Author Spotlight: Deborah Dolen

Author Deborah Dolen is the busy author of 29 books. Her work all seems to share a common thread of working with natural ingredients, such as honey, beeswax to make lip balm, bee pollen to make healing salves, and easy-to-grow flowers that are fun to cut and arrange for the home.

For example, Deborah has written about edible flower petals, and she offers tips for making great salads and wowing your guests with sprinkles of bright orange marigold petals and violet impatiens petals. Deborah helps inspire me to garden with her writing about the ways that flowers are meant to do many things. In designing a garden, I like Deborah's advice to choose some plants designed just for making fresh cut floral designs to bring in the home, plus a selection of herbs for making skin care products and medicinal syrups. Beyond putting flower petals in salads, you can also make floral petal extracts for skin care. Deborah Dolen covers all of these--and more--concepts in her books.

If you have even the slightest interest in beekeeping, you may well find that after reading Deborah's book, The Beekeeper's Digest, you'll really want to be a beekeeper and raise honey bees.

Beekeeping has become more and more popular for backyard gardeners. As Deborah writes in The Beekeeper's Digest, honey bees make so many byproducts it is amazing! And you don't have to be a beekeeper to make natural products using things made by the bees. For instance, you can buy bee pollen from a local beekeeper and make "bee pollen oil" by just soaking the bee pollen in macadamia nut oil. Deborah writes that macadamia nut and jojoba oil is most closest to our own skin chemistry, so she uses these two oils for making almost all body care recipes, including lip products, cleansing creams, and even soap. In fact, it was from Deborah Dolen I learned soap is basically oil. Back to bee pollen oil, you simply soak bee pollen in macadamia nut oil for a week, and you'll find that you suddenly have a beautiful orange oil packed with micronutrients and very healing for the skin. Deborah says marigold petals are also dynamic to infuse if you'd like because marigold oil, also known as Calendula oil, is great for anti-inflammatory purposes and circulation. She highly recommends it for people with edema.

Another interesting point in The Beekeeper's Digest is that the source of the hive is very important. The more remotely the honey and byproducts are produced from a major city pollution the better. There are a lot of interesting beekeeping facts in Deborah's book, and she has a wealth of recipes for products like lip balms and soothing creams. You'll never think about beeswax the same way again!

Aromatherapy is another topic dear to the heart of Deborah Dolen. Her work on the topic helps you understand essential oils and what they are known to do, which is a good topic to research if you want to make your own skin care products. Aromatherapy Basics is Deborah's book designed to help you tlearn how nature and botanicals work. &

Many botanicals are natural healers, and essential oils from them can go into a lip balm type recipe and become a healing "salve." One of Deborah's recipes along this line is for a lavender super-healing burn butter. Another example is her bruise balm using blue chamomile. The book helps you create essential oil blends for specific results. It can be a helpful guide if you want to make your own bath bombs and bath salts, as described in two other of her books, The Self Apothecary and The Bathroom Chemist. These books offer a ton of bath and body products to give as gifts for Christmas or other holidays. The cost is very low compared to buying finished body care products, and you can trust the high quality of products you make yourself.

In addition to making bath and body products for the coming holiday season, Deborah Dolen shares a lot of recipes for food items that make great gifts in her Kitchen Arts Collection. This book contains a selection of dry dip mix recipes and loads of "gifts in a mason jar" recipes. For a sample recipe, check out Deborah's .org site: http://www.deborahdolen.org/.

Are You Looking for a Florist in Vancouver BC?

If you live in or are visiting the Vancouver, BC area, you might be looking for a Vancouver florist. Flowers on 1st is a local flower and gift shop based in Kitsilano on the west side of Vancouver.

The shop offers daily flower deliveries to all areas including the downtown business core, Vancouver General Hospital and other local hospitals, and the cruise ship terminal for cruises going to Alaska. If you have friends departing on a cruise from Vancouver, imagine the fun of surprising them with flowers and/or a gift basket. There are lots of options for gifts, including Belgian chocolates, fruit baskets, champagne, balloons, and wine and cheese.

If you need a birthday surprise, you can order birthday cakes as well as flowers. There are a variety of floral arrangements available for Mother's Day flowers, too.

Flowers on 1st is a great option if you're looking to order roses from a florist in Vancouver. They have a wide variety of colors of long-stemmed roses, such as red, yellow, white, pink, and purple. They do simple bouquets and elaborate arrangements--basically, everything you could want!

