Conservation Researcher
Christiaan is a conservation researcher and herb gardener specializing in the conservation and cultivation of medicinal plants featured in the Chinese materia medica. He did his undergraduate degree in the Global Resource Systems program at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he studied ethnobotany and the cultivation of Asian medicinal plants, and he will start his Master's program in Botany at UBC in January 2024. Christiaan is as passionate about promoting plant medicine as he is protecting wild populations of medicinal plants, and he is interested in exploring opportunities for dialogue between different fields that could lead to interdisciplinary collaboration. To these ends, Christiaan has started two learning gardens for traditional Chinese medicinal herbs in Vancouver which he is helping to steward in a group setting, writes a gardening column for the Canadian-based Traditional Chinese Medicine magazine 'Medicinal Roots', and leads workshops on medicinal plants in horticulture. He is currently working on a research project at UBC creating a database platform for traditional Chinese medicinal herbs in Canadian botanical gardens.