Page 63 - Panama City Living Magazine

More people are finding their way back to nature when facing ailments and challenges in life. The phenomenal hype surrounding CBD has conquered common conscious minds, and, as a sideeffect, is opening paths and awareness for other alternative medicines that might offer cures and solutions for a healthy and
balanced lifestyle.
Long before the hype, Panama City Beach resident Chandra Hartman pioneered the idea of growing and offering herbal remedies in Panama City Beach. In 2013, together with husband Eric Marcus, Chandra opened Wild. Root. Coffee and Apothecary, a storefront that corresponds with her lifelong interest in natural medicines.
Visitors to Wild. Root. can learn about herbs and their benefits and buy remedies and other homegrown or handcrafted products while indulging in aromatic specialty coffees. Proprietor Chandra’s authentic and fundamental knowledge speaks of her lifelong passion for and interest in plants and their benefits to humans.
Chandra’s career started out in a much different field and brought her to Northwest Florida when she accepted a position as an architectural designer in Walton County after completing her studies in Arizona.
Asked about how she made the leap from the corporate world, she simply confirms that it is truly her personal experience and passion that drives her to learn and share as much as possible about natural remedies. “I’ve always had the spirit of a Renaissance woman,” Chandra says. “In my early 20s, I went to a local Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner for a lifelong illness. I had profound results and that fueled my interest in natural health even more.” She explains that she started “playing around” with growing her own food, permaculture, wildcrafting, foraging, making fermented food, and making plant medicine.
In 2007, she went back to school, earning her second bachelor’s degree in sustainable community development in an effort to combine her passion with her chosen career as architectural designer. “I felt a strong pull to help bring the natural and built environment together,” she explains. But the downturn in the market and the oil spill altered her and husband Eric’s lives. She decided to open Wild. Root. and share her passion.
“There isn’t any nationally recognized certification to become an herbalist, but there are several really good schools that provide training to help someone go from being a family herbalist, to a community herbalist, to a clinical herbalist,” she says. After studying at the East West School of Planetary Herbology in Santa Cruz, CA, a school that, according to Chandra, covers a broad range of herbal topics with focus on using herbs from all over the world in a Traditional Chinese Medicine framework, she enrolled in an advanced program, the Hsin Fa School of Herbal and Energetic Medicine.
Chandra is in the process of finalizing her advanced studies and is looking back on six years of successfully operating two Wild. Root. store locations. We caught up with her and asked her to share her experiences.
www.PanamaCityLiving.com • March—April 2020 • 63