Understory Apothecary began in 2010, when Sean Croke was living with their then partner Rylee Uhrich in a small cabin in the middle of the woods. Sean had already been working with the abundant herbs growing around them for many years, making medicines and sharing them with their community to support health and wellbeing.
From there, they went on to study herbalism and wildcrafting with a range of teachers, gradually extending their harvest region across much of the Cascadian bioregion—from the rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula to the high deserts of southeastern Oregon. During this time, they began selling tinctures at local farmers markets and herbal conferences throughout the West Coast.
As the work grew, Sean also began supplying fresh wildcrafted and garden-grown herbs to medicine makers and herbalists across the country. They also served as the primary medicine maker for the now-defunct Olympia Free Herbal Clinic, where they worked as a practitioner.
All along, the focus has remained the same: learning new plants, meeting them in the wild and in gardens, and developing respectful cultivation practices that increase abundance rather than deplete wild populations.
Rylee has since moved on to new paths, and Sean now runs the work primarily on their own, with the steady support of their partner Thea Schnase and their child Juniper. The business is based on 25 acres of farmland in Littlerock, Washington, within Chehalis tribal territory.
Today, all herbs used in products are either cultivated on-site or wild-harvested by Sean and a small group of trusted collaborators, with a continued commitment to careful, ethical, and regenerative harvest practices
Our tinctures are the main products that we make, and we take a lot of pride in the quality of these precious medicines. All tinctures are made with freshly harvested plant material that is processed either immediately following harvest or after being carefully shade-dried if that is necessary to make the best quality tincture from that specific plant.
All tinctures are made using organic cane ethanol with traditional ratios and percentages in order to create a quality and reproducible product. Our tinctures are currently worked with by herbalists and naturopaths all across the country and even with a few international practitioners. We also, of course, ship tinctures to individuals who are not practitioners so that they can work with these beautiful plants for their own health.
We also create a limited amount of essential oils from locally abundant plants including Red Cedar (Thuja plicata), Lavender (Lavandula angustifolia), and Sitka Spruce (Picea sitchensis). We have been working with the distillers of Cascadia Terroir, a local essential oil distillery, for almost a decade now and have recently built our own essential oil still.
We do still provide fresh harvested herbs to some select clients although we have had to cut back to a certain extent to be able to continue to do our harvests with the same quality and care that we always have.
The main focus of this business and this project is to propagate the plants either out in the field or back in the home gardens and we are strict about not over-harvesting and actively working to expand the wild stands.
Sean also teaches these principles and practices through the Hawthorn School of Plant Medicine, and has a clinical practice in which they see clients on a sliding scale basis utilizing these same quality medicines.
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