About Wayside Botanicals

Wayside Botanicals was founded in 2017 by the owner and operator, Reisha Beck. It sprang from humble beginnings on rented land, with minimal financial resources, and a whole lot of passion. It is still mainly run by Reisha herself, but with the amazing amount of support from her family and friends, and the hard work of the ever-increasing volunteers and apprentices, Wayside is flourishing and growing.

In 2020 Wayside joined forces with Ravens Roots Naturalist School. We now share a growing space and campus together, as well as conduct many of our educational workshops within Waysides medicinal herb gardens. In collaboration with Raven’s Roots, we created 7 Layers Nursery. We offer both live plants and seeds, focused on hard-to-find medicinal herbs and perennial vegetables. We host monthly plants sales with farm tours and free plant walks, for more information check out our nursery page.

 Wayside Founder: Reisha Beck

Founder and Operator, Reisha Beck, has a background in organic farming, permaculture design, Pacific Northwest ethnobotany, and bioregional herbalism. She started Wayside Botanicals as a single mom, living on a shoestring budget and a desire to contribute to her community in a healthy and positive way. After years of hard work and dedication, she now supplies fresh and dried medicinal herbs to tincture making companies and apothecaries across the USA. Reisha is also a core instructor of the Ethnobotany and Growing Herbalist Immersion courses and the lead herbalist instructor at Ravens Roots Naturalist School. In addition to the immersion courses, she also teaches short courses on medicinal mushrooms, mushroom cultivation, herbal medicine making, permaculture gardening and more. Born in the mountains of Colorado and raised in Western Washington, she spent most of her childhood outside and unsupervised in the forest. Her love of nature and plants has taken her down a path of healing by connecting with the natural world and cultivating deep relationships with the plants she harvests and grows. She loves to open the door to the plant world to others, as her mentors have done for her. She is a mother, herbalist and deeply committed to creating positive change through permaculture and connection with the Earth. You can find her in the herb garden or wild harvesting in the Cascades with her family.