Our Team

Dara Saville is the founder of Albuquerque Herbalism and the Executive Director of the Yerba Mansa Project, a non-profit organization. She has an MS in Geography and Environmental Studies from the University of New Mexico and is also a graduate of Tierona LowDog’s Foundations of Herbal Medicine program. Her work involves teaching herbalists, organizing the community to undertake native medicinal plant restoration on public lands, working with local schools to engage students in medicinal plant studies, and fostering a renewed land connection through public events and field trips.

Dara is a regular columnist for Plant Healer Quarterly where she writes on a variety of botanical topics including environmental issues concerning medicinal plants and is also an instructor in UNM’s Holistic Health Program. She is a contributing author to several Plant Healer books and is the author of her first forthcoming book through UNM Press, Ecological Herbalism: Medicinal Plants and Living Landscapes of the Southwest.

Angie True is an ecopsychologist/psychotherapist, herbalist, writer and mountain-dweller. She is a graduate of Prescott College, Indiana University and the Colorado School of Clinical Herbalism, as well as many herbal mentors over the years.

Angie is also the executive director of The Calyx Institute, a practice which combines the latest research into the dietary, lifestyle and environmental causes and components of emotional symptoms with ancient botanical practices and traditional psychotherapy. In addition, she serves as administrative director at the Yerba Mansa Project, has taught literature at the college level and currently teaches on a wide variety of topics from herbally-infused perspectives, including mental illness, dreamwork, chronic illness, ecopsychology and more. She and her colleagues are ridiculously slowly opening C.I. Botanicals, a place for dreaming and meditation herbal formulas, wild bitters and plant-related artworks.

Rachel is a native New Mexican, born in Belen with a passion for sustainability and plant medicine. She has worked in the medical field for almost 25 years, recently as a Registered Nurse in the Albuquerque community, with experience in pediatric oncology, orthopedics, hospice, managed care, skilled inpatient care coordination, and cannabis nursing.

Rachel has studied cannabis as medicine for several years and has presented at multiple cannabis conferences in New Mexico and has counseled countless patients in the community. Rachel feels that it is imperative to teach the community about the wonderful benefits and uses of this very diverse plant. She hopes to help abolish the stigma and fear hiding behind it. She is currently working towards her Master’s degree in nursing with the goal of opening up her own Family Practice in the Albuquerque community, focusing on holistic health. She feels that bringing nature back to its roots is key to sustaining our environment and our community.

Donna has had a love of plants and nature since her youth, foraging briar leaves, admiring club mosses and orchids of the New England woods. She is ever grateful to her nature science teacher as a child. Violets and lemon balm in her grandmother’s garden and foraging wild mushrooms with her Aunt in Ireland are formative experiences. She has learned from a number of herbal teachers, programs, practitioners and a walkabout apprenticeship in the Sandia Mountains. She also studied at Albuquerque Herbalism in the Advanced Program.

Other pursuits have combined herbal activism and education through a weekly herbal radio program featuring folkways and herb talk along with many guest speakers.

She has gained great knowledge through the varied and often under radar experiences of working in herbal retail settings for the past number of years. She currently lives in the Chihuhuan desert in Las Cruces, New Mexico where she helps run the Wellness Department at a local Co-op. Her favorite strategy, while perusing the herb and supplement aisles, is to inspire people by educating about simple, accessible lifestyle supports. Offering ideas for tea blends and recipes. You will find her there doing what she loves and sharing that enthusiasm in her community herbal classes that she is offering at the Mountain View Market Co-op.

She can be contacted for classes and offerings at maytreeherbals@gmail.com