Sarah Baldwin

Sarah Baldwin grew up in the wooded hills of southern Indiana and now lives near Bloomington, Indiana, in a handmade home built from cob and straw bale construction. In 2010 she interned at Herb Pharm, a commercial herbal products company, an experience she has described as opening her to plant based healing practice, and she went on to work in organic farming and gardening while developing her own line of natural wellness products. She writes on herbalism and natural wellness for publications including Plant Healer Magazine and The Herbarium, and keeps a personal blog, Moonflower Musings, covering the same subjects.

Her deck, the Herbal Healing Deck, illustrated with artist Ashley Verkamp, presents forty eight medicinal plants alongside symbolic and traditional meanings drawn from herbal folklore, positioning plants rather than tarot's traditional human and symbolic figures as the deck's central imagery. Baldwin received a Cosmic Sister grant, a program supporting women working in plant medicine, ethnobotany and psychedelic research, which funded a feature profile of her work. Herbalism itself spans a wide range of practice, from historically documented traditional plant use to claims of energetic or spiritual plant properties that fall outside pharmacological testing, and Baldwin's deck and writing present both registers, folk history and personal spiritual practice, without drawing a sharp line between them for readers.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Sarah Baldwin's Cosmic Sister recognition was more than a funded profile: the 2018 Plant Spirit Grant sent her to the Temple of the Way of Light in Peru for an ayahuasca retreat focused specifically on studying Amazonian medicinal plants, a destination and a plant tradition entirely outside the Indiana herbal apprenticeship and Oregon internship that shaped her earlier practice.

Her academic background sits underneath both halves of that career: a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Culture from Indiana University, a degree in neither botany nor herbal medicine specifically, preceded the Herb Pharm internship and the herbal writing career that followed, positioning The Herbal Healing Deck as the product of a communication and writing background applied to plant medicine rather than of formal botanical or ethnobotanical training.

Baldwin continues to write and teach on herbalism today, describing her own goal in terms distinct from typical author biography language: she says she aspires to become an ambassador for the plants themselves, a framing that treats her writing and teaching as advocacy on behalf of the plants rather than as personal career description, consistent with the same register her Peru journey and her deck both work in, treating medicinal plants as active partners in her work rather than as passive subject matter for her cards and writing to describe from the outside.