About Erin

The first sanctuary I found was in nature, under the azalea bushes of my childhood home in suburban Philadelphia. Life abounded there, but was restrained by tiny chain link fences that parceled up incredibly fertile land into ever shrinking patches of private green. The doors to the wild, untamed world flew open when my parents enrolled me in a summer camp called Farm & Wilderness in the Green Mountains of Vermont when I was twelve. Needless to say, that was a life changing summer and I begged to go back every year. The suburbs no longer suited my wilding adolescent soul, and once I was uncaged, I could never quite fit myself back into those confined, refined spaces.

Luckily the world continued to reveal itself to me. I was guided to a Quaker farm school in New England where I had not only a large range to roam, but my first official lessons in Ethnobotany and Horticulture, as well as Conflict Resolution and Anthropology. I journeyed to Guatemala as an Ethnobotany intern, and something deep in me simultaneously awoke and broke. The world reveled itself to me in it’s raw beauty and utter vulnerability. I became more enraged by the injustices I witnessed, and was driven to go deeper into the most primal of places, into the ground.

Formal higher education would only be tolerable if I could travel the world and work in the Earth, so I chose a school called Friends World College, within which I traveled to farms from North Carolina to Nicaragua to Northern India to California, apprenticing myself to the land and the wisdom of the farmers that tend it while getting college credit. After witnessing systemic injustices entangling land and people across the planet, my eyes were opened to the importance of food sovereignty and environmental justice as the foundation for all my work. After many years of seeing the reality and struggle that so many face when simply trying to tend the ground, I was determined to find a way to feed the world and free the Earth. I sought out the best formal farmer’s education I could find and studied at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UCSC.

After a decade of nomadic farming and living out of a backpack, I was planted in the High Desert of Northern New Mexico and began my twenty five year apprenticeship to this enchanted and humbling place. This arid valley I call home has taught me to listen, tend, and gather medicine and nourishment from the Earth and sky.

I decided the greatest impact I could have was to work directly with young people, change makers of the future. I became an ecological educator in Santa Fe and my work over the years has included being the garden director/instructor at the Santa Fe Children’s Museum, Monte del Sol Charter School, and the Santa Fe Community College. I have also taught with Earth Care International, Santa Fe Botanical Gardens, and Home Grown New Mexico and been a consultant for private gardens.

Along with my husband, the permaculture practitioner Joel Glanzberg, and our three children, we have tended a growing home on 1/5 of an acre north of Santa Fe for 15 years. We are honored to tend a tiny plot in a fertile valley that has been providing food to it’s inhabitants for thousands of years, and do our best to feed it in return.

Along the way, my roots have deepened, and my sense of what “gardening” means has become expansive, to simply cultivating care and connection for life. This work of tending my family and land lead me to receive teacher training with Lifeways North America in Waldorf Early Childhood pedagogy and teach preschool at the Santa Fe Waldorf School and run the Parent and Child Program. My work is to support the spirit of the family which is the beginning and foundation for all growth internal and external. Now the work of tending the self, the land and the community ripples out in many forms through classes, council and coaching growers and tender of all kinds.

My current vocation is to create grounding practices for tending the land, self, family, and community, so that we may all become rooted, rising, and whole together. This year I completed a training in Tending Grief with Francis Weller in 2024 and am currently enrolled in the Eco Psychology Certificate Course at Pacifica University, both of which are deepening my capacity to have and hold deeper understanding, relationships to the land, ourselves and each other.

I help people to cultivate and grow relationships, practices and skills that meet their own needs and the needs in alignment with what the Earth needs. This manifests in my work as a consultant, coach, counselor and community member. It is a great honor to share my seeds of wisdom along with practical and spiritual skills that help others grow and bloom. There are many ways to work with me through my classes, council and camps. Wander around this web (site) and I hope you find something we can share.