A Season of Immersion

 

Enjoying black birch tea at the conclusion of our opening forest bath in the Milford Experimental Forest

I spent my spring and summer in the company of a small collective of plant enthusiasts, nature lovers, and aspiring herbalists. Six sweet souls joined me at the school for the Plant and Place Immersion, an herbal medicine program dedicated to cultivating kinship with the natural world. Beginning in early May and finishing at the end of August, we met two full days every four weeks and thread our time together with virtual sessions to keep connected and learning. Our classroom consisted of wildflower meadows, the protected Milford Experimental Forest, and nearby wooded trails. A tipi sheltered us from rain and bright summer sun. I was their guide, but the plants their true teachers and conduit for connection.

Journaling sensory interpretations with Yarrow

Learning botany and plant identification

Participants explored herbal medicine through five modules:

• Basic Botany and Plant ID
• Ethical and Wise Foraging Practices
• Cultivated Herbs for the Home Garden
• Tree ID, Ecology and Medicine
• Mushroom ID, Ecology, and Medicine

Sensory interpretation of both the plants and within our own bodies were a constant thread and provided participants with an understanding of how herbs can foster balance within the body, mind, and spirit. We monographed a variety of plants ensuring that each participant would complete the program with their own detailed materia medica, essentially a guide of the medicinal attributes of the plants we met, how to prepare and work with them for a variety of ailments.

 

Wild green cake topped with Garlic Mustard (recipe courtesy of Alan Bergo)

We cooked up wild green cakes from plants freshy harvested by participants - a blend of stinging nettle, violet leaves, cleavers, and garlic mustard - and sipped a spring tonic of chickweed and burdock root. Participants learned how to craft their own infusions and decoctions from herbs utilizing herbs they had harvested and dried themselves, as well as how to create mineral-rich vinegar extractions.

Sensory time with the plants - before monographing a plant, participants took solo time with the plant to document their sensory impressions.

Participants discovered the importance of fostering relationships with the plants that share our place and how integral these relationships are for working with plants medicinally. The natural world is all too easily perceived as a collection of resources, commodities available for the taking. The indigenous worldview perceives the natural world as a community of individuals, subjects rather than objects. There are plant people and tree people and rock people - this is not personification - but rather a recognition that these are sentient living beings with intrinsic value. Given this animacy we should behave as we ideally would in our human relationships, with respect, compassion, and reciprocity. They are after all our kin. May we foster relationships with the plants, work with them, rather than merely using them as a means to an end.

Making herbal salve infused with calendula, plantain, and chickweed

Labeling salve with all the important details

We crafted herbal infused salves from wild harvested and cultivated herbs and learned a myriad of ways in which these topical preparations can heal irritated tissue due to wounds, insect bites, and dry skin.

We crafted numerous tinctures and discussed the virtues of both folk tincturing and scientific measurement, working with dried herbs and fresh herbs. Participants particularly enjoyed harvesting fresh lemon balm from the garden and whipping this into a delicious and medicinal alcohol extract as well as learning the more complex double extraction of reishi mushroom.

A collection of preparations

Harvesting Lemon Balm in the garden

Straining tincture

Combining a water and alcohol extract for a mushroom double extraction

Guest teachers shared their insights and inspired participants to listen closely and offer gratitude, build soil, walk barefoot, and become acquainted with the many four-legged, winged, and fuzzy living beings with which we share our home. Lakota pipe carrier, Scott Weis shared stories with us his time with indigenous elders and led us in ceremony. We visited lifelong gardener Paul Cardillo at Earthman Farm and learned how to make compost to nurture a variety of plants. With Barefoot Ken, we padded around sans shoes, wriggled our toes with glee, and discovered how to sense place through our feet. Naturalist Emily Woodmansee taught us how to let curiosity lead the way, how to map birdsong, and walk with heightened awareness.

Naturalist Emily Woodmansee with treasures from the forest

Walking barefoot makes you smile

Gardener, Paul Cardillo at Earthman Farm

Homework included daily sit spot, sensory walks, and solo time identifying and researching herbaceous plants and trees to encourage participants to better get to know their personal places that they call home. These practices imbued them with a sense of belonging, rooting them to place in ways never before known. We shared our experiences through group shares and storytelling and learned from one another in community as our ancestors surely did. 

Participants Christina and Shelley holding herbal bundles - keepsakes from the land - and our mandala offered in gratitude to place

We finished our time together exploring the forests and fields that had nurtured our growth. We greeted now familiar plants and yet still met new plant, tree, and fungal people. A guided forest bath gave us time to reflect, give thanks to the land and one another, and contemplate where our paths might lead next. Participants finished with full hearts, a variety of preparations, a journal filled with observation and herbal monographs, and certificates recognizing their dedication to plants and place, a culmination of 120 hours of study in bioregional herbalism. 

I poured my heart and soul, sweat and labor, into this program all of which was fully reciprocated by the enthusiasm, wonder, and dedication these participants shared with me. I am already dreaming up next year's curriculum and looking forward to who might join me in the Plant and Place Immersion 2025. 

If you'd like to deepen your connection to the natural world of which you are a part, discover how to work with plants as food and medicine, and make herbalism a part of your everyday life, then reach out and secure your spot in the upcoming Immersion! To learn more about the program and other offerings from the School of Plant and Place Connection, visit: www.SchoolofPlantandPlaceConnection.com.