Tampico woman creates a healing community

TAMPICO — The health industry will tell you their remedies are grounded in research. Carol Camper will tell you her remedies are, well … just grounded.

For her, our health should be something that comes naturally. She’d rather see people turn to plants than pills when they can, and she’s doing her part to help teach people how to build relationships with plants.

Camper owns Avalon Unity Garden, a 100-by-150-foot patch of land located just outside her Tampico home that’s open to visitors by appointment — but this isn’t your gramma’s garden: no neatly hoed rows of tomatoes and carrots and corn here. The five-year-old garden is a carefully crafted maze of plants and fruit trees, a gathering place for people to relax, meditate, and learn nature’s ways. It’s here that she offers classes on a host of plant-based topics — medicinal mints, flowers as food, plant identification, herbs for pets, and more — along with offering a place where people can gather for supportive ceremonies and events.

Growing up gardening with her father in Sterling, Camper has long been fascinated with Mother Earth’s offsprings and the health benefits they can offer, something that has fallen by the wayside in the past century as modern medicine has given us no shortage of concoctions and chemicals designed to cure what ails us. She’s constantly researching to get the most out of what plants have to offer, even ones people consider pesky, like dandelions and creeping Charlie. If it worked hundreds of years ago, it can work today, she said — it’s just a matter of learning.

That’s where Camper comes in.

“I feel like I’m that bridge between the past and the future,” she said. “People really are not taught. We haven’t been encouraged to eat healthy, to really look at ingredients, and we think that if it’s on the ground not to touch that. We’ve been conditioned to instant gratification and ‘I want it now.’ I come from a generation where Dad would pull a radish out of the ground, wipe the dirt off on his pants and eat the radish.

“Times have really changed.”

Camper considers the top four most nutritious herbs to be, in order, stinging nettle, lamb’s quarter, purslane and dandelion; each can be found in the garden. Stinging nettle, Camper said, “is the most nutritious herb that people can consume; it is like a multi vitamin that’s loaded with all kinds of minerals. In the body, it works with every organ.” That, along with dandelions, are rich in vitamins A and C and are popular ingredients in teas.

Lamb’s quarter, which is high in iron, and purslane also have health benefits and can be incorporated into our diets.

“Lamb’s quarter tastes good, and I really like it,” Camper said. “It’s high in iron, and it can be used as a green. For example, if you’re making tacos, it can be a lettuce substitute. I like to take purslane, dehydrate it, and make it into a cracker. That way, when you’re snacking, you’re eating something that’s healthy for you that can clear any issues from normal grain like glyphosate, that can bother people’s stomachs.”

Want to know more? Camper invites you to enroll in one of her classes where she shares information she’s learned from conferences she attends and deep dives into books and other credible publications that she takes in order to learn more about what grows in the ground and the role it plays in our health. Classes on medicinal mints (such as creeping Charlie), edible weeds, and flowers as food are offered, as well as those on plant identification and what herbs are good for dogs.

Amaranth is a unique plant that has healthy effects for young women who are going through their menstrual cycle, Camper said; and while it can be a challenging time in their lives, Camper inspires them to embrace it. She can host puberty rites of passage ceremonies in the garden, to help girls understand that their transition into womanhood is a blessing and not a curse, she said.

Another ceremony Camper hosts is one for women entering their crone years — typically in their late 50s or early 60s — which celebrates the wisdom that the years have given them and helps instill confidence in them as they age.

“These rites of passage ceremonies, when you say that you are honoring a menstrual cycle, it changes the energy,” Camper said. “Right now we have a society that invalidates our young people and invalidates our old people. You’re honoring the intuitive messages you get. That is going to change that pain to enlightenment or power. It helps her go out and say that they can face the world.”

The garden’s embrace offers an oasis of serenity that welcomes people to step in and step back from the hustle and bustle. The space can be rented for special ceremonies, private women’s circles, meditation, yoga classes and more. Camper even welcomes campers, renting the space to overnight RV’ers.

Camper has also dressed up the garden with decorative pieces, incorporating recycled materials, including a trampoline frame used to create a large moon decorated with crystals, and a steel water pot hanging in a planting areas with inspirational messages on it. The garden also helps put the “art” in “earth,” with its an 18-foot-long piece called “Mother Earth,” sculpted from soil and covered in plants, and a dome-shaped Womb Room, a covered in-ground room.

At one corner of the garden is a circular area surrounded by a couple dozen willow trees, that, when fully grown, will come together in a shelter of leaves and branches to create an area where people can gather and relax.

“People who have addiction issues or anxiety or high stress issues have come out and have said that the best part about it is that it’s peaceful,” Camper said. “It’s quiet. The things that seem to grab their attention aren’t here. We have yoga mats and coloring books for the kids and they can just come sit in the garden and focus and let everything disappear. It’s a place that people are going to be able to gain the benefits of the plants.”

Feeding people, nourishing the air, keeping stuff out of the scrap pile, solar power, biodiversity, helping pollinators … they’re all roles the garden plays on the her own little corner of the world’s stage — important parts that help people connect with the planet and its plants. Those weeds we complain about can actually be greens that we snack on; it just all comes down to learning their benefits.

“When we find how valuable it is, it’s a game changer,” Camper said. “These plants are connecting you back to the food, the history, the connections that we once had with it.”

Avalon Unity Garden is located at 107 South Lincoln St. in Tampico, and is open by appointment. Find it on YouTube, go to avalonunitygarden.com, email carolcamper444@gmail.com or call or text 815-718-3331 for more information.