Meet Alexa Hapgood | Owner & Founder of Roaming Roots LLC- Ecological Garden Design & Foraged Botanical Art

We had the good fortune of connecting with Alexa Hapgood and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Alexa, what’s the most difficult decision you’ve ever had to make?
A decade ago, I found myself in my mid-twenties with a prosperous and relatively prestigious career in fine wine sales. The career ticked off the boxes of what our society would consider success, but unfortunately, and quite inconveniently it was leaving me progressively feeling more depressed and unfulfilled by the day. I felt a deep calling to get my hands on plants– to learn how to grow more of my own food, to learn more about gardening to support wildlife, and to create sustainable and beautiful art in partnership with nature which could both teach and inspire others.

I have a professional degree in Fine Art and have always had a deep love of nature. I was fortunate to grow up surrounded by wild, untamed nature, with a mother who deeply supported and encouraged the curiosity and wonder that both my brother and I had for the natural world. I spent my childhood largely in the undeveloped woods just beyond our backyard in Ohio– hunting for tadpoles and frogs by the creek with my brother, identifying caterpillars munching on specific plants in our garden and raising them into butterflies, observing orb spiders weaving webs and gorging themselves on moths and insects on our back porch. These were all things which I took absolutely for granted as normal and commonplace until I somehow found myself in my late twenties living in a suburb outside of Denver, an ecological wasteland of mowed turf-grass and ornamental landscaping plants from Asia which supported exactly zero local wildlife. I deeply longing for wild plants and the insects, butterflies, birds, and bees that I had grown up with.

Around that time of feeling lost and depressed, I picked up a book called, “Bringing Nature Home” by east-coast entomologist, Dr. Doug Tallamy. This book immediately put words and scientific research to what I was noticing and feeling in the neighborhood in which I lived. The book is both an alarm bell of the ecological collapse that is currently at our doorstep and an encouraging and hopeful call-to-action for the immense opportunity that we have right now, right where we are, to make a difference in our own backyards. His newer book, “Nature’s Best Hope” is even more encouraging and inspring.

I didn’t think I could afford the time or expense of going back to college for a new fancy degree, but I knew I could become self-trained and taught by just choosing wisely where, and with who, to spend my time and energy with. Before leaving my wine job, I started volunteering one morning a week at the Denver Botanic Gardens with one of their ecologically-trained horticulturists, I also enrolled in a Permaculture Design Course, and signed up for the CSU Colorado Master Gardener training program.

I started spending my spare time reading every book I could find on ecologial horticulture, and Colorado native plants. I saved up all the money I could over the next year from my wine sales career and put in my notice. In the summer of 2020, I joined a strictly-organic, all-ladies garden care company in Boulder and have been continuing to explore, experiment, design gardens, and find my footing in this world of native plants and edible and sustainable gardens ever since. It was a very hard decision to leave my career in wine sales, and one that a lot of my family and friends didn’t quite understand, but it was definitely the right one.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I have a small business called Roaming Roots. Through this business, I offer a handful of ecological garden consultation and designs each year. I also make seasonally-guided, natural art to adorn homes, offices, businesses, and empty winter planter boxes. Other than occasionally using cotton string, wire, or glue —my materials are sustainably foraged, or sustainably cultivated entirely from local plant materials and natural objects — dried forbs and grasses, seed-heads, pinecones, beautiful branches, rocks, the annual pruning off of grapevine and berry vines.

I was classically trained in painting and drawing and design, but I seldom use paints on canvas anymore. I love that I can create this botanically foraged 3-d art in a way that is zero-waste and low carbon footprint on the planet while also exalting the wonder and perfect beauty that is right there in front of us in the natural world.

I also teach a handful of hands-on, nature-inspired craft making classes each year to others through my business, Roaming Roots LLC– both at our farm, Jack’s Solar Garden, and seasonally at the Little Herbal Apothecary in Layfayette and other local pop-up venues.

I personally use my sustainable foraging time as a type of personal therapy and meditation. When I am looking for plants and natural objects to collect, I am forced to slow down to the frequency of plants and nature and to pay deep attention to the world around me in a way that our hunter and gather ancestors knew deeply and intimately. I find it incredibly calming to my nervous system and sadly something that we often aren’t able to do much of in our fast-paced, screen-heavy, tech-heavy, modern world.

I like teaching others about this type of meditation, because I think many people and children in our current economic system are starved for a connection to nature and also of tangibly creating something with their own-two hands.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
If I was showing a dear friend around the Front Range for a day, I would start the day by cooking them up a local breakfast at our farm with fresh eggs from our sweet chickens and organic veggies from our garden. We’d sip herbal tea that I dried and blended from my medicinal herb garden. I would then offer to take them on a native plant tour of sorts– first to the High Plains Environmental Center in Loveland or maybe to the Denver Botanic Gardens. We might stop into Moxie Bakery for lunch or hit up a casual local Mexican spot, like Blue Corn tacos in Longmont.

We’d then spend the afternoon wandering around my 23-acre farm, foraging our acre of edible perennial habitat for elderberries, blackberries, raspberries or asparagus, hunting for signs of wildlife, collecting whatever we find that excites or interests us. We’d spend some time with our friendly flock of sheep, or being entertained by our chickens giving themselves dust paths and hunting for grasshoppers around our farm. We’d sip on homemade shrub mocktails and tend to my medicinal herb garden together, slowing our pace and thoughts to the natural world. We’d watch the sunset over the rockies from a bench under the shade of our giant cottonwood trees in our East pasture.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I am grateful to my partner, Byron Kominek, who continues to encourage and push me to be brave, to take risks, and put myself out there and to keep making-connections and hard choices that will help me keep growing and learning.

I am grateful to all of my garden business mentors and colleagues, many of which have become close friends—Shelly Bouchet, Avery Ellis of United Ecology, all the folks I met through Harlequin’s Sustainable Gardens in Boulder, many folks affiliated with COOL Boulder, Wild Ones, and the People Pollinator Action Network. The truth is the sustainable gardening world is full of encouraging, loving, and helpful people.

I am grateful to Catherine Hunziker, founder of Wish Garden Herbs for consulting and providing mentorship on our Medicinal Herb Garden at Jack’s Solar Garden. I am grateful to both Faith at Little Herbal Apothecary in Layfayette and Amber at Rebecca’s Herbal Apothecary in Boulder for buying organic, local medicinal herbs from my small farm for their small local businesses, for allowing me a place to teach botanical wreath-making classes, and for supporting all of my botanical offerings from our small farm.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roamingrootsgarden

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/roamingrootsgarden