 |
| Melanie Rose, owner of Hummingbird
Herbals, inside her shop./Photo by Dustin Bradford. |
When Melanie Rose whirs past you – two swinging
orange braids, goddess pendant dangling from her neck,
fat lower lip irresistibly slack – you can hear
the faint buzz of gossamer wings following her frenzied
flight. The proprietor of Hummingbird Herbals, Melanie
is hummingbird incarnate: slight build, snappy pace, fast
metabolism and flamboyant tail feathers keeping her constantly
a flight.
When I first met Melanie her home and business were located
in a one-room, tar-papered shack on the south side of
town. After spending most of her 20s living in a tepee,
truck and, for a short time, a cave, Melanie had become
accustomed to making her nest in small spaces. Water came
from portable jugs, and electricity flowed through an
extension cord routed from the main house through the
back yard. Terra cotta pots of catnip (used to calm fussy
kids) hung 6 feet off the ground from chokecherry limbs
outside, a last-ditch effort to keep the neighboring cats
out of her herbs.
I came to Melanie as an apprentice. Five hours a week
I chopped smelly roots; poured dark, forest brews called
tinctures from mason jars into 1-ounce bottles for sale;
and mixed shredded herbs in a 5-gallon bucket until I
had sneezing fits. For this work, Melanie gave myself
and five other apprentices a weekly class on healing with
herbs.
Classes were held in the shack/office/ medicine-making-kitchen-turned-Wednesday-night-classroom.
Hippies, freaks, plant nerds – we all were with
Melanie as our leader. She taught us first and foremost
that to separate personal life from business life was
folly, and furthermore too much trouble. So the night
Melanie taught class in a gelled-up mohawk, fishnets and
leather mini was all par for the course.
“I’m going to an ’80s party after class”
she explained, silver bangles sliding down her hummingbird
wings as she showed us, through ripped Pat Benatar shirt,
where the liver, stomach and gall bladder were.
Invariably our budding herbal knowledge came to circle
around our own lives and ailments. We etched our knowledge
of liver herbs in our minds through apprentice Pam, who
was convinced her own liver was beyond repair due to being
a lush pot-head and incurable addict to coffee, cigarettes
and sugar. Melanie would look at us, sprawled across her
sagging thrift store couch, lower lip poised in slight
expectant pout and test: “Now if Pam believed in
treating her liver damage, what herbs would she take?”
It was through Eli that we became familiar with aphrodisiac
herbs, learning to distinguish between those you sip in
tea with a tried-and-true lover and those you surreptitiously
slip to a man of your affections on Valentines Day. From
Neil we learned that mind-altering plants were just under
our noses.
“Looks like you’re having a little serotonin
fix,” Neil said to Melanie one night as she peeled
a banana during class. “If you add peanut butter
or sunflower seed butter it’s doubly powerful –
a real happy meal,” he added.
“OK Neil, you’re in charge of snacks for class
from now on.” Melanie directed.
In that one-room shack, with Melanie’s sweet and
needy rez dog, Liz, pacing in hopes of finding food or
a scratch, we learned about emmenagogues (herbs that bring
on menstrual bleeding) and chologogues (herbs that support
the liver). And when an apprentice asked “what about
the synagogues,” Melanie, not missing a beat, explained
that those were places where Jewish people went to worship.
Classes were two hours long though often we’d push
it, getting into the finer, micro elements of herbalism.
It must have been in the wee hours that we began renaming
Melanie’s formulas with their more truthful titles.
“Moon Balance,” for balancing womenhormones
and easing PMS, became known behind as “Bitch-Ease.”
The tonic for herpes known as “Viral/Nerve Tonic”
was secretly referred to as “Vixens and Viruses.”
Melanie can go from hard science, explaining the difference
between gram positive and gram negative bacteria, lower
lip hanging slightly, and then suddenly begin chirping
about magic and forest fairies. Quite fluent in computers,
she’s quick to see that if the computer is giving
her problems and Mercury is in retrograde, the best solution
is to let it lie and go get a beer at Carver’s.
This 32-year-old hummingbird is true renaissance woman,
putting up dozens of quarts of tomatoes in fall, playing
guitar and singing in a band, chopping her own firewood,
making jewelry and even hanging drywall. She can explain
why marijuana produces “the munchies” and
give a detailed explanation of how food is digested and
excreted. She is clinical herbalist extraordinaire, whom
many people all over the Unites States rely upon. Clients
who’ve moved from Durango continue to order formulas,
and she gives consultations to people with persistent
and challenging conditions. She has her a cult following
of locals who swear by her Virobiotic tincture for colds
and flus.
More than 50 students have come through her program, sitting
in Wednesday night classes sipping custom herbal tea and
making up their own censored names for her formulas. She
works with menopause, urinary tract infections, irritable
bowel syndrome, warts, hemorrhoids and the common virus
with practical herbal science and just the right amount
of ethereal magic that seems to trickle out of her orange
braids and leave a trail like tiny feathers wherever she
treads.
These days Melanie’s home nest is a converted school
bus, complete with kitchen, bathroom, spice rack full
of tinctures and a tiny woodstove barely big enough for
two hummingbird families to nest in. Her shop is bigger
than ever, 1,000 square feet that includes shop, lab and
office, with each and every crevice filled. Every six
months there is a new batch of apprentices. Like those
who came before, they stand on the step stool, pulling
down mason jars of sloshing dark green tincture, praying
this is not the moment when the bookshelf crammed with
jars containing liquid worth thousands of dollars comes
crashing down. They brew sweet, spicy chai by the gallon
and mix up teas with names like “Passion,”
“Rejuvenation” and “Mother to Be.”
All the while Melanie buzzes around, navigating the small
space wielding turkey baster and graduated cylinder (tools
of the trade) while muttering about new herbal formulas.
Never doing less than five things at once, she whirs,
buzzes and flaps until she’s sent herself into a
tailspin, prompting the apprentices to suggest a nectar
break.
In summers, Melanie often migrates north, gathering plants,
trading with other herbalists and sometimes taking a break
to simply enjoy wild lands and the plants that grace them.
This is, after all, what brought her to herbalism in the
first place. After reading Clan of the Cave Bear at age
16 and becoming inspired by the references to wild plants,
Melanie bought several herb books and began foraging through
open space adjacent to her home near Denver. While other
teens were partying and flirting, she was making dandelion
cookies and onion cough syrup for her family. She continued
to experiment with herbs after leaving home, and at the
summer Rainbow Gathering in 1995 she had the opportunity
to work in the CALM (Center for Alternative Living Medicine)
tent. Having just finished herb school in New York and
armed with an apothecary of herbal medicine, Melanie worked
with about 500 people over eight days. And after eight
years of learning, making and using herbal medicine, it
was this experience that propelled her to open Hummingbird
Herbals.
That was seven years ago. Melanie is pretty pleased with
the way things turned out. She pulls on her lower lip
and thinks about life for a moment, “It was either
herbalism or learning to sing opera in Greeley.”
|
