Who We Are
Our Pollinating Team
Deb Soule
Chief Plant Whisperer
Deb Soule is an herbalist, Biodynamic gardener, founder and visionary of Avena Botanicals, and the author of The Woman's Handbook of Healing Herbs and How to Move Like a Gardener. Since the late 1980's, Deb has been closely observing and studying Ruby-throated hummingbirds and interplanting the gardens with hundreds of flowering plants specific for hummingbirds, bees, and monarch butterflies.
Bullfrog
Born Performer
Any summer audience is a good audience to me. I have shows every night in the garden ponds‚ I'm excited to sing you my new song when you come by. I sang it last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that....
Laura
Board Member
Laura Brown-Lavoie is a poet and earth worker. She participates in the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth: as a devotee of soil, as a companion for people giving birth, and as an Ancestral Medicine practitioner. Her first book of poetry Club Desire (Binch Press, 2022) undresses the extractive relationships between people and Earth in the estuary of the upper Narragansett Bay. She has spent four seasons helping to tend the altars and gardens at Avena Botanicals, and supporting pilot programs of the Herbal Classroom. In the fall of 2023, she begins graduate studies at Union Theological Seminary.
Bumblebee
Looking for Colorful Friends
Hi! I LOVE COLORS! I like your red sweater, and your purple socks, and your green hat, and your blue earrings! Even if no one else gets your fashion style, I love coming and checking you out, rock it!
Viennia
Board Member
Viennia Lopes Booth enjoys exploring the intersections of life, death, and the plant world. Her formal education and her varied life experiences have circled around how to care for each other and the earth in ways that are regenerative and affirming. She is a first-generation college graduate with a Master’s degree in education, served in AmeriCorps National Civilian Corps supporting communities in need and has extensive training/skills in herbalism, midwifery + women’s health, environmental education, hypnotherapy, organic farming, and natural deathcare. In 2010, Viennia began her learning with Deb Soule while attending a permaculture design course hosted by Avena. Since then, she has worked countless hours in the gardens at Avena. Viennia has also had the great pleasure of attending and assisting with the Herbal Classroom’s workshops & programming, including a year-long Biodynamic training. Viennia is a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe. She is the daughter of a Mashpee Wampanoag /Cape Verdean father and a Dutch/English mother whose ancestors include both the original indigenous inhabitants of Cape Cod and some of its earliest colonists from afar.
Ceci
Garden Apprentice, 2022
Ceci is a queer gender non-conforming organizer, composter/earth steward, creative and facilitator learning how to live in more harmony with the land. They are dedicated to climate justice and queer trans* people of color liberation. For a recent growing season, Ceci joined Avena Botanicals' farm team to support tending to the land and our ecological communities.
Ruby-throated Hummingbird
Interdimensional Traveling Healer
Ruby-throated hummingbird zhhoooms between dimensions, blessing the blooms and humans of our gardens regularly with their impossible hover and dazzling flash of crimson.
Denise
Board Member
Denise Lofman has roots going back several generations on the Herbal Hummingbird Hub’s land. Her great-grandparents and grandparents stewarded the land, and her father grew up on the farm that is the Hub. Denise has magical memories of visiting the farm as a child, and as an adult when she came for one of the Herbal Classroom's first workshops in 2010. She is grateful she was asked to be one of the founding board members and continues to serve on the board. Denise believes deeply in the healing, sanctuary, and community that is nurtured and propagated by the Hub and Avena Botanicals. She lives and works on the North Oregon Coast, focusing her efforts on restoring habitats, native plants, and salmon on the mighty Columbia River.
Kei
Board Member
Kei Soares Cobb is an afro-futurist fruitarian fugitive healing-artist working in collaboration with The Emergent Forest for the reparation, liberation, and actualization of all beings. Kei’s investment in the Herbal Classroom began in 2020, and piloted as the Artist-in-Residence in Avena Botanicals' barn in the summer of 2022.
Digs
Board Member
Douglass, or Digs, is a grower and educator, who has, for the last decade, engaged in restorative agriculture projects with youth and adults currently (and formerly) experiencing incarceration in county jails and state prisons across New York State. He is currently supporting a land-based immersion program in the Adirondack mountains with young people impacted by the prison system. Digs met Deb at Soul Fire Farm around 6 or years ago and they became close friends and collaborators from there.
Monarch
Exterior Designer
Excuse me, don't step on those flowers it took us 6 generations to kiss them to growing we need some color up in this forest! Oh, what do I do for a living? I visit flower beds here, and flower beds there, now I've gotta go, my heart's singing "Milk-weeeed" today!
Kwah
Chief Astrologer
Kwah has been involved with the Hub since its early days as the Herbal Classroom, is ex-president elect, and goes way back with Deb to College of the Atlantic.
A word from Deb about pollinators...
“Monarch butterflies, Ruby-throated hummingbirds and un-pollinated Echinacea seeds called me to study pollination. The Forgotten Pollinators, co-authored by Stephen L. Buchman and Gary Paul Nabhan (published 1996) ushered me into the vast realms of pollinators, pollination ecology and the cultural context of plant, pollinator and seed relationships. Sue Halpern’s book Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly (published 2001) informed and heightened my curiosity for Monarchs. For over 28 years Avena’s gardens have included large amounts of flowers for monarchs, Ruby-throated hummingbirds and other pollinators and birds. Each June we eagerly await for the return of the brilliantly orange Monarch butterflies. One of their primary food sources, the common Milkweed grows abundantly in and around Avena’s gardens. In the fall we spread the seed along our fence lines to encourage as many milkweed plants and flowers the following summer. Monarchs and Ruby-throated hummingbirds both are migrating pollinators; the monarchs that leave Avena’s gardens in fall we pray will safely find their way to Mexico. These butterflies will not return to Avena. Unlike monarchs, Ruby-throated hummingbirds will return the following spring to the garden they were born in or have lived in before, given they survive their 3000 mile migration in spring and again in fall.”