About

My Nature Story

I grew up on a farm in Ontario, the daughter of an organic farmer and a nurse. Nature wasn't something I visited — it was just life. Soil, seasons, growing things, caring for people. I didn't have words for it then, but those two threads — the land and the healing — were always woven together for me.

When I moved to Guelph for university, I'll admit I was trying to get some distance from all of that. But I found myself noticing something that troubled me: how many people around me had very little connection to nature, or to where their food came from. That observation quietly shifted my direction. I set out to help people make those connections — gently, meaningfully — and to explore how that reconnection could support healing for individuals and communities.

When I discovered horticultural therapy, something clicked. This was my modality. It named what I had always known intuitively.

Years later, when my mom became terminally ill, I moved home to the farm. I planted a large vegetable garden — partly to nourish my grieving family, but also because I needed somewhere to be. That garden gave me a place to sit with my sadness, to grow through it, and to be with the people I loved — my nieces, my siblings, my dad, and the friends who were my supports through that hard season. Nature held all of it.

That experience, and so many difficult ones since, has reminded me again and again that growing things is a healing place. For me, and for so many people — even those who don't yet know it.

Work Experience

That season of grief led me back into the work in a deeper way. For nearly seven years I served as Program Coordinator and then Program Manager at Peace Ranch, a community mental health organization on a working farm in Caledon East. There I led a team delivering rehabilitation programs that drew on horticulture, farm animals, cooking, nature, art, and music as therapeutic tools — and managed a social purpose market garden that employed people living with mental health-related barriers to work. It was rich, grounding, community-rooted work, and it shaped everything about how I practice today. 

Since 2013, my work has taken me across a range of settings and populations. My longest and most sustaining contract has been with the Guelph Enabling Garden, where I have worked with a wide variety of individuals and groups over many years. Alongside that I have delivered programming for older adults through the City of Guelph and the City of Cambridge, and have brought horticultural therapy into school settings with children and youth. Each context has deepened my understanding of what nature-based work can offer — and who it can reach. 

My Approach

Every person I work with brings their own history, their own relationship with nature, and their own goals. My job is to meet them there — with curiosity, patience, and deep respect for what they already know about themselves.

My work is sensory and grounding by nature, drawing on the evidence that connecting with the living world — its textures, scents, sounds, and rhythms — through our senses, supports healing in ways that are both measurable and felt. I work collaboratively, which means goals are set together, and the pace is always yours to determine. And I hold autonomy as a core value — not an afterthought. You will always lead what we're doing and know why, and you will always have the freedom to shape, pause, or redirect our work together.

I bring reverence to this practice — for the people I work with, for the plants and places we share, and for the quiet, persistent way that nature nurtures us back toward ourselves.

Why "Grounding in Nature"

You may recognize grounding as a mindfulness strategy — the 5-4-3-2-1 technique, where you pause and notice what you can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. It's used to help people return to the present moment when they feel overwhelmed or dysregulated.

When that practice is rooted in nature, something more happens. We already know from research that nature reduces stress — and the evidence tends to focus on one sense at a time: the sound of water, the scents of trees, the texture of bark. My work brings those threads together, layering sensory experience in ways the research suggests are genuinely therapeutic.

But grounding in nature does something else too. Nature spans time and space in a way nothing else does. When we slow down enough to notice it — really notice it — we remember that we are not alone. We are connected to all living beings, across all of time. That awareness can bring us into the present moment and gently shrink the urgency of what feels wrong. In nature, we can borrow something — its strength, its resilience, its capacity to grow through difficulty and loss.

That is what I am here to help people find.

Credentials

• Registered Horticultural Therapist (HTR), Canadian Horticultural Therapy Association — registered since 2012

• Master in Environmental Studies, York University, Experiential &Therapeutic Education Through Sustainable Agriculture 2005 

• Honours BA in English, University of Guelph, 2000

• Based in Guelph, Ontario — serving individuals and organizations across the region