Deepa Natarajan
Deepa Preeti Natarajan works at the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley where, since 2006, she’s had the opportunity to transform her love of plants into a year round offering of public educational programs, exhibits, and events, inspired by the beautiful and complex relationship between plants and people. In 2018 she completed the University of Kent’s MSc in ethnobotany, her dissertation focusing on urban ethnobotany and ritual plant use in the Hindu Indian community residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s deemed 2019 the “Year of Ethnobotany” at the UC Botanical Garden and has created a series of workshops, classes, programs, lectures, symposia, exhibitions and events. She teaches on-going natural dye and chai workshops, and is currently co-teaching a 6 week Global Ethnobotany course with UC Berkeley Professor and Ethnobotanist Tom Carlson. She loves to garden and persists in growing tropical plants such as sugarcane, bananas, and cardamom in her Berkeley backyard.
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