About
EarthFlower,
as a website and practice, views our living Earth as a precious flowering and seeks to support this vitality for individuals and communities. To that end, EarthFlower aims to provide information on healing and regenerative practices on a developing basis. The focus is food to support life, herbal medicine to support healing and flower essences to support the psyche and spirit, but each modality is a part of the web of life and intertwine with each other.
Claudia Keel
is an herbalist, flower essence therapist and a food and nutrition counselor. She has practiced in New York City since 1999. Claudia teaches regularly about herbs, flower essences and traditional foods in workshops and conferences and also offers private mentorship for both budding and established practitioners. In 2013, she co-founded ArborVitae School of Traditional Herbalism and is a director and core instructor and clinic mentor there.Since 1995, Claudia trained as an herbalist in apprenticeships and courses with master herbalists, which include a number of professional certifications. Her primary studies have been with Kate Gilday, Matthew Wood and the late William LeSassier. In the years before William LeSassier passed, she worked closely with him, hosting a small apprenticeship group as well as a formal study course for other herbalists. Claudia helped to found the William LeSassier Archives in 2006 and has served on the board of the Northeast Herbal Association.
Her primary training in flower essence therapy has been with David Dalton of Delta Gardens, but she also has flower essence practitioner training with the Patricia Kaminski and Richard Katz of the Flower Essence Society, and has professional trainings Jane Bell and Steve Johnson of Alaskan Essences, Bach Flower Essences, Kate Gilday of Woodland Essence and a number of other producers. From 2002 onward, she hosted in NYC the Delta Gardens Flower Essence Practitioner Training course along with continuing practitioner training courses, and for a number of years she led the ‘Flower Essence Practitioner Circle’, a continuing studies and case-review group for metro NY practitioners.
Since 2002, Claudia has served as the Weston A Price Foundation NYC Chapter Leader, providing education and resources for nutrition and traditional foods throughout New York City. She teaches about food and nutrition regularly in workshops and conferences nationally. She also co-founded in 2002 a farm-to-consumer food club, focusing on local, traditional and artisan produced foods that were not readily available in the city. Under her leadership, the club quickly grew to serve numerous households throughout metro NY and evolved into to non-profit organization the Traditional Nutrition Guild (TNG) in 2006 and its subsidiary, the Traditional Foods Club (TFC) in 2010. She served as the president and the director of the club, TNG and TFC until 2011. She also founded the Traditional Food Swap, a community group that hosts swaps of traditionally prepared foods and herbs, along with foraged and NYC grown foods.
Claudia is a devoted gardener and wildcrafter and active student of organic and sustainable earth-care practices. For over 20 years, she has been active in the NYC community garden movement, as a gardener, muralist, workshop teacher and advocate. She assists periodically in a EM (Boakashi) fermenting food waste and garden remediation project with a group in El Sol Community Garden. Claudia Keel is also an artist, painter and muralist. Her artwork has been exhibited in one person and group shows in Boston, New York City and Italy. She has created 15 community murals in NYC area.
Previous to her health practice, Claudia worked for many years as an artist-in-residence in public schools, community gardens and centers, as well working in homeless services and inter-religious dialogue for NGO’s. In 1993, she founded the Art & Nature Project, which continued on her earlier work as an artist-in-residence in public schools, expanding it to also focus on nature and art projects and murals in community gardens and community centers. In 1993 she also began her 14 year collaboration and work with the poet Richard Lewis and the Touchstone Center for Children. Claudia received her BA in Religion from UNC-Chapel Hill, and studied in Masters of Fine Arts Painting programs at Massachusetts School of Art and School of Visual Art.