Reflora & Co.

10/17/2026

There's still room for you in the Autumn Apothecary Workshop! Follow the vibrations of celtic song, inhale the aromatic vapors at the top of the stairs, enter the apothecary filled with dried herbs, honeys, and jars. Prepare yourself to examine, measure, and personalize your recipes to make & take home. Register at www.refloraandco.com/mercatura or call me at 203-271-1311 while before it fills up!

Reflora & Co.

10/08/2026

🍂🌿THE AUTUMN APOTHECARY IS OPEN!
Make & Take workshops are back!

Join for the Autumn Apothecary: Hands-On Winter Remedies, an intimate workshop limited to just 8 participants.

We’ll gather around four working apothecary stations to make an Aromatic Chest Rub, Herbal Sinus Steam, Mullein Lung Infusion and Elderberry Syrup preparation—measuring, blending, stirring, straining and pouring along the way.

You’ll leave with generous take-home amounts of all four preparations, plus recipe cards and instructions so you can make them again at home.

Saturday, October 24 | 10 AM–12 PM
$55 | Only 8 seats

Registration is now open on the website www.refloraandco.com
enter the MERCATURA → APOTHECARY WORKSHOPS to reserve your seat. 🍂🌿 Come stock your winter apothecary with me.

09/29/2026

Week of 9/28-patient visits will be telemed or off-site due to bulding repair issues.
Please contact me with your preference.

09/28/2026

Keeping the season going...starts & seeds...herbs & greens...soon to plant garlic...winter sowing in the distance...and today I give a nod and a wink to Persephone...she doesn't have to leave for winter after all.

09/27/2026

Tonights Dinner: Cast Iron Stuffed Delicata with Lemon Pepper Chicken and Baked Stuffed Apples to provide immune support for the fall and winter months ahead.

Lemon-Pepper Chicken:
Marinade: Slice chicken into thin cutlets and toss generously in a bowl with olive oil, coarse sea salt, 1 tablespoon of cracked black pepper, and fresh lemon zest.
Set Aside: Let the chicken marinate at room temperature while you prepare the pesto and bean filling.
Cook: Do not wipe out the cast-iron skillet after the squash. Sear the chicken over medium-high heat for 3–4 minutes per side. Turn off the heat and immediately deglaze with the juice of half a lemon. Plate: Slice the chicken into strips and layer them directly over the warm bean filling in the center of your serving platter.

Stuffed Baked Apples:
Prep & Score: Core 2 whole Granny Smith apples and use a paring knife to score a thin line around the equator of the skin to prevent bursting.
Mount & Stuff: Slide the apples onto the central posts of your ceramic baking dishes. Tightly pack the cavity with your mixture of homemade granola, raisins, brown sugar, and cinnamon.
Top & Splash: Top the granola with a small pat of butter. Pour 1 tablespoon of water or apple juice into the bottom bowl of each ceramic dish to prevent scorching.
Bake: Loosely tent with aluminum foil to protect the granola, slide into a cold oven, and turn the heat to 350°F (175°C). Bake for 35–45 minutes until fork-tender, removing the foil for the last 10 minutes to crisp the top.

Mise en Place and Chef Prep:
Set out all your equipment, measuring spoons and cups.
Toast walnuts, set aside to cool.
Wash apples, prepare the stuffing, set aside 2 pats of butter and 2 T. water.
Rinse & drain beans, set aside.
Wash squash, cut into rings, deseed, set aside.
Wash, pat, and chop herbs.
Smash 3 garlic cloves.
Measure out ingredients.
1. Marinate the chicken.
2. Get the apples in the oven since they take the longest.
3. Make the pesto.
4. Prepare the cannellini stuffing to near completion.
5. Plate the delicata rings with their stuffing on platter.
6. Cook the chicken.
7. Set aside the baked apples to cool while eating, then have for dessert with a sprinkle of cinnamon, drizzle of maple syrup, or maybe some whipped cream!

09/21/2026

09/19/2026

The doors are open.

What began as a collection of ideas has slowly grown into a place of its own.

Reflora & Co. now has a home.

Inside are the worlds of Medicina, Litterae, and Mercatura, along with a few other places I've been creating along the way—the Doctor's Desk, the Renaissance Scroll, and the Reflora Haven.

Some rooms are already taking shape. Others are still waiting for what will eventually belong there. And I think that's exactly as it should be.

Please come in, wander around, open a few doors, and see what you find.

Welcome to the World of Reflora.

Reflora & Co.

09/17/2026

CELEBRATION OF ST. HILDEGARD

FROM LITTERAE
Knowledge Given Voice

THE RENAISSANCE SCROLLS: ST. HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
A Renaissance Woman Before the Renaissance

Come into the courtyard. Today, we unroll the Scroll for Hildegard of Bingen.

Long before there was a Renaissance, there was Hildegard.

Abbess. Writer. Composer. Healer. Naturalist. Visionary.

We would eventually invent a phrase for someone whose curiosity refused to remain confined to a single discipline. We would call her a Renaissance woman.

Hildegard of Bingen lived three centuries too early for the name.

Born in Germany in 1098, Hildegard entered religious life as a child and would eventually become an abbess, found two communities of women, write works of theology, medicine and the natural world, compose sacred music, correspond with popes and political leaders, and travel to preach publicly—an extraordinary undertaking for a woman of the twelfth century.

Her work did not fit neatly into one room.
Neither, apparently, did her mind.

She observed the natural world. She wrote about plants and healing. She recorded extraordinary visions. She composed music. She wrote poetry and theology. She counseled powerful people and challenged them when she believed it necessary.

And something about Hildegard feels remarkably familiar here.

Perhaps because she seems to walk straight through the five principles of Reflora’s Visual Manifesto.

