like an herbal icy hot. It had that minty, fresh, and then the heat from the cayenne pepper. The capsaicin, obviously, specifically is what we’re looking for here. Very simple product we’re making at home. 

If we bring this to the market, it will be a good example of other things to use the oil for. My wife, Heather, she’s a graphic designer. She made a little label for it. We took it to the farmers market. It was really meant to be almost as a marketing tool for the oil, but people really responded to it. They’re like, “This is a really nice product that you’re making here.” That kind of just built on to itself. “Well, if they like this we’ll bring a couple of other examples of different things that we’re making,” then it kind of took off on its own and that’s become a big part of what we do. I don’t really even offer bottles of oil for culinary use anymore. That part has faded into the background and the herbal business has really taken off, and it was because wintergreen!

It was wintergreen. That’s how we got started. It was a simple infusion in sunflower oil is how we started. I had a lot of sunflower oil at the time that was great. Now, the product that we offer, I actually use hempseed oil in it. Hempseed is anti-inflammatory as well. It’s really good for inflammation, obviously, joint pain and sore muscles. By utilizing the hemp oil and the wintergreen together, we can make a really powerful topical product. That’s another thing, which is kind of a side tangent to where we started here. I always like to talk to people about the oils as well because oils aren’t just a menstruum. They’re not just a medium for extracting chemicals. They’re an ingredient in the product as well. We can make really nice products if we consider the oil as one of the ingredients. That was my original pitch for bringing the products to the market to sell the oils.

The wintergreen is such a powerful herbal ally for topical pain relief that folks really responded to it. They buy it and take it home. They come back the next week and, “I need a bigger container of that. Where do we get more of that?” That snowballed. It’s another good example of me getting out of my own way and letting nature take its course and let the market decide what they want us to do, so that’s what we do.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I love that, again, wintergreen is showing up in a big way. It almost seems like wintergreen is this catalyst in your life, showing up when you’re at this kind of turning point.

Bevin Cohen:

You’re right. She’s been there every step of the way, doing something different, offering herself in a different way. Just kind of lead me along on a fantastic adventure with it. It possibly wouldn’t have happened without wintergreen, so it’s pretty cool.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

It’s almost like a more positive version of the giving tree in that wintergreen is not giving all of herself as you might say, but it keeps showing up for you in beautiful ways.

Bevin Cohen:

You’re right. Wintergreen, Gaultheria procumbens is the species. It’s a low-growing plant. It grows along the forest floor. It prefers the shade. It spreads via underground rhizomes, so it spreads underground. We can harvest it up. You can be pretty generous with what you take. You could take a good amount of it. She spreads pretty well. Obviously, you want to be responsible and respectful when you harvest from the wild. Of course, you know what I mean. She is a prolific plant and she really spreads quite quickly, so that works out really well from a wild harvesting point of view. 

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Nice. Thanks for sharing that. I have to ask is your icy hot, that herbal blend, is that something that you still sell on your website and at markets and stuff?

Bevin Cohen:

We do. Over the years, it has come together. It got to the point where we’re offering that. We called it, “sore muscle rub” or something like that, and then we started another product that was really geared towards like an arthritis type of product. It had nettles, witch hazel and sage. It had a bunch of other botanicals in it. What I found is people were getting confused about the two products. What we have done now is we’ve combined those two into very potent topical. It’s got hemp oil and flax oil, both for its anti-inflammatory benefits and then a whole list of different botanicals. We do still offer it on our website. It’s got the red label. We kept the color of the label so everybody will still recognize it. We don’t do as many farmers markets as we used to. In the early days, we used to do so many farmers markets. In 2020, that got slowed down quite a bit for us. We pivoted into an online store model and that’s been very successful for us. We still go out and we’ll do events and that sort of thing, but not to the scale that we used to. We do a lot of stuff now through the online store on our website.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Good to know. We have working with wintergreen for a sore muscle rub, and then you’ve also shared a Forest Winter-healing Tea with us with three lovely ingredients. Everyone can download their copy of that at herbswithrosaleepodcast.com or look at the show notes. I’d love to hear more about this beautiful blend.

