Welcome!

I’m Jen, a clinical herbalist and the founder of Gather & Hold. I’m a desert child — I grew up playing with lizards (and avoiding javelinas) in the mountains of Tucson, Arizona. I have a highly developed sense of geologic time.

Equal parts analytical and intuitive, I started my career as a math teacher and physics researcher. I moved to New York City, where I became a data visualization researcher at Columbia University and started my own visualization company.

While living in Brooklyn and working with my own health challenges, I started paying attention to my quiet, lifelong calling toward healing. I began seriously studying herbalism and dreaming up the company that’s become Gather & Hold.

I studied community herbalism and medicine making in New York City with Robin Rose Bennett, Peeka Trenkle, and with Angela Ueckerman, Stephen Switzer, and Julia Bennett, at Third Root Community Health Center. I studied clinical herbalism with David Winston.

I’m now happily living back under the open skies of the west coast, in the East Bay with my husband and our high-energy toddler, where I can get to the redwoods in 20 minutes. I was a tree-hugging kid, and my lifelong home is nature.

It's my great privilege to help people feel better in their bodies, bringing my knowledge of traditional plant healing together with evidenced-based research. I dream of one day having an apothecary-on-wheels and a tiny medicinal herb farm.

❤ ❤ ❤