About Us

 Compost moving round and round in beauty...

About RavenCroft Garden 

RavenCroft Garden exists to celebrate herbal medicine as people's medicine and is celebrating her 22nd year as sacred land and a place for cultivating the healing tradition of wise women. Nature and woman spirit live here along with geese and chickens, cats and fairies, hedgewitches and grandmothers.

RavenCroft is home to a vision of community centered herbalism touching ground and rooting deep. Around us we have skills, wisdom, and confidence to cultivate life, deepen connections and ground healing. Community centered herbal practice invites women to become resources in their families and community; whose vision of health, healing and wholeness grows from earth as trees grow from roots.

At RavenCroft health is put into action cultivating, sustaining and celebrating life with deep sustenance. A place to experience and dance with Nature’s creative unfurling, a place to wonder and wander, learn and educate while claiming our role as generative shapers of beauty on earth.

Located just 30 miles northeast of Seattle WA, the garden is easily accessible. 

Delicious, local food meals are included with all workshops. Two or three day workshops and apprenticeships include overnight camping or indoor sleeping space and meals. 

Want to visit? No money? Join us for a Work Exchange Day, Seasonal Celebration or a Women’s Moon Circle. There’s no charge and it’s lots of fun.

Experience life on a croft. By working with nature we cultivate personal, community and global health. Join us, meet plants and animals and share in the wisdom and knowledge gained by cultivating life!

Earth is our home. Now is our time. Let’s keep growing!

More Online Information!

Be inspired! Subscribe to an online newsletter, Walking Seeds, available through Pacific Wise Women! Articles filled with hints and helps on  bringing herbs to life, tending heart(h) and soul/soil. Simple, easy recipes you can make in your own home. 

About EagleSong E. Gardener

Hello and Welcome,

I am a yarn spinner, story catcher, weaver of heart and soul at RavenCroft Garden, a seasoned, generative gardener and community centered herbalist. My lifetime practice of integrated earth medicine has strengthened in me a compassionate voice for health/wholeness/holiness found by living in dynamic equilibrium with nature and woman spirit.

Bringing 5 decades of experience weaving the natural elements of the gardens I tend into daily living is delicious work. One natural flow of those years gardening, wild-crafting, making herbal preparations and teaching people safe and wise use of herbs as medicine birthed the term community-centered herbalism in 2002. It became necessity to include the elements of earth, air, fire and water as full members of community. Herbal practice became a way of life beyond remedy whilst including it.

In 1992 life brought me to RavenCroft. Here gardens and learning experiences are crafted to share nature’s bounty with others. A global shift morphed the gardens to include the flumdiddley kitchen school in 2014. In this ever-simmering cauldron of possibility, recipes for cultivating life with meaning are dispensed through Healing From the Ground Up, Women's Moon Circles, LIA, Seasonal Celebrations and dancing the turning of the year in the Living Labyrinth.

I spent a decade as Director of Natural Beauty at Willows Lodge in Woodinville, WA. www.willowslodge.com While at Willows Lodge, I designed and implemented generative landscape management systems for the world renowned Willows Lodge and 5-Diamond Herbfarm Restaurant. www.theherbfarm.com Both establishments are recognized with 5-Star Environmental ratings from King County’s nationally acclaimed Enviro-Star program. This experience deepened my perception of cultivating life and the meaning of compassionate resilience. 

Upon completion of the project at Willows, I returned home, held vigil for a year as anchoress of RavenCroft then, took a sabbatical Crone's Year Away for dreaming possibility. Keeping vital food and herbal medicine in people’s hearts, hands and homes, rekindling hearth fires with Wisdom Circles and story medicine are the chosen work. 

Way back…
my walk in beauty adventure wandered through interludes of gillnet fishing in SE Alaska to working on the northslope of the Alyeska pipeline project which brought me to  “BitterSweet Farm” in Vader, Washington. With a small flock of sheep; Walker, our new baby boy and an independent streak tempering through the years, I began my herbal  adventures and ongoing apprenticeship to life. 

After the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980, the flight path took me to the Okanogan highlands for deep homesteading and horse-logging experiences and furthered my understanding of herbs in a different bioregion.  There, our second son, Li, joined the merry band and on we traveled. Back to the rainy side of the Cascade range and into deeper work as herbal educator and field manager at the original Herbfarm nursery in Fall City, WA.

Upon turning 50, and as a lifelong learner and gardener, I ventured to Hawaii to study and receive a Permaculture Design Certificate. Along with a certificate from the University of Washington in Healing and Therapeutic Garden Design, these educational opportunities furthered my simple understanding that gardens heal and fueled my fire to continue working in the context of gardens and health. 

As a US delegate to the first Terra Madre World Meeting of Food Communities in Turin, Italy (2004), I began seeing global patterns of change that have grounded my perspective on local food, earth medicine and global health. 

While approaching my crone years, I was called to pilgrimage. I visited my grandmother, Ruth Davies’, birthplace in Cropthorne, England in 2011. Walking the footpaths of the midlands in England, I realizied hedge medicine is in my blood. Many familiars are in those hedges as they had been when my Grandma walked them and her mother before her. Hedges and their medicine moving to the forefront of my current herbal practice. 

A second pilgrimage followed in 2013. I visited small farms and gardens and met with their tenders; engaged the concept of transition now and through the ages, within and without; stood with standing stones throughout England and Brittany; visited cathedrals; explored the countryside of France and met with remarkable trees around the world. All bringing new impetus and deepening my emerging work on a local/global scale. 

Blessed with a life journey richly textured in a planetary fabric, I advance whole-heartedly into my crone years. 

A Pilgrim’s Herbal and RootsTalk are projects currently underway devoted to re-weaving the healing cloak of the Ancients whilst cultivating an abundant future as we dance life on earth today.

With grateful heart, I carry hedge medicine. I delight in sharing stories, songs and earthly mischief wherever I am called. Story medicine quickens a sense of our world as holy, mysterious and worthy of care...and anyone can do it! With earthy soul and joyous spirit, I enjoy inspiring others to cultivate heart and soul with the medicines of (h)earth and soil as they journey.

In Beauty, 

EagleSong E. Gardener