Our Feature in the Ohio Cooperative Living Magazine
We were featured in the Ohio Cooperative Living magazine in May 2023:
Woodland Herbal is a family business based in Warsaw, Ohio, who specialize in plant-based medicines, traditional remedies, and natural body care products like teas, salves, tinctures and extracts, beauty care, and more. Their products are handmade and crafted by their family of herbalists, resulting in a quality you can’t buy in stores. They employ great research, time, love, and positive intent in all of their recipes, using only the highest quality of natural ingredients known to man.
Herbalist and photographer Brandon Scott who manages the business and who creates majority of the products, indicated that the family comes from a very long line of doctors, farmers, healers, and apothecary proprietors, which can be traced to the Scottish Highlands during the 11th century. For example, Grandma Lanning's great grandfather, Dr. JR Miller, had a Universal Magnetic Balm before and during the time of the Civil War, which became a household medicine cabinet staple in the US. JR’s son Otis owned an apothecary and served as a country doctor until his dying day. In 1921, great-great grandpa Levi Wells built Wells hospital in Guernsey County and named it for his father, a country doctor who took Otis Miller as an apprentice joining the families.
To this day, four generations are actively involved in creating Woodland Herbal’s recipes, supported by a team of caring, talented and passionate people. While there is no legal certification to qualify a herbalist, family members have studied with instructor and author Rosemary Gladstar, earning a certificate from Sage Mountain for Science & Art of Herbalism, and they are members of the American Herbalists Guild, American Botanical Council, United Plant Savers, Herbalists Without Borders, Herb Society of America, and Coshocton Chamber of Commerce.
Woodland Herbal hand makes and designs every aspect of their products from scratch, drawing inspiration from the old ways while blending in their eagerness to learn the new. They create all their own recipes, design and print their labels, produce, and ship out from their workshop. They have over 80 unique products, ranging from organic loose leaf teas to medicinal topical salves and creams, as well as potent plant extracts known as tinctures that can be employed similarly to supplements. Their formulary provides natural remedies to aid sleep and dreaming, inflammation and pain relief, detox and wellness, low mood and anxiety, focus and memory, energy levels, immunity and more. Their most popular products include the Five Tea Special, Sleep & Serenity Care Package, Down the Rabbit Hole Tea and Moon Drops Tincture.
Woodland Herbal is always striving to learn and evolve their work to meet the demand of modern needs, while respecting the traditions of the generations who came before. Their drive is to offer those in need an alternative that is often gentler with little to no side effects, while educating the public about medicinal plants, endangered plant conservation, and responsible stewardship of the land. For every item sold, their team plants 100 wildflower seeds on an acre of previously deforested land to create a safe place to cater to our area’s beloved pollinators. In 2022 they funded the planting of over 4,373,600 Ohio wildflowers!
Their family of herbalists focuses on a community-based approach and had originally set up at the Coshocton Farmers Market in 2018. Since the pandemic, Woodland Herbal has moved from festivals and artisan markets to online orders via Etsy and their website. Through the Etsy store, customers from as remote as Greenland and as far as the tiny islands in the South Pacific have found them. Although they currently do not have plans to return to live events, Woodland Herbal is working hard to afford building upgrades to build a storefront, and in time, they will likely get back to setting up at festivals and artisan fairs, as well as community health-centered events and educational settings.
Brandon Elijah Scott & Jennifer Parsons
Brandon is a wanderer and world traveler, an author and artist, a herbalist as well as a photographer, thinker, designer, nature lover, and seeker of truth and wisdom. Jenni is a life long herbalist who is a book obsessed, nature lover, who follows the old ways, and who lives and loves by wit, wisdom, and community.