About Us

Dirt Gems is a collaboration between Anne Louise Burdett and Chelsea Iris Granger, and was started in the summer of 2019.
The Dirt Gems is about plant magick. We have created these cards to serve as tools for you to connect with your plant allies. We hope this deck will help you to connect with the energetics of the ecologies around you and around the world. The cards are divided into four suits to highlight the patterns from which the plants are emerging and what message they may hold for you, individually, and as an interconnected spread. The suits are based on the elements, weather systems, ecologies, energetics and alchemy. Each plant is classified in its corresponding suit based on its habitat, personality, relationship to other non human beings, and/or how they may interface with people. Let these cards be a starting point for your own relationships to form, get to know them the same way you would a new friend.
Around the world there is a forlorn feeling of impending doom and generalized sense of widespread grief. The creators of this deck believe that this grief wells from the loss of connection between humans and nature, and even the idea that we are somehow separate from nature itself. Humans have a unique and expansive talent for abstraction, rationale, and ingenuity. This can be magnificent, but it has also led our species to set itself further and further apart from the rest of life on earth. There is so much noise in the human world it has become deafening. One of the most fundamentally important and precious things we can offer, to one another and the world at large, is focused attention. To listen. This project was created to serve as a tool to tune into the quieter voices around us, those that long for us, as we do them. Our planet is in a beautiful web of interconnection, and we as humans have detached from this in many ways. These cards and their plant counterparts invite you to come back to yourself and this sense of connection to the world around you and inside of you. These Dirt Gems invite you to remember that all life is generative and supportive of life. To remember that you are part of everything, made of everything, completely whole, that you are enough.

Anne Louise Burdett
Anne Louise Burdett is a medicinal herb farmer, sex educator, clinical herbalist with special training in sexual health and trauma, and a dancer. She runs TOCA, a sexual health plant medicine business, ZELL, an herbal clinic and school (if you are interested in learning more about plants or making an appointment for a consultation, please get in touch!), and writes curriculum and trainings for LETS!, Liberatory Education Tools. She is also a performer in The Royal Frog Ballet (with Chelsea). She is wildly in love with the ocean and is committed to working in marine conservation and environmentalism. Anne Louise has been cultivating her relationship with plants for 20+ years, and believes wholeheartedly in being true to oneself, acting from authentic desire, and in individual wellness being essentially and always tied to collective wellness.
Zell Herbal Clinic & Apothecary
@tocabotanica | @zellandthewhale
Chelsea Granger
You can find more of Chelsea’s projects and collaborations for sale in her Etsy shop
@chelseairisgranger
photo credit to Alexandra Difiglia