Bevin Cohen:

It is quite an interesting tea. You should definitely make it and try it. I’ll tell you all about how this happened. We do a program. It’s an interactive tea-tasting experience. We do it a lot – I travel a lot, do a lot of educational programming and such. This tea-tasting, an herb group had asked me to make an interactive tea experience. We developed this thing and it was such a hit that we’ve taken it all over the country now, and it’s one of the most popular things that we offer. We sample three different teas. We talk about it. It’s almost like a wine tasting. We talk about the aromas, the flavors and the effects. Throughout the process of the steeping, I share a bunch of knowledge about different plants growing and folklore, and whatever might be of these different plants. I found myself – I kept telling the story about a tea that we were making at home for around cold and flu season. It was pine needles and garlic was the tea blend. It initially started off kind of as a joke. I’ll say, “Oh, have you guys ever had garlic tea?” and everybody’s, “No, no, no. No way.” I’ll be like, “You’re not living life until you have some garlic tea.” That was sort of the shtick. I found myself saying it so often that I thought—because we’re drinking this tea home. It’s a fantastic tea for cold and flu. Garlic has water soluble zinc, which is absolutely fantastic in that scenario. The pine needles offer Vitamin C. It’s a really nice plant. We kept talking about it and talking about it.

We also—sorry, there’s a side tangent here—we also have a Patreon community, which if your listeners are familiar with Patreon, it’s a membership-based community program thing. One of the benefits that our Patreon members get is the seasonal herb boxes that we ship out. It comes on the equinox and the solstice, these boxes of all these different herbal products that we’re making here on the farm – teas, tinctures, oils and all sorts of different stuff. We develop a special seasonal tea blend for each box that goes out. Coming around wintertime, I was still talking to folks about this tea. I said, “We should make this tea for the winter tea box. Doesn’t that seem appropriate?”

I was out in the woods gathering the pine needles for it. We have a lot of white pine that grows here. We’re out there gathering the pine needles. I was talking to my wife. I was like, “The garlic is very forward in this blend. It’s a very strong tea and if folks aren’t familiar with that, that might be difficult for them to adjust to, these folks that are getting these boxes in the mail. We need a third ingredient. We need something else to balance this thing out.” I looked down, and of course, all along the forest floor, my good buddy, wintergreen. I said, “This is it! This is my third ingredient! This is exactly what we need.” So, I gathered up a bunch of that wintergreen and brought it in. Now, we’re talking. We got some serious tea here, right? We have got the zinc from the garlic. We’ve got the Vitamin C from the pine. We’ve got the methyl salicylate that comes from the wintergreen, which is wonderful if you’ve got a headache, you’re feeling tight in the head, fantastic stuff. But the other bonus is the strong wintergreen flavor really helps balance out the garlic.

I just really kicked this thing up, turned it up to 11. This was a killer tea blend! So, we made it up. We sent out the tea boxes to everybody. I was a little nervous about it because it was the first very medicinal forward tea that we offered in these boxes. Everything else has just been a delicious blend that represents herbs from the season. This one was a little bit—I was nervous how people are going to react to it, but I got emails back from folks. They said, “This, best box yet,” “Best tea yet,” “Absolutely lovely!” “We had a cold, we drank this tea, bada bing! we’re feeling so much better.” That was cool to see people respond to it so well, so when I had to share a recipe for the podcast for your listeners that involved wintergreen, I said “This is it right here.” It’s such a good tea. I would recommend if you’re new to garlic in your tea, maybe put a little honey in it. Add a little honey to sweeten it up. It is so good for you. It does wonders. I’ll say, if you feel something coming on, you drink some of this tea. Tomorrow morning, you’re going to feel great and that’s really not even an exaggeration. It’s so effective. It’s fantastic.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Lovely. Thank you so much for sharing that with us.

Bevin Cohen:

Of course.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

And is there anything else that we haven’t covered about wintergreen that you’d like to share?

