Ancient Chinese Herbs in Northern California

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Using various organic methods, the inn's gardens produce beautiful vegetables and cut flowers in addition to the Chinese medicinal herbs.

Jessica Curl Rose’s was no run-of-the-mill childhood. Instead of playing in the ’burbs, Jessica grew up in the redwood forests of the Mendocino coast, just north of San Francisco. While many kids her age were spending hours watching cartoons, Jessica stayed by her mother’s side as she worked outdoors in the garden and combed the redwood forests and meadows looking for healing plants. 

It’s no surprise then that when Jessica went away to college on the East Coast, she took her love of plants with her. As an undergrad at Bard College in New York, Jessica studied medical anthropology. She then pursued a graduate degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine, a major that combines acupuncture with Chinese herbal medicine.

Today, back in Mendocino, Jessica and her herbalist husband, Ken Rose, have established a thriving Traditional Chinese Medical practice at the Stanford Inn, just south of Mendocino. Their patients are members of the local community and guests at the inn, which is rapidly becoming a healing destination.  

The Stanford Inn and the Roses’ clinic occupy an exceptional piece of land at the mouth of Big River, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As coincidence would have it, the location is the very spot where nearly 200 years earlier, Chinese workers who fueled the logging and railroad industries of the area lived and planted the medicinal herbs they had brought with them from China.

“You can still see surviving trees from the orchard planted back then,” Jessica says. “Our presence at the inn feels more and more like the continuation of an ongoing thread of cultural confluence.”

Meeting over Medicine

Ken began serious training in Taijiquan (tai chi chuan) in 1970 and, because in China good martial arts teachers are also adept at Traditional Chinese Medicine, he also began to study “bone medicine,” a discipline that could most readily be likened to sports medicine in the West. Additionally, he spent all of the 1990s and early 2000s studying and practicing in southwestern China and Beijing.

When he came to lecture at a conference in San Diego, he met Jessica, who was attending the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in San Francisco and tending the school’s small medicinal herb garden. Ken expressed his interest in learning to grow medicinal herbs and Jessica had a good source for seeds.  

The two married eventually, spent a year in China studying the cultivation of medicinal herbs, then returned to live and plant herbs in Jessica’s old Mendocino stomping grounds. They planted a small herb garden at home, but were also aware of the spectacular organic herb, flower and vegetable gardens at the Stanford Inn. They also knew of the growing reputation of Joan and Jeff Stanford, owners of the inn, as leaders in developing ecologically sound gardening strategies. The inn was (and still is) a training center for Ecology Action, an organization that trains people in intensive biodynamic farming methods, then sends them to developing countries to teach the locals how to grow vegetables under challenging conditions with limited space.