Above all, they are a small local company which values quality and customer service.

Meet Victoria Neblik, Author, Photographer, and Lecturer

Dr. Victoria Neblik is a freelance writer, botanical photographer, and former Oxford University research biologist. She is currently involved in a number of writing projects and has periodic public speaking engagements on wildlife topics. Her books include Where Flowers Bloom.

Victoria trained at the Universities of London and Oxford and subsequently spent six years as a post-doctoral research biologist and research fellow. Her scientific work has taken her to 19 countries and across 4 continents. Today, she writes for various magazines and works as a public speaker and visiting university lecturer.

The photo below is (c) Victoria Neblik, 2014, all rights reserved.

1. When you were a student and researcher, what first drew you to studying the sciences?

I have been interested in wildlife and living things for as long as I can remember. As a child I used to be wildly enthusiastic about planting seeds and growing things; I also remember being very interested in my mother's medical textbooks (she worked as a hospital nurse). In many subjects, books for adults seem to become much more dense--devoid of pictures--and generally much less appealing than those for children. In science, though, books are often full of pictures and diagrams and that captured my attention early on.

In Britain, we tend to specialise much earlier in our education than in the US, so by the time I was at University I had long since made the decision to study science. As a student, I did a degree in microbiology because liked the idea of unraveling how diseases and germs function. Later on, I applied for various doctoral studentships in the microbiology, but many of them seemed uninspiring. Spending three years studying one tiny part of one virus seemed insignificant, somehow. So at that point I began to move towards zoology: studying many animals at a time, rather than one disease.

2. As a photographer and author, what do you see as the connections between your visual art and your written work?

I take pictures of plants and wildlife and I write about both. Really, I think these are just two different ways to look at the same subject. Actually, a lot of the writing I do is for magazines, so I am working in a very visual medium much of the time.

Sometimes you get a great story and only a fairly mediocre image to go with it, and at other times you can get a fantastic studio shot with not a lot of effort and no tale to go with it; for me, the real magic comes when you get both--a visually exciting image and a great story behind it.

3. What inspired you to branch out into public speaking?

Public speaking is part of life as an academic, whether it is giving lectures to students or to school children who wish to study science or presenting a discovery at a scientific conference. So, I guess public speaking has long been part of my life. It is just that I talk to people from all walks of life, now, rather than only to academics. Writing and public speaking are both ways to present a view of the world or tell a story, though, so they have something in common. It's just that you get more immediate feedback in a public talk and interaction with the audience.

4. Would you tell us a bit about your experiences in the Middle East and topics for talks you've developed from your experiences?

Certainly! I have been very lucky in that I have been to see some amazing places and some great wildlife. The talks are really just an excuse for me to share some of that experience and the pictures I took. I remember being first inspired to visit the Middle East by a talk someone gave to my class when I was at school--so, talking in schools now is a bit like coming full circle.

I have spent quite a bit of time in Jerusalem and I used the city as a base for shorter trips to various wildlife sanctuaries and national parks. I felt that Jerusalem has a really powerful, ancient and authentic atmosphere to it: as if it is as old as time itself. It was quite a moving experience.

My first trip to the region was to see Palestine Sunbirds, which are a little like hummingbirds. Once I arrived, though, one thing led to another and I moved on to see hoopoes and hyraxes, Syrian dragonflies and so on... Highlights of my last trip included seeing a giant black fire racer snake in the Golan Heights and a trip to the Alexander River to see the population of Nile Turtles they have there. The turtles, frankly, are fairly hideous looking things--enormous creatures with peculiar snouts and a face only a mother could love--but they have an interesting biology and a sort of primitive "gill"-type structure inside their throats. So I guess they're interesting, rather than endearing--but I thrive on that, you know? The weird and the wonderful! The Middle East has plenty of both, which is something I have tried very hard to capture in my talks.

5. For aspiring writers who would like to focus on topics related to nature and travel, what are some tips you would offer based on what you've learned in your own work?

I think different things work for different people, but for me, keeping a diary or a notebook is important. Little details can add great appeal to almost any article and it is precisely these details that tend to be forgotten. Having a solid background in biology (in my case) or in geography or history, I think can also be a huge benefit for travel writing: that way you are writing from a position of strength--starting with what you know about a place and embellishing with local details and with your own experiences.

Thanks, Victoria!