Bevin Cohen:

I think that just wintergreen illustrates the point that Mother Nature is literally providing for us if we take the time to listen. That’s the point I want to drive home about wintergreen. When we were doing the farmers markets and offering these sore muscle salves, at every single farmers market, without fail, there would always be one person that would say to me, “Do you use arnica in this product?” Everybody is familiar with arnica. Arnica is a wonderful herb. It works wonders for that sort of thing, absolutely. But am I using arnica in this product? No, I’m not because I can’t grow arnica where I’m at in Michigan. I can’t forage arnica where I’m at in Michigan, so no, I’m not using it. I’m using these other herbs instead. These herbs that are right outside my back door that nature has ready for me to learn about and experience if I just let myself experience those plants. To me, that’s what wintergreen represents: the opportunity to learn about the plants growing in your region. Wherever you’re at, Mother Nature’s got everything that you need if you just go look for it.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I love that. That makes me think of my cold sore lip balm recipe. Whenever I share it, people are always like, “Where is the lemon balm essential oil? You have to have lemon balm essential oil for cold sores.” That’s really expensive and St. John’s wort is amazing and it grows for free in my yard, so I just don’t need that. We get these herbs that become almost like clichés. Even St. John’s wort. You say St. John’s wort and people think that’s a depression herb, not a cold sore herb. I love the way you said that. It’s like we got to listen to the plants. We got to pay attention and look for what’s growing out in our backyard, which is actually a great segue to your book.

You’re publishing another book this spring 2025, Herbs in Every Season. I’m so grateful I got a chance to take a peek at it early on. The first thing that really struck me about this book, Bevin, is as the title says, Herbs in Every Season, this is a book about connecting with the plants. This is not a book about plants that grow far away from us. There are so many books in here that grow in lots of different climate—or so many herbs that grow in lots of different climates. It really is about connecting with those. A lot of these—I just opened it to Monarda. This is something that you don’t regularly find in commerce. This is something that you do find out there. I grow it personally. I adore the book. It’s beautiful. Again, I just love the emphasis on the connection with the plants themselves.

One thing that I wanted to discuss with you that I thought just grabbed my attention—I’m going to read a bit just from the introduction here. You write, “Our fast-paced modern world practically begs us to seek out the convenient, streamlining our experiences into a homogenous conglomerate of online shopping and clickable availability. It’s an absolute marvel that almost anyone practically anywhere has access to whatever herbs they desire, no matter how exotic, no matter what time of year. If every ingredient can be ordered with a click and shipped to our doorstep, why should we take the time to explore our fields and forests hunting these precious plants at their seasonal peak? Why bother turning the soil to cultivate our aromatic herbs when they are so readily available at our local grocery store?” You go on to say, “This book will answer these questions and more,” but that’s my question for you. It’s right there. Why should we care if we can order everything with a convenient click? Why should we make the effort?

Bevin Cohen:

This is a point that I try to make, obviously, throughout the book, but all the time when I’m talking to folks about plants because why take on that extra labor and all of that extra time and the uncertainty of trying to forage for something when it is so easy to get from some other place?

First, I’m going to come back to the relationship--that relationship that we have with the plant, the place I think is very important, with the earth I think is very important. When we take the time to plant and cultivate an herb or when we take the time to seek out a plant and learn about its habitat, walk through the forest to discover where it lives and gather a little bit of it, we are far more connected to that moment in time and to the medicine that we’re going to make. If we just source ingredients from lands unknown, we, of course, don’t know anything about the quality of it. We don’t know anything about how it was cared of. We don’t know anything about it other than what the person selling it to us is going to tell us about it. That’s okay in some situations where that’s all that we have available to us, most certainly, but when we have those opportunities to turn to the wild places or to turn to the earth, we can make more powerful medicine by understanding the nuance of that plant.

When we were working on this book, writing this book, exploring each of the herbs through this season, through its life cycle and seeing how it grew in each place, it almost boggles the mind to see how the plant reacts differently. It makes different medicine sometimes depending when you harvest it in its life cycle and what part of the plant that you’re going to be working with. It’d different depending on where the plant is growing and what time of the year that it is. We spent many seasons working on this book and mostly in this garden. It was the same place sometimes different times, but even if it was winter of this year and winter the next year, I’m a different person now. I have changed, right?

And herbal medicine is all about that intersection of person, place and plant. We can only understand that if we take the time to work with the plant in its natural environment, if we take the time to grow it or harvest it or whatever it might be. Bag-wrapped and plastic shipped to us from the other side of the planet, that’s not it for me, and I was really trying to get people turned on to a different way of thinking of plants. We don’t need to know about all the plants in the world necessarily. We can if you’re a plant nerd and you want to know about them, but as an herbalist or as a medicine maker, the most valuable plants to know are the ones that grow around you, the ones that you grow with. We grow together.

