Erica Skadsen
MSc Ethnobotany from University of Kent, UK (2019)
BS Biology (Botany emphasis) and Anthropology minor from Portland State University (2015)
BA Industrial Arts (Graphic Design and Printing emphasis) and
BA Broadcast Communication Arts (Audio Production emphasis) from San Francisco State University
I am a long-time small business owner and more than 25-year resident of the Native lands currently known as Portland, Oregon. I am a botanist and yard plant consultant specializing in local native and introduced species. My research interests include native and potentially hazardous plants and how they are used in the Cascadian bioregion of the Pacific Northwest and Borneo, traditional body arts and adornment, and plant identification. I conducted ethnobotanical fieldwork in 2019 in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo.
Beyond my credentials, I am a plant nerd.
I enjoy hiking, reading, making jewelry out of natural materials, and growing native, edible, medicinal, and otherwise useful plants in my low/no budget garden. I am most familiar with native Northwest vascular land plants west of the Cascade mountains, common poisonous or sensitizing plants, edible species, and plants considered 'invasive' or 'weeds.'
I love thinking about, being among, growing, propagating, consuming, increasing, decreasing, researching, and learning more about plants. I am enthusiastic and may get excited and talk fast (feel free to ask me to slow down!). I yearn to learn and teach which plants we can safely interact with and how. I am an unabashed plant toucher - and sniffer! I smell them and feel their texture and listen to them creek at night in the wind. I wear them and sleep in their frames and put them on and through my skin, into my lungs, and through my digestive tract. Don't you?
Plants warm us and cool us and give us comfort and sometimes make us itch or sneeze. They live inside and outside and are a part of our houses, but they also live in our traditions and histories, our presents and futures, our hearts and songs and minds. Who is doing all these things? These plants all have identities and names and are not just objects. Let's find out who they are, then you can start to consider what they are doing there, what their role is, and what your own role and relationship is with these plants.
This can be as simple as wanting to remove all non-native, invasive plants often called 'weeds' from your yard, while increasing the local, edible, medicinal plants, and otherwise useful plants - but not yet knowing which is which. Or it can be an in-depth inquiry into how they got there - to your yard, and there - to this current continent. What attributes do they have, and how may they benefit or decrease the health of your yard, animals and other plants, fungi and microbes, yourself, and the environment as a whole.
We will have but a short time together, so our narrow focus will be limited to identifying and naming plants. Consider what you will do with that knowledge, and how that will change and strengthen your relationship with the plants around you.
I am also interested in food, health, and housing security and disparities, food sovereignty, and native and heirloom plants. I do a lot of community outreach and mutual aid with our local houseless neighbors distributing meals, water, supplies, and resource information, building trust and community. I am very active distributing food among the PDX Free Fridge network, and produce a map of free food resources around inner N/NE Portland.
For now, it's just me!
In the future, I may team up with and mentor local youth aspiring to work with plants, and other people who will be able to remove the invasive plants we have identified from your yard if desired.
My Role
I want to be a catalyst to help folks see and notice plants (decrease "plant blindness"), to get to know them, to discover what they're telling us about the land and ourselves, to form and maintain a relationship with plants, and to learn how to care for them and ourselves.
My visit is not a bounded moment, the intention is to spark an open-ended curiosity about the plants around us. I am not going to give you all the answers, and I will give you more to look up on your own after I leave. This is not homework, but lines of inquiry you can follow. I hope to give you a few ideas and add to your skillset of ways to go about increasing your knowledge. I want to help pique your curiosity and spark your continued journey into botanical and ecological knowledge and appreciation.
Cascadian Botany
P.O. Box 17656
Portland, OR 97217-0656
USA
Call/text/WhatsApp:
(503) 240-0260
11am to 6pm Pacific Time
Monday through Sunday cascadianbotany (at) gmail.com
