About Olearia Botanics
About Me
Hi there! I'm Gemma,
Plants came first.
Long before Olearia Botanics, there was a fascination with the plants growing around me.
I originally went to university thinking I would study animals, but somewhere along the way I was introduced to the world of plants and completely fell in love with it. I wanted to know what everything around me was — names, where they grew, why they grew there and how it was all connected to the surrounding landscape.
That curiosity led me through a four-year Bioscience degree and into six years working professionally as a botanist and ecologist, identifying native plant species and learning the intricacies of Australian ecosystems.
But my relationship with plants began to change when I started wondering not only what is this plant?, but how can I work with it?
From identifying plants to working with them
One of my first jobs outside university was on a bush crew, working in landscape management, biomass reduction and weed control. A large part of that work involved herbicide use — something I resisted from the beginning.
We were taught which plants belonged and which were considered weeds, but I became increasingly curious about the plants we were removing. I began discovering that many of these so-called weeds had long histories of medicinal use.
It opened up an entirely different way of looking at plants.
My scientific understanding of botany began to meet herbalism, plant medicine and eventually energetics, evolutionary herbalism, astroherbalism and spagyric processes. Rather than replacing one way of understanding plants with another, over time these different worlds began to weave together.
And that is very much how I work today.
Olearia began on the road
Olearia Botanics began when I left my work as a botanist and spent a year travelling in my van from Victoria to Far North Queensland.
I wanted to work with plants more directly — not only identifying them in the field, but understanding what I could actually create with the plants growing around me.
One of the first things I made was a simple herbal oil infused with three plants I knew well — cleavers, plantain and chickweed. Three common plants, often growing right beneath our feet, that I had begun learning about through a medicinal lens.
That oil became Stingless.
I travelled with it through Far North Queensland, gifting it to people who were being relentlessly bitten by mosquitoes and midges. The feedback was incredible. People started calling it liquid gold.
For me, though, something much bigger was happening. I was seeing the plants do what I had read they could do.
After years of identifying plants through a scientific lens, this was a different kind of understanding. I wasn't only learning their names, families and ecologies anymore — I was learning how I could work with them.
That experience deepened my curiosity enormously and pulled me further into herbalism and the medicinal world of plants. I became fascinated by the idea that so much of what we need can be growing around us, often unnoticed, and that learning to identify a plant can be the beginning of learning how to work with it.
Around the same time I began making a Rose Golden Face Oil. That little formulation travelled with me too, continuing to change as my knowledge grew, and eventually evolving into what is now the Kakadu Plum Golden Face Oil.
Somewhere along that journey, Olearia began to take shape.
Formulated from the plant up
Skincare wasn't something I had originally planned to pursue. It became a natural meeting point between so many things I cared about.
At the time, I was becoming increasingly conscious of what we were putting onto our skin and wanted to move away from mass-produced products and unnecessary ingredients. I wanted to explore skincare in a much simpler way — working directly with botanicals and understanding what they could offer the skin.
That curiosity eventually led me to complete a Diploma in Organic Skincare Formulation, adding the technical knowledge of cosmetic formulation to my background in botany and herbalism.
Australian native plants were always going to sit at the heart of Olearia. I had spent years learning to identify them and understand the ecologies they belonged to, and my fascination with discovering how we can work with the plants growing around us has never left.
In many ways, my formulation process still begins exactly there.
I start with the plant, not the trend.
I become interested in a species. I identify it, research it, learn its chemistry, history and traditional uses where that knowledge is appropriate to engage with, and explore how its constituents can best be extracted and formulated.
Sometimes that becomes skincare. Sometimes an infused oil, glycerite or herbal preparation. And sometimes it simply becomes another plant I know a little more intimately than I did before.
Where science and intuition meet
My relationship with plants now stretches across many different ways of knowing them.
I have worked with plants through botany and ecology, herbalism, evolutionary herbalism, formulation, permaculture & design to energetics, astroherbalism and spagyric and alchemical processes of plant medicines.
Some of those worlds are grounded firmly in science. Others ask for observation, intuition and a different kind of relationship with the plant.
I find value in exploring both.
Olearia Botanics has become the place where all of these threads meet — where I can continue learning from plants, formulate slowly and thoughtfully, and share some of that knowledge with the people who use what I create.
More than anything, I hope Olearia encourages a little curiosity.
To notice the plants growing around you. To wonder what they are. To learn their names. To understand the landscapes they belong to.
And perhaps, through something as everyday as caring for your skin, to feel a little more connected to them.