I was just trying to really nail that point home, so I’m glad that you asked that question and read that excerpt of the book because that really is what that whole book is about.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I love that. Now, I have a thought that maybe seem a little tangential. When you were talking, it makes me think of the The Matrix, which I’m a huge fan of the Matrix movies. You didn’t see that coming, huh?

Bevin Cohen:

No.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Like you, I’m not a purist. I’m so grateful for my ginger and turmeric which I do not have a relationship with growing in the real world. If we surround ourselves with just plants wrapped in plastic shipped from all over the world that we don’t have that connection, it reminds me of the beginning stages of The Matrix. There’s the character, Thomas Anderson. He’s in his cubicle. The world just kind of has this gray sheen to it. He’s searching for something because he doesn’t feel alive, which in the real sense of this movie, he’s not. I don’t know why I’m talking about the Matrix all of a sudden. I did not see that coming, but I just had that sense of, yes. We have to surround ourselves with living beings and have that connection, so that we can feel alive too. Again, not a purist thing, but we have to reach for it a little bit out of convenience sometimes.

Bevin Cohen:

Anytime that we can. I use plants here that I obviously can’t grow or forage all the time. I love avocado. I drink coffee. My wife really enjoys a nice chocolate, so we got cacao. I was at a greenhouse and they had a cacao tree there and I was like, “This is my opportunity to get to know this guy,” so I just feel the bark, feel the leaf and smell the flower. Whatever you can to just have that connection. I don’t know. Maybe it sounds a little woo-woo, but I think that is one of the most important things of being an herbalist – having those opportunities and realizing how important those opportunities are.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Absolutely! Your book really does a great job of highlighting that. Such a great array of herbs. You got 48 herbs, right? That’s correct? The number? Forty-eight-

Bevin Cohen:

That’s right.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Again, there’s the Monarda, which is a beautiful endemic plant sometimes called “native oregano,” amidst plantain, these lovely wild weeds, amidst horsetail. You don’t always see horsetail around, in like an herbal. You often see the horsetails in local foraging or something, but you really do hit a lot of different avenues of things that might be primarily cultivated. We’ve got cayenne vs. things we might be finding out on the sides of our water ditches like horsetail. It’s really got a wide array of plants. My favorite thing, because this is also my joy is the recipes. I always think like it’s one thing to pick up a book and read it or listen to a podcast. It’s another thing to say, “Okay, I’m going to bring that home with me. I’m going to work with it,” because then it becomes yours. It’s just something that you get to really be tangible with and you get to now have that relationship and grow, and not just hear about the relationship. I love the recipes that you have in here. You said something in the beginning. I’ll just have to paraphrase. You said something like all these recipes are simple enough for the beginner, but you also kind of pushed yourself to find new ways and interesting ways of combining these recipes and working with the plants. I appreciate that too. Do you have-

Bevin Cohen:

It was so much fun. It was so much fun to do the recipes. I also try to make the point in the book too that the recipes should be a starting point for folks. I’ve developed this recipe. This is the recipe that I’m doing, but make it your own. That personal expression that comes across in what you can do when you’re making these recipes is an important part of it as well, to feel free to experiment. I think that’s some of the value of it is that personalization that we can do when we work with plants.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Do you have a favorite recipe in here or maybe a story about creating your recipe? The recipe creator sometimes I know it’s not always straightforward. There are tries and misses. Any recipe stories for us?

Bevin Cohen:

Yes. The recipes, that was quite an adventure. When Timber Press—that’s the publisher for the book—when we first started talking about doing this book, they were looking for a strictly medicinal book about herbs. That’s what they wanted. They like the seasonal aspect. They thought that was fun, but they wanted medicinal herbs. I said, “I don’t think that’s really what I want to do.” You’ll notice throughout the book, for all of the herbs, we also include culinary applications. We talk about the plants in the kitchen as well. You can’t really, to me, separate those two things: herbs for the apothecary and herbs for the kitchen as a person who works with herbs in the day to day life. Those things, there’s a lot of overlap here. Those exist at the same time. I said, “We’ve got to do both. That’s what I want to do.” Thankfully, they were onboard with that idea. “Alright. We’ll let you. We’ll see how it turns out.” That was really nice for me to have that opportunity to explore all avenues as far as the recipes go.

