Earth Week: A journey creating sanctuary gardens for plants, pollinators and people

Through a colorful slide show presentation, herbalist, biodynamic gardener, and author Deb Soule ’81 explores who inspired her to begin gardening and studying medicinal plants while growing up in rural western Maine, how she came to be a student at COA, cross-cultural experiences with herbalists, and how in the late 1980s hummingbirds got her attention and have guided her gardening and medicine work for over 36 years. She will share about the trip poet Laura Brown-Lavoie took with her in the fall of 2022, following the migration of the ruby-throated hummingbirds down the eastern seaboard to the Alabama coast, which included observing federally licensed bird banders for a day at the Gulf of Mexico. Deb will conclude with talking about the creation of sanctuary gardens for pollinators and people on college campuses, libraries, public spaces, faith-based communities, and community gardens and farms; sharing a few easy to grow flowers which especially attract Ruby-throated hummingbirds; and why these sanctuary garden networks are needed more than ever. Her book Notes from the Hummingbird Corridor (Under the Willow Press, 2025) will be available for purchase.

Deb Soule ’81 is an herbalist, biodynamic gardener, and author of Healing Herbs for Women (Skyhorse Publishing, 1995), How to Move Like A Gardener (Steiner Books, 2013), and The Healing Garden (Princeton Architectural Press, 2021). Her most recent book, Notes from the Hummingbird Corridor, is a collaboration with Brown-Lavoie that weaves together poetry, prose and detailed information on planting for pollinators, especially the ruby-throated hummingbird. Soule founded Avena Botanicals Herbal Apothecary in 1985, and has tended over two acres of medicinal herbs on the same farm since 1995 in West Rockport, Maine. She is also the founder of the Herbal Hummingbird Hub, a nonprofit learning center whose mission is to serve people, plants, and pollinators by tending herb gardens, sharing herbal medicines, and stewarding racial, ecological and ancestral healing circles.

Introducer/moderator: COA Head Gardener Barbara Meyers ’89.