New Student Learning Garden & Outdoor Classroom at Sunrise Waldorf School, Duncan, BC
Dr. Jasmine Rose Oberste, DACM, joined the Lilium Board of Directors in November of 2023. Jasmine has so many talents and skills and is a wonderful practitioner/educator/grower. We wanted to share more about her and her work - enjoy!
By Denise Cusack & Jasmine Rose Oberste
Jasmine, thank you for sharing with us all. I would like to first ask you to share a little about how you came to join Lilium as a member and presenter.
Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you. I’ve appreciated Lilium Initiative's work for a number of years and with recent vacancies on the board I was invited to join. I had stepped back from clinical work and teaching when my daughter was born and in recent years been focusing more on community-based permaculture work and I was feeling ready to reconnect with the Chinese medicine community. Lilium Initiative bridges my love of Chinese herbs and of restorative agriculture.
Can you tell us a little about your experience - your education, background, and practice or teaching focus, and where you are located?
I studied at the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, graduating with a masters in 2004 and finished their doctoral completion program in 2021. While I was in private practice in the Bay Area, I taught the comprehensive exam review course for first and second year students at ACTCM, as well as a “Demystifying Chinese Herbal Medicine” for the general public. I later taught Chinese Herbal Formulas in Oakland at ACCHS and created a non-profit project, the Chinese Herb Garden with the mission of “promoting the sustainable use of Asian medicinal flora.” This project is a combination of photography of live Chinese herbs, researching and writing about issues related to sustainable practices, and in most years, creating a calendar of photography of East Asian herbs in the garden (my own garden or various botanical gardens around the world).
In 2018, when the UN’s special climate report came out, I shifted my focus to learning and practicing permaculture, focused on food sovereignty and access, youth and reconciliation through community-based restorative agriculture.
I was born in and spent most of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in 2015 moved to Vancouver Island in British Columbia.
What drew you to Asian Medicine and what specialty areas have you been drawn to?
I entered the field of Chinese medicine through a relationship with a taiji teacher who inspired me to understand cosmology and physiology more deeply. At the time, my grandmother was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer and I saw how Chinese medicine supported her through her treatment and healing.
You are also a grower and permaculture designer - can you tell us a little more about that?
Having a young child and looking at the impact humans have had (and continue to have) on destruction of the environment, inspired me to want to support youth in connecting in a meaningful way with the earth through learning to grow food and restore native ecosystems. I used the local Waldorf school’s seven acre campus as my first design project, and I led the creation of a large new student garden where there had been dumpsters, invasive blackberry, and scotch broom and the edge of a gravel parking lot. It was an amazing process to be a part of leading many parent volunteers and seeking grants and donations to create fertile soil where there had been parking. See above our photo of the outdoor classroom surrounding a stained glass mosaic in the center of the new student garden.
Concurrently, there was a local movement to protect the forests on the mountains surrounding the Cowichan Valley. Through this work I met my good friend who I’ve now co-taught with, Qwiyahwultuhw. When I first heard him speak at a city council meeting about the forests, he talked about how when the forest is cut down, even if they replant the trees, the medicine plants don’t always come back or the habitat for animals, birds and insects. I knew he was a kindred spirit in recognizing the interdependence of all life and wanting to care for it.
We have co-created a number of projects of different scales, the largest of which has been bringing middle school students from the local Waldorf school on a series of field trips to help create a community garden and orchard on the Cowichan Tribes Reserve (the local Native American Reservation, as it would be referred to in the United States). We are on our third year and it has been a beautiful and meaningful project. We hope to create more of such gardens.
As an educator, what would you share with students as a key element of Asian medicine that is most relevant and crucial in our world today?
One of the beautiful and unique aspects of East Asian herbal medicine is the emphasis on relationships between herbs and synchronistic combined effects. Very seldomly is an herb used alone - they are almost always used in combinations to enhance each other or to balance out potential negative effects. I appreciate the view of seeing how the parts work together and trusting that there is something synergistically more powerful than the individual components.
What herbs do you use most in your own home?
Most commonly we use Chinese soup herbs - some are woody like Astragalus, huáng qí 黄芪) and are used to make broth and then strained out before adding other edible ingredients; while others such as lotus seeds (lián zǐ 莲子) and mountain yam (shān yào 山药) are left in and can be eaten as part of the soup.
Goji flower and berries (gǒu qǐ zi 枸杞子) at the school garden.
What is your favorite plant to integrate into your regenerative growing spaces?
I love including berries of all kinds into regenerative growing spaces - they can often be propagated easily from cuttings; they work in a food forest contest as understories between trees or ground cover (strawberries); they are antioxidant-rich and nutrient-dense; and are often costly to purchase organic and generously abundant in the garden. Berries we’ve planted in the past couple years include wild woodland strawberries and everbearing Alpine strawberries, goji berries (gǒu qǐ zi 枸杞子), saskatoon, black raspberry, a number of raspberries with everbearing heritage favourite, many varieties of blueberries, and currants.
Is there anything you would like to share that I did not ask about?
I am also a potter, and have recently created an online shop, The Tea Garden, with organic Chinesee soup mixes and my hand-made pottery. I plan to expand it to include Chinese herbal teas and some organic oolong teas soon as well.
You can see my online shop here: www.theteagarden.com
And read more and link to some videos about the school and community garden projects I’ve designed and helped create here: www.threetreasuresinstitute.com/garden-projects
And I’m on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/drjasmineintegrative/
Dr. Jasmine, thank you so much for taking the time to chat and share more about yourself and your work with the members of Lilium.