Where it started to get tricky was the cooking, the actual cooking of the recipes because I didn’t want it to be boring stuff. I didn’t want it just to be like, “Sprinkle oregano on this,” or whatever. I want these to be interesting, unique types of things to make. That really was more challenging than I expected it to be, especially to make it and then make it so the photographer who came could take a photo of it. That was really the adventure. We had a photographer come here for three days and shoot many, many photos. All of the recipe photos were done on those three days. Many of the garden photos were done on those three days. It was a very busy three days. To be able to make this food and have it ready to be at peak picturesque state was very challenging to do. I’ve never done anything like that in my life before.

One recipe that stood out to me that I thought was really fun—I started to have a little bit of fun with it. You work on a book for multiple years, you’re kind of “Let’s see what I can get away with. Let’s see if they’re going to let me do this,” so I started having a lot of fun with it and one that stuck with me that was really fun is we did a corn bread. It was all about sunflower. We write about sunflowers in the book. Everything you can do with sunflowers, every part of the plant being edible, all the different medicinal benefits, pressing the oil from it. We really tried to cover all those things. I said, “Let’s make a corn bread, but let’s make it out of all the parts of the sunflower plant instead.” Yeah! So, that was a lot of fun. We ground sunflower seeds to make the flour. We did all these things. We decorated the top of it with sunflower petals. I had seen on Instagram or something, I had seen somebody had this focaccia bread that they decorated really beautiful with flowers and herbs. I was like, “I can do something like that.” Well, no. Not the first try, I couldn’t! It was a thing, but it came out so beautiful and I thought this is such a cool representation of whoever makes this recipe is going to do it their own way. The way that they decorate the flowers, every time is going to be unique and special. I think that that is so cool and then the bread turned out so good. It was really delicious. It was just a fun way to experiment with everything that one plant has to offer.

We always find ourselves—I won’t say “we” and I won’t say “always.” I’ll change that. Sometimes some people seem to be stuck in using just one part of a plant all the time. They’re like, “We’re always going to use the flower. We always use the root.” Whatever it might be. It’s like all these different things are useful for something, so getting to know all the parts of the plant, that’s part of that relationship that we’re trying to develop. I said, “Let’s do a recipe where I’m going to use every part of this plant, as much of this plant as I can in one recipe.” That was a challenge that turned out to be deliciously successful.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

That’s awesome. I always love hearing behind-the-scenes stuff. That’s a cool, cool story just how the book came together too. I can only imagine that is a tremendous amount of work. With my first book, what I did is I took photography lessons because I couldn’t imagine. I live rurally. There’s no way I’m going to get a photographer out here and I just couldn’t imagine. I honestly couldn’t imagine that situation of three days of straight cooking and prep, so I was just like “kudos” because the book is gorgeous! The photographer did a beautiful, beautiful job. It’s just very inviting and lovely.

Bevin Cohen:

I appreciate that. Her name is Miriam Dome. She’s from Chicago. My wife, Heather, also, she’s a photographer. She’s done photos for a lot of my other books. This one, Timber was like, “No, we want” – yeah, look at these things! They’re like, “We want just the most bold photos. We’re going to go out and we’re going to do this like this.” So, Miriam and I, because of the seasonal nature of the book, I was like, “Some of these plants, you got to get – it’s very particular, and if you miss it, you miss it. You’re not going to see it again for 11 months.” We had a lot of back and forth communication. She was driving all over the country to find places, pictures of the rosemary. She’s got a beautiful blooming rosemary in there. She was in Spain. She was always on the job finding these photos and then it came down to just for three days. It was three from sun up to sun down shoots, three days of it. It was quite an experience and that was a while ago. Now, finally, the book is out. I’m so excited to see the book and it turned out so beautiful. There’s a lot of work that went into that. It was really quite a project. It’s really cool to see it out.

