Meet our Instructors
Leslie Lekos is the founder and director of Wildroot Botanicals herbal school and product line. She’s been teaching herbal medicine courses since 2009 and began marketing products in 2004. She is known in her region for distilling hydrosols and is sought nationally to teach at conferences and for herbal consultations. Her medicines have reached folks locally and internationally.
In addition to herbal work, she’s supported parents as a doula, childbirth educator and prenatal yoga instructor for almost 20 years. She is co-author of the book, Yoga for Pregnancy and is a certified Iyengar Yoga teacher. Most importantly she is the mother of two sons.
Leslie believes wholeheartedly that the plants themselves are the best teachers and strives to support her students to grow their own relationships with plants and cultivate space for people to align with their innate inner knowing and connection to health. She believes herbal medicine is the people’s medicine and that we all have a right to know how to care for ourselves and our communities. In addition to courses taught at Wildroot Botanicals, she teaches for several local tribal communities and youth outreach programs.
Leslie has studied extensively with respected herbalists from across the country including Dr. Aviva Romm, Rosalee de la Foret, 7Song, jim mcdonald, Rosemary Gladstar, Matthew Wood, Dr. Tiffany Freeman, Thomas Easley, Margi Flint, Sam Coffman, Michael Tierra, Cathy Skipper, Dr. Florian Birkmayer, Sean Donahue, Yarrow and Angela Willard, Michael Pilarski and more. She has a B.A. from Fairhaven College, WWU in Holistic Health: Herbal Medicine and Somatics.
Leah Grupp-Williams came to Wildroot Botanicals as a student in the Foundations of Herbalism course and more recently in the Wild Foods Connections course. She started developing her interest in growing herbs and perennials in 2015 while serving as an intern at a farm incubator program. She has held roles in organic farm education and management and was previously the co-owner of a small farm focused on production of vegetables and medicinal herbs. She is a lifelong appreciator of the plants of Western Washington and lives in Skagit County where she gardens on a ¼ acre. She works as a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and is currently focused on finding more ways to bring plants, nature, and movement into her practice.