Dear Reader,
The goal of Lesvos Plant Medicine Conference Center Library is to create a pay-wall free digital library on the subject of Plant Medicine along with a conference center as a meeting point for the study of Plant Medicine.
Lesvos Plant Medicine Conference Center Library was founded in Lesvos, Greece in 2015 with the purchase of olive grove farms near Vatera, Vrisa and Vasilika on the island of Lesvos. The olive tree groves are in three habitats – mountain grove, Aegean Sea grove and Vasilika river grove. The groves are a mixture of wild and domesticated olive trees of various varieties.
Olive oil is a plant medicine and a primary carrier for other plant medicines.
Dr. Barry Steele is an early Lesvos Plant Medicine collaborator – presently multi-tasking as web designer and web master for this site.
The late Dr. Allyson Carlyle from The University of Washington School of Information Science was an early collaborator on the digital library and remains a primary inspiration. The pay-wall free aspect of the library was of constant discussion/debate.
Lesvos, Greece is known to readers of Homer and, more importantly, as the birthplace and work space of the poet Sappho, circa 620 BCE, born in Eresos, Lesvos.
Philosophy, narrative and poetry are a part of living with plants. What stories are the trees and plants telling us? Homer and Sappho bring the poetic quest to the table. Living with plants is a poetic quest. “Who are all these green neighbors anyway?”
https://www.uh.edu/~cldue/texts/sappho.html
Lesvos, Greece is also the birthplace of Theophrastus, the father of Western plant science and it is where Aristotle fled when he left Athens in 323 BC.
Aristrotle’s Lagoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN8ortM4M3o
As a student at the The University of Michigan I had many great teachers. Burt Harrison was the assistant to the chancellor at the U of M Dearborn campus and my teacher regarding plants. Burt Harrison understood and lived permaculture as a master gardener. Burt inspired the concept of having a cabin one could retreat to for a year, to live in nature and witness the season’s change. (Burt studied ancient Greek and introduced me to Isidoros Kioleoglou, founder of The Ionic Center on the Greek island of Chios.)
The LPMCCL Cabin is a rudimentary space where one can satisfy Burt Harrison’s ideal of living with plants in an olive grove overlooking the Aegean Sea. The name of the cabin is Solitude. Rather than a one year period, at the moment, Solitude is available for living in “one of the four” unique seasons of the year – Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall — in an olive grove overlooking the Aegean.
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To support salaries for plant medicine librarians, LPMCCL introduced Lesvos Plant Medicine Conference Center Library Medical Cannabis Chocolates to the legal medical cannabis market dispensaries in Michigan, August 25, 2018. Primary benefactor of space and advice was Ben Horner from The Michigan Medical Marijuana Report.
The cacao plant medicine used for LPMCCL medical cannabis chocolate was sourced from Barbara Wilson at Mindo Chocolates based in both Mindo, Ecuador and Dexter, Michigan. The cannabis plant material was sourced by Ben Horner and made into Rick Simpson Oil via alcohol extraction by Jerome Poynton.
The cannabis into chocolate infusion was my own process with technical guidance from the late David Floreani of Savage Brothers in Chicago and presently Javier Sanchez (based in Texas) also of Savage Brothers, founded in 1854.
Jerome Poynton
June 29, 2023
Punta del Este, Uruguay