Rosalee de la Forêt: 

Thank you for sharing that. Unless you’ve been through the book process yourself, when you hold something in your hand, there’s no idea of everything that goes into that. We didn’t even talk about the probably four stages of editing that it went through and just on and on. I’m very impressed with this book. I do not say that about a lot of herbal books. I will say it about yours. It’s gorgeous. It’s beautiful. It’s inspiring. It’s welcoming. It’s accessible. I think beginners will love it and I think people who have a lot of experience with herbs, which I would include myself in that, would love it as well, because I do. Thank you so much for the work that went into it. I do have one last question before I let you go. I feel like I was winding down there. I was like, “Wait. No.”

Bevin Cohen:

Not yet.

Rosalee de la Forêt: 

Not yet, no. My last question for you is, “What new skills or things are you currently cultivating with herbs?”

Bevin Cohen:

Such a good question again. Your questions are very thought-provoking, I’ll say that. I do a lot of podcasts and I feel that I answer the same questions all the time, and that’s not the case today. I’ve really been enjoying this. This one I put a lot of thought into because one skill that has come from writing the book has been this need to see things here and now. To be here and now and to see things here and now, to be acutely aware of the exact moment in time that I exist in, and what is happening in the world around me in this moment. Who am I right now? Where am I at? What are the plants doing? Through writing this seasonal book, that was the whole thing.

I was doing that already I want to say in my day to day life, but we really fine-tuned it. We really leaned into that concept of the moment and how everything is so fragile and can change. I thought, “Was this the skill that I’ve been developing? Is that the answer to this question?” Then I thought, maybe not. Actually, maybe I don’t need any new skills. Not to say that there’s not room to grow and things to learn because there certainly is a whole lifetime of things I know nothing about that I can learn these new skills, absolutely, sure. But what if instead of looking forward to learning something new, what if I go back to the skills that I’ve already acquired and tune them up a little bit better too?

I compare it to doing yoga or doing Tai chi or something. Once you’ve mastered the forms of a sun salutation—“mastered.” What a funny choice of that word right there. Once you’ve learned the form, the physical movement, do you go on to learn new forms or do you learn to lean into these forms a little deeper and breathe into this moment a little bit more? That’s how you truly master something. This has been such a great question and I’m so happy that you asked it because it’s really got me thinking about this a lot that sure I have room for growth into new things, but maybe instead, I should go back and really tune into the skills that I’ve already got, and learn them a little bit better and lean into that a little harder, and breathe through that motion a little bit more, then maybe I’ll be ready to bring on something new.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Interesting, Bevin. I’m going to put you on the spot. Is there a skill that you’re thinking you could dust off?

Bevin Cohen:

Oh, gosh, yeah. There are always skills that I could dust off. Tea blends, that’s one. One of the beauties of this Patreon thing that I talked about earlier, this seasonal box, these things  that we send out, is because the things that we send in the box is our herbal products that I have never made before. They’re all new things to me. The Small House products, if you visit our website and all those products, we’ve been offering those products for years and years and years. We make them in bulk and it’s a whole thing, but these boxes, they’re new every year because it’s a much smaller scale that we’re working on so I can get away with that. It’s just been so fun to be able to get out there and experiment with making things new again, and really trying to make something seasonal or what’s happening in this moment and representing it in that box. These tea blends are one of them, making these very seasonally specific blends of herbs that we’ve never done before, that we could offer to these people. I’ve learned that maybe sometimes if we do something over and over and over again and it becomes a routine, we don’t think about it as much as we did before. We’re just banging it out and getting it done, but then we lose the beauty of the whole project, and the beauty is being in that moment. When you’re making an herbal tea blend the colors, the aromas, the energetics of the plants, all those things have to come together just right to make the perfect tea.

That’s the scale I think I need to brush off again, is the excitement of creating and working with plants. That’s something that I could always dust off, brush off and wax on, wax off or whatever, make it shine a little bit better than we do. Routine can be dangerous for me because it’s too easy to slip into that repetition. For me—I only speak for me–once I find myself repetitively doing the same thing over and over again, maybe I’m not doing it as well as I used to. So, stepping back and seeing things from a fresh light, that’s probably the best thing that I can do with everything in life. Not just herbs and plants, but every aspect of my life. Sometimes stepping back and looking at it from a fresh point of view is good for us.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I like that, Bevin. I like how you presence that with presence and that seems like a constant theme with you. Herbs in Every Season, there is a presence needed to show up for the herbs with the seasons, to be aware. As you said, herbs, we get them when they’re flowering for a moment in time. When we miss it, we miss it. There’s a presence that needs to happen there. I appreciate all of that.

