About Lorie
Lorie Middendorf has been a licensed medical massage therapist and has practiced massage therapy for 20 year. She is also a licensed esthetician and a reflexologist. Throughout the years she has worked at garden centers, plant nurseries, herb shops, health insurance companies, salons, health spas, doctors’ offices and organic farms. Lorie has been growing and landscaping with herbs, vegetables, cottage garden plants, culinary, indigenous and medicine herbs for over 30 years.
Lorie Middendorf’s medicinal herbal and plant passion started when she was 16 years old roaming, riding and hiking the Mountains of Northern York County, Pennsylvania. She learned by taking her plant indentation books out into the woods and fields to get to know the plants in every season of the year. She read old books on herbal healing and made infusions, oils, liniments and syrups that the authors referenced. Her favorite books from that time and still are Medicines from the Earth by Richard Evans Schultes, The Herb Book by John Lust and Jethro Kloss’s Back to Eden. There were no medicinal herbal schools at that time, on line schools and U-tube videos were still 30 years from making an appearance. A person was lucky to find a class on using herbs or making potpourri. Authors didn’t make it easy, you had to carefully dig out what pearls of wisdom you could from the pages and do your own experimenting with formularies.
Since then Lorie Middendorf has completed the Homestead Herbal Foundation Program with Susan Hess and has had many Medicinal Herbal teacher over the years. She considers David Winston AHG her first formal teacher. She has also studied with Danial Gagnon, Dr Tieraoni Low Dog, Rosemary Gladstar and many more. Lorie Middendorf is also very thankful to her friends at the Rosemary House and Gardens for all their help, friendship and inspiration over the years.