Susannah Shmurak

In 2002, Susannah Shmurak and her husband became homeowners by rescuing a hundred-year-old house scheduled for demolition and moving it to an empty lot in a small Minnesota town. She has been turning that lot into an edible landscape ever since.

She came to this work by an unusual route. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at St. Olaf College — including a course called Eco-logic: Consumption and Its Consequences — and left academic teaching in 2015 to write full time about health and the environment.

Since then she has founded and run HealthyGreenSavvy.com, published Everything Elderberry with Skyhorse in 2020, and written for Sierra, Ensia, Northern Gardener, Mother Earth Living, and The Upside. She writes a weekly Substack, Garden & Forage, read by more than five thousand subscribers. She served on the City of Northfield's Environmental Quality Commission, a mayor-appointed municipal body.

Her subjects are foraging, growing food, medicinal plants, permaculture, and eco-friendly yard practice — and she is open about preferring whichever version of it takes the least effort.

A fifth of an acre, worked since 2002

The corner lot in Northfield, Minnesota — zone 4b — is planted with six kinds of berries as well as plums, grapes, apples, and rhubarb, plus raised beds of greens, squash, tomatoes, and ground cherries.

She is, by her own description, obsessive about energy conservation. Everything she grows has to survive a Minnesota winter.

Credentials and education

• PhD in English, 2006University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — dissertation: Constructing Urban Experience: American Realism, the Periodical Press, and the Late-Nineteenth-Century Cityscape
• Visiting Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary StudiesSt. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota
• Former member, Environmental Quality CommissionCity of Northfield, Minnesota

Books, journalism and speaking

• Everything Elderberry: How to Forage, Cultivate, and Cook with This Amazing Natural RemedySkyhorse Publishing, 8 September 2020 · ISBN 9781510754003
• “How to Put Your Yard to Work for the Climate”Sierra, Sierra Club · August 2016
• “Most Americans drink fluoridated water. Is that a good thing?”Ensia, University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment · November 2017
• “Paris is building the eco-community of the future”Ensia, 2018 — syndicated by Trellis and Resilience.org
• “Street Food: Is It Safe to Grow Food on the Boulevard?”Northern Gardener, Minnesota State Horticultural Society · Jan/Feb 2017
• Regular contributor to The Upside by Vitacost2018 to present
• “The City's ‘War with Nature’: Urban Parks in The House of Mirth and Sister Carrie”Nineteenth Century Studies, vol. 24, no. 1 (2010), pp. 123–140
• Minnesota State Horticultural Society speaker rosterEco-friendly yard practices · permaculture · growing natural remedies · foraging · edible landscaping