Bevin Cohen:

Thank you. I was just going to say because the title of the book at one point, you know how it is that titles of books change and evolve throughout the process. At one point, the title of the book was “Herbs for Every Season.” I said that doesn’t work because “herbs for every season” that’s meaning that we’re assigning this herb a job. That’s how I felt about it. This herb’s got to serve this purpose or something. It’s not herbs for every season. These herbs are in every season. We are in. We are immersed in the plant world, that’s what we’re trying to do here. Just changing that one word, for me, changed my whole perception of what was happening. Language is powerful like that. We’re in every season.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

In every season. I love it. Thank you again so much for being on the show. Thanks for all the work that you do and for all your beautiful offerings that you share with the world. I’m excited for this book to get out there. It’s been wonderful hanging out with you. I really appreciate it.

Bevin Cohen:

This has been so much fun for me. Thank you so much for having me on the show. This is wonderful. Thank you.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Absolute pleasure.

Thanks for being here. Don’t forget to download your beautifully illustrated recipe card above this transcript. Also, sign up for my weekly newsletter, which is the best way to stay in touch with me. You can find more about Bevin at his website, smallhousefarm.com. If you’d like more herbal episodes to come your way, then one of the best ways to support this podcast is by subscribing on YouTube or your favorite podcast app. 

I deeply believe that this world needs more herbalists and plant-centered folks, and I’m so glad that you’re here as part of this herbal community. Also, a big round of thanks to the people all over the world who make this podcast happen week to week:

Emilie Thomas-Anderson is the Project Manager who oversees the entire podcast operation from guest outreach, to writing show notes, and on and on. I often tell people I just show up! Emilie does most of the heavy lifting. 

Nicole Paull is the operator for the entire Herbs with Rosalee School and Community. She keeps an eagle eye view on everything to ensure it’s running smoothly. 

Francesca is our fabulous video and audio editor. She not only makes listening more pleasant. She also adds beauty to the YouTube videos with plant images and video overlays. Tatiana Rusakova is the botanical illustrator who creates gorgeous plant and recipe illustrations for us. I love them and I know you love them. Once the illustration is ready, Jenny creates the recipe cards, as well as the thumbnail images for YouTube. 

Alex is our behind-the-scenes tech support and Social Media Manager, and Karin and Emilie are our Student Services Coordinators and Community Support. If you’ve written in with a question, undoubtedly, you got help from them. 

For those of you who like to read along, Jennifer is who creates the transcripts each week. Xavier, my handsome French husband, is the cameraman and website IT guy.

It takes an herbal village to make it all happen including you. Thank you so much for your support through your comments, reviews and ratings.

One of my favorite things about this podcast is hearing from you. I read every single comment that comes in and as always, I’m excited to hear your thoughts on our conversation and wintergreen. Have you used it? 

Okay. You’ve lasted to the very end of the show, which means you get your very own gold star and this herbal tidbit:

For this herbal tidbit, I want to read a section of Bevin’s book, Herbs in Every Season, and the reason I want to read this is because I love it so much. At first, I was like I’ll just read a sentence or two on the podcast, but really, the whole thing is just so good. 

Bevin writes, “At its heart, the practice of herbal medicine is a study of the relationships among plants, people and the environment. By exploring the complexities of these relationships, not only do we learn new ways to work with our herbal allies, but we also learn more about ourselves. At the end of the day, our most noble pursuits are those in which our ultimate goal is to become better people. When we commit to learning about herbs and the multitude of wonderful things they offer us, we inevitably find ourselves learning more about who we are and how we approach the natural world. After all, our education is framed by our experiences. While certainly some herbal knowledge is universal, it is, at the same time, also unique to its practitioner. We all come to herbalism from different paths in life. The way we experience these plants in our approach, their varying flavors and aromas is as distinctive as the herbalist. In addition, as with anything else in the natural world, herbs are seasonal. When we encounter an herb is going to have just as much impact on our process as how we encounter the herb. Our experience is determined by our knowledge of the herbs in relationship to the season, or at least, it should be.”