Meet Your Teacher

Meet Toni, the teacher behind The New Old School.

She came up through libraries, gardens, kitchens, midwives and hand-written notebooks, not through a wellness brand. The school is what she has been quietly compiling since 1985, finally organized and finally teachable.

Meet Your Teacher

Forty years of paying attention — and writing it all down.

Toni didn't come up through a glossy wellness brand or a TikTok feed. She came up through libraries, gardens, kitchens, midwives, hand-written notebooks, and hundreds of people who didn't know where else to turn. The school is everything she's been quietly compiling since 1985 — finally organized, finally teachable.

Toni's Working Shelf
  • A working herbal garden.
  • An apothecary cabinet.
  • Biofeedback hardware.
  • The honest answer when she doesn't know — and where she'd go to find it.
Shelves of tinctures, herbal oils, salves, and supplements — the apothecary cabinet, stocked.
The apothecary cabinet isn't a figure of speech.

The teaching that almost didn't happen.

For decades, Toni shared her knowledge with one person at a time — over coffee, over the phone, in living rooms and kitchens. Then, at the beginning of 2020, things changed. Many people started seeking a more affordable way of self-care. Customers of Fragrance of Heaven would come in for a candle, just to find themselves sitting down and chatting about health and doing things the "old school" way. The key would be applying those proven old school ways to today. And so The New Old School was born.

Toni on her feet mid-presentation, taking a question from the room.
On her feet, taking questions. Same as always.
No fluff, no filler Texas-based · Online globally

Old school, but not stuck in it.

The "old school" half is the wisdom that worked for generations before us: herbalism, traditional kitchens, quiet observation. The "modern day" half is what we now have access to: better instruments, better testing, better information, and tools like biofeedback scanning that let you see what your body has been trying to tell you. Toni teaches both halves, in plain English.

40+
Years researching
350+
Students taught
4
Curriculum pillars
Toni's garden — marigolds in bloom, raised beds, a squash hanging from the trellis at sunset.
The working garden, 2025 season.
Rows of hay-bale garden beds under homemade trellis frames in a backyard.
Hay-bale beds, one of the old school growing methods Toni teaches.