Kyle & Serena | Herbal Support For Mothers: The Journey of Fertility, Pregnancy, Birth & Beyond
Husband and wife super-duo Kyle Denton & Serena Marinelli join InnerVerse to talk about herbalism strategies for the stages of motherhood. Through their company, Tippecanoe Herbs, Kyle and Serena spread the sage wisdom of plant power and provide many products for life-enhancement. In the free hour, we discuss fertility, conception and pregnancy, and what herbal allies are equipped to nourish and relieve women through these exciting steps.
In the Plus+ Extension, we continue addressing various aspects of pregnancy, herbs for stimulating labor, the man's role in preparing and guiding the birth process, bringing consciousness to contractions, healing after baby comes, post-partum plants, enhancing breast milk production & nutrition, breaking generational trauma conditioning, and much more!
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In this episode
Core themes
The Botanical Power Couple Behind Tippecanoe Herbs
Chance introduces Kyle Denton, the returning guest he calls the show's court herbalist and fairy folk ambassador, alongside his wife Serena Marinelli in her first appearance. Together they run Tippecanoe Herbs, the Milwaukee shop that grew out of farmers market booths. Serena describes the division of labor with affection: Kyle is the Aquarius, the creative, the wizard, the druid who makes concoctions, while she is the Sagittarius who says let's make it real and gets a label on the bottle. Before they combined forces she was living in Italy and he was in Wisconsin. Their son Davide arrived after the shop, which they call their first born.
Fertility As A Conversation For Two
Serena opens the fertility discussion by pushing back on the assumption that conception is the woman's problem alone, saying it takes two and that the responsibility of creation should be shared. Kyle describes what he sees at the shop counter, where a woman approaches with a question while her partner waits on what they affectionately call the boyfriend couch, a little chair off in the corner. Kyle says the practice he likes to preserve is having that conversation with both partners present, and he contends that the man's own state of health is part of the picture, a turn in the conversation the boyfriend rarely expects.
Doctrine Of Signatures And Plant Lore
A large share of the episode is Kyle's interpretive method rather than any protocol. He reads plants through what he calls his astro herbal chart, assigning them to Venus, Mars, the Moon or Virgo, and pairing every Venusian softness with a Martian counterpart, because where there is a princess there is always a prince, the thorn and the bramble. He layers in the alchemical triad of salt, sulfur and mercury and the principles of three. He also detours into folklore, noting that Achillea takes its name from Achilles, taught by the centaur Chiron, and calling the old leaves of three warning a psyop against learning to identify poison ivy.
Grief, Identity And The Passage To Motherhood
The most personal stretch is Serena on what changes in a woman after loss or after birth. She frames the postpartum shift as a question of identity: you once were a maiden, now you are a mother, so you have lost what you were before, grieving a self you knew while meeting a newer self you do not know yet, becoming a stranger to yourself. The heartbeat, she says, is the rhythm of the present moment, an answer to a mind stuck in what if. In the outro Chance and his wife Jennifer speak about their own loss the previous year and how many women quietly wrote to her afterward.
The Father To Be, Flower Essences And Whole Plants
Chance asks what supports the man taking on the mantle of fatherhood, and Kyle answers with categories rather than prescriptions. He defines adaptogens as plants said to help every system adapt to stress, then spends time on Wisconsin's American ginseng industry near Wausau, which he describes as heavily pesticided and expensive, arguing for a trusted organic grower. He praises a flower essence called Truth Teller, labeled conviction, and describes what a man running a business pushes down instead of saying. Kyle also makes a craft case against essential oils, noting it takes forty roses to make a single drop, preferring whole plants in carrier oils.
Quotes
“By far the greatest homegrown resource that we've got, above and beyond what we can generate with our green thumb, is in our magical ability to make more people.”
“He has amazing ideas. He's the creative. He's the wizard. He is the druid.”
“Let's have this conversation with your partner present, because we have in our shop something that we affectionately call the boyfriend couch, which is this little chair that's off in the corner.”
“You once were a maiden, now you are a mother, so you have lost what you were before. You are grieving the part of yourself that you knew and you were familiar with.”
“This is why jingles are important to me, because I want them to be succinct, I want them to be funny but informative.”
“We carry the Y chromosome, and the most effective motivator for us to crush is for us to stay focused on our why. Why am I doing this?”
“I don't know if it was the herbs, if it was the nourishment, if it was all of the things, but that's the point, is that there's not a thing, it's a multitude of pieces.”
“So it's self care for yourself and for your growing baby. I feel like there's some energy transmission with your touch, for sure, and I feel like it's very important.”
“I learned this practice of biofield tuning from Chance and from Eileen McKusick, using tuning forks and combining them with herbs. That's been a real game changer as far as my clinical work has gone.”
“In the dream it was like the baby from the Incredibles that is invincible, and no matter what kind of thing happened there was no damage. Baby was impervious, still smiling and happy.”
Kyle Denton is a community herbalist and medicine maker from Wisconsin who founded Tippecanoe Herbs with his wife Serena Marinelli in 2015. From their Milwaukee apothecary they craft small batch remedies from locally harvested and organic herbs, working from a bio terrain philosophy that blends Ayurveda with Western herbalism. He also runs Root Radical Herbal Academy, has taught for over a decade through his annual three season class and his Milwaukee herb walks, and sees clients as the Tuning Herbalist, using tuning forks to read the biofield. His Substack and podcast, Resonature, explore the interval between vital herbalism, biofield tuning and cosmology.
See all Kyle episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
