Videos & Interviews

Uncommon Scents: The Movie

This is a professional documentary about aromatherapy and focuses on the key issues and potential of using essential oils. Essential oils have become wildly popular over the last few years but they are often very mis-understood and are also heavily marketed at the general public. This film is currently in post-production and features interviews with renowned world leaders in research and use of essential oils in clinical aromatherapy e.g. Robert Tisserand, Jeanne Rose, Ann Harman, Cathy Skipper, Jade Shutes etc.

I was honoured to be interviewed speaking about the importance of valuing the plants that oils come from, as well as key ecological issues in essential oil production e.g. sustainability and organics. The crew filmed a medicinal herb and wild food foraging walk that I took in 2016 at the Botanica conference in Sussex, UK. Uncommon Scents is intended for release in theaters. It is cinematic: rich in scope, visuals, and sound with high production value. Watch the trailer below to get a glimpse of the topics and issues that are included in this film.

Watch the Trailer Below

The first ever  introductory video to my online course (from April 2015).

And two video lessons from my online course showing:

1. How to make herbal tinctures 

  2. How to make St John’s Wort infused oil

The first video in this new series showing the plants and processes that produce natural skincare and aromatherapy ingredients such as fixed oils, herbal infused oils, essential oils, aromatic waters & hydrosols e.g. rose water etc. They usually aren’t what people think they are! Some of them can be inexpensively and easily made at home, while others require specialist equipment, good weather and are usually much more cost-effective and practical to buy from professional producers.

The first video is available to view now and I will film more in 2020.

Video 1. No you haven’t just made your own rosehip seed oil!

Giving a lecture on Using Herbs in Natural Skincare for the annual conference of Formula Botanica, an award-winning on-line professional organic skincare school. From 2017.

A guided medicinal herb and wild food walk and cookery demo for National Heritage Week, Ireland, 2017.

Re-Birthing the Hawthorn

County Clare, Ireland.

A creative video documentary by Lena Hughes and Ana Colomer

Kindly funded by the Clare Arts Office, Creative Ireland, and the Ennis Street Arts Festival, highlighting all the wonderful aspects of the Whitethorn – the stories of lore – association with fairies and its rag tree connotations, its herbal, botanical and gastronomical uses, its place in agriculture plus the amazing biodiversity found within this tree. 

I was interviewed for a local film about the traditions surrounding the Hawthorn tree here in County Clare, Ireland. As well as the hawthorn being a valuable source of food and medicine it is also greatly revered, respected and sometimes feared in local folklore. Many traditions persist here even in this modern age. This short film by local artists Lena Hughes and Ana Colomer, interviewed local people about the hawthorn in terms of its significance in folklore, as wild food, as medicine and as vital part of the habitat for wildlife. For those of you from outside of Ireland be warned: this film contains some strong accents (not least my own!) which you might find hard to tune in to at first but if you are genuinely interested in this then it’s well worth persevering with to hear the various interviewees wax lyrical about a tree that clearly has major significance in their lives.

Giving a demo on how to make your own herbal medicines for the Rude Health natural health show at the RDS, Dublin, 2012.

As well as running this podcast Helen is the author of this book

‘YOUR HOLISTIC BUSINESS RECIPE’.

It’s very practical and helpful. I highly recommend it.