WINGS OF IMAGINATION

Hildegard experienced a vivid interior world of visions and images and spent decades attempting to understand and record what she perceived. She imagined relationships among humanity, nature, the body, the spirit and the larger created world.

MIRROR OF TRUTH

She observed.
Plants. Illness. The natural world. Human nature.

She gathered what she encountered, considered it, recorded it and placed it beside what she already understood. For Hildegard, curiosity was not something to be confined to a single subject. It was a way of encountering the world.

SWORD OF FORTITUDE

And then she spoke.

She wrote to popes, bishops, rulers and ordinary people. She traveled and preached publicly. She founded communities and defended the authority to carry out the work she believed she had been given.

For a woman living in the twelfth century, simply possessing such a voice would have been remarkable.

Using it was an act of fortitude.

Here at Reflora, we have another way of expressing that idea:
The Feather Pen is the Sword.

LYRICAL ARTS

Hildegard composed.

Music and poetry were not decorative additions to her intellectual life. They belonged within it. Words, music, image, nature, medicine and spiritual understanding existed alongside one another.

She apparently saw little reason to separate them.
And perhaps that is why she seems so at home here.

PASSAGE OF TIME

Hildegard died on September 17, 1179.

More than eight centuries have passed. Her music is still sung. Her writings are still read. Her observations are still studied and debated. Her name still travels through gardens, libraries, churches, apothecaries and classrooms.

And in 2012, she was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, one of only a small number of women to hold that distinction.

There is a small figure of Hildegard on the wall beside my desk.

Beneath her is a description that begins:
“Hildegard of Bingen, Patron of Gardeners, Musicians, and Women Physicians.”

That combination alone might explain why she found a home at Reflora.

But I think there is something more.

Hildegard reminds us that medicine, nature, literature, music, art, spiritual life and the work of the hands were not always asked to live in separate rooms.

She lived among all of them.
Imagination. Truth. Fortitude. The Lyrical Arts. The Passage of Time.

A Renaissance woman before the Renaissance.

And a rather extraordinary woman with whom to unroll our first Scroll.

Some threads are not lost to time. They simply wait for another hand to pick them up.

The Scroll is rolled again.

But Hildegard’s thread will remain with us a little longer.

There is still the garden. The apothecary. The teacup. And the work of the hands.

We will follow it.

REFLORA & CO.
Medicina · Litterae · Mercatura
© 2026 Reflora & Co., LLC

09/13/2026

FROM LITTERAE
Knowledge Given Voice

THE RENAISSANCE SCROLLS

There are many ways to enter the World of Reflora.
Today, we make our way into the courtyard.

There are stories waiting here. Lives worth remembering. Old ideas worth reconsidering. Writers, artists, naturalists, healers, and wonderfully curious minds whose work has traveled across centuries to find us again.

This is where we will gather to read The Renaissance Scrolls.

And the first Scroll bears the name of a woman who seems almost destined to enter the World of Reflora.

St. Hildegard of Bingen.
Abbess. Writer. Composer. Healer. Naturalist. Visionary.

Her feast day is September 17.
On that day, we will unroll her Scroll.
And what a story it holds.
Come back to the courtyard.

REFLORA & CO.
Medicina · Litterae · Mercatura
© 2026 Reflora & Co., LLC

09/07/2026

THE WORLD OF REFLORA

There was a time when medicine, literature, nature, art and the useful things of everyday life were not considered separate pursuits.

The physician knew her plants.
The gardener kept an almanac.
The kitchen had its remedies.
Letters were written by hand.
Books were kept within reach.
Beautiful things were expected to be useful—and useful things were permitted to be beautiful.

Much of that knowledge remains.

It waits in old books and botanical texts, in gardens and kitchens, in remedies and recipes, in traditions and in the accumulated experience of those who came before us.

But knowledge was never meant merely to be preserved.
It was meant to be lived.

To meet the experience of the present.
To be questioned when necessary.
Tested against what we know.
Practiced and understood anew.
And carried forward when it still has something to teach us.

This is where Reflora begins.

Not by attempting to return to another time, but by bringing what is worth knowing from the past into conversation with the life we are living right now.

And from that conversation, things begin to take form.

A botanical encountered in an old text becomes the subject of new inquiry.
A forgotten preparation finds its way back to the worktable.
A field observation becomes a page of writing.
A remedy becomes a teaching.
An idea becomes something that can be held in the hand.

Knowledge is not merely preserved here. It is given life—and form.

Welcome to The World of Reflora.

It is gathered into three divisions:
MEDICINA · LITTERAE · MERCATURA

MEDICINA — Knowledge put into practice.

The study and practice of natural medicine, where traditional knowledge, modern understanding, careful observation and lived experience meet.

LITTERAE — Knowledge given voice.

The written and lyrical world of Reflora—literature, field guides, essays, history, art, education and the preservation of ideas worth carrying forward.

MERCATURA — Knowledge given form.

The useful and beautiful things that emerge from this world—botanicals, preparations, provisions, remedies, objects and things made by hand and chosen with purpose.

Three divisions.
But never three separate worlds.

A botanical may begin in Medicina.
Its history may become Litterae.
Its preparation may find its way into Mercatura.

Follow one thread long enough and you will often find it woven through all three.
That is the tapestry of Reflora.

And woven throughout are the principles of our Visual Manifesto:
Wings of Imagination · Mirror of Truth · Sword of Fortitude · Lyrical Arts · Passage of Time
To Imagine · Seek · Endure · Create · Honor.

There are old books here, but this is not a museum.
There are old ways here, but nostalgia is not the point.

We look backward when there is something worth retrieving—and forward when there is something worth discovering.

Sometimes we seek the thread.
And sometimes, the thread finds us.

The doors are open.
Welcome to the World of Reflora.

The website is currently under construction. More to come soon!...