What spheres go well with Life?
Edit: I'm also not finding any information on flaws, how do they work?
Life, Matter and Forces are the pattern spheres. This generally means that they're heavy on Paradox (although that's not a rule), unless you find a way to make effects coincidental. With that in mind, you could take another ephemeral sphere, like mind, entropy or correspondence.
Actually, do your character sheet last - first work on a backstory and find a suitable paradigm. Since you've chosen to be a verbena (classic druid/pagan style willworkers - herbs, potions, etc), it won't be that difficult!
//edit: You've got 15 character points (freebies) to work with at character creation. There are Merits and Flaws, which are actually permanent or semi-permanent advantages/disadvantages of your character. For instance, you may have a character that is exceptionally huge and walks with a limp. If you get a flaw, you raise the pool of freebies that you can spend on your character by the amount listed (for instance, vengeful is a 2 point flaw, so if you select it you get 17 freebies to spend). Merits work exactly the opposite, i.e. they subtract their points from your freebie total.
You've got a limit of 7 points of flaws, so the maximum you're going to get is 22 freebie points. There is no maximum limit on merits (aside from the 22 points).
You can find Merits/Flaws close to the last pages of Mage: the Ascension.