Heart of the Harvest: Exploring Cultivation and Wildcrafting in Herbal Practice Panel Discussion

Welcome everyone to our panel discussion, Heart of the Harvest: Exploring Cultivation and Wildcrafting in Herbal Practice. I'm your host, Lindsey Feldpausch, and I am so glad you are all here with us today as we dig into one of the most fundamental aspects of herbalism, how we source our plants.

Whether they're tending a cultivated garden or respectfully harvesting from the wild, every herbalist should recognize that the way we gather our herbs or the purchases that we place in commerce shapes not just the medicine we make, but our relationships with the plants themselves. Today, we will be exploring how cultivation and wildcrafting each offer gifts, challenges, and responsibilities, and how we can sustainably and accessibly harvest herbs. We have three wonderful guests joining us who each bring a depth of knowledge and personal experience from the gardens, the forests, and the plants themselves. Thank you all for being here.

I'd love to take a moment for each of you to introduce yourselves and share a bit about your background.

Thanks, Lindsey. Hello, herbies. My name is Heather Wood Buzzard, and I am a writer, a wildcrafter, an herbalist, and hang out here a lot in the Herbal Academy or The Herbarium—it's my favorite little corner of the Internet. I actually did a clinical herbalist training at the Appalachian Center for Natural Health with my mentor, the renowned fifth generation herbalist, Cherokee herbalist Phyllis Light. And I also have my master's in writing and narrative health care from Lenoir-Rhyne University. So narrative health care is my more abstract realm of herbalism, and wildcrafting and traditional folk herbalism really keeps me grounded. And I started out about 12 years ago as a wildcrafter. I was digging dandelions for dollars. And I am here today with a few more dollars and a little bit more wisdom. I live here in the Southern Appalachia temperate rainforest biome.

Wonderful. Hi, everyone. My name is Sarah Wu. I am living here in Costa Rica the last 16 years in Huetar territory in the low mountain range outside of San Jose in our Central Valley. I also live part-time in Le Marche in Italy, where I work with plants there as well, so temperate and tropical plants. I've been working with medicine plants since 2001. I've studied with a lot of different people. One of my absolute favorite teachers is actually Seven Song. We worked together for many years curating and organizing a pretty intensive herbal first aid training. I work as a community herbalist, as a clinical herbalist. I live off-grid, so a lot of herbal first aid. I'm also a permaculturist for about 16 years now and I've been teaching regenerative philosophy and strategy from community level to backyard level to even some larger projects and event-style permaculture design, which is really fun. I work with my garden. I also wildcraft a lot. I'm so happy to be here with you all. Thank you. You can also find me in The Herbarium. I'm a contributing writer and a teacher for various classes, as well as in some of the other ones in the Herbal Academy. I'm not even sure where I live in the Herbal Academy... Many places. ... ecosystem.

All right. Hello, everyone. My name is Logan. I'm a practicing clinical herbalist, born and raised in the forest of the Pacific Northwest, where I still reside today. So I'm a lifelong folk herbalist based out of Oregon. And a lot of my practice surrounds around doing clinical herbalism, maintaining my herb farm, and doing permaculture design, as well as doing a lot of education, which is why I'm here today on the wonderful Herbal Academy, where I've been making many herbal monographs and working on a new gardening course that I'm excited to launch with y'all. And yeah, I guess my whole practice just grew up wild foraging plants since I was a small child up into today. And I've worked in all aspects of the herbal industry, from starting as a lowly wildcrafter in the forests as a high schooler, all the way to working at Mountain Rose Herbs in Quality Control with our good pal, Steven Yeager, working different herb farms, working around clinical herbless, herbal products maker. So yeah, today I pretty much have my own company. It's based out of all the plants I grow and wild harvest myself. It's called Noti Botanica, that's N-O-T-I Botanica. And yeah, that's pretty much a little brief snapshot of my realm in the herbal world. So yeah, thanks for having us.

You guys, this is so exciting. You all have such incredible resumes and backgrounds, and I'm so excited to be learning from you today. So I'd like to start off by hearing from each of you. Do you tend towards working majority cultivating herbs or are you more of a wild harvester in your plant work?

Thank you so much for the question. I'm a little bit of both. I was thinking about this one and trying to actually put it into buckets of how much I wildcraft and how much I cultivate or purchase, because I also do purchase herbs from different producers, whether they're small farmers or even some bigger companies, like Organic India, for example, I buy a lot of tulsi from them, although I actually grow a lot of tulsi as well. The reason why I also buy it is because I just can't actually cultivate enough in my small homestead. I live on 2,500 square meters and so while it's a fair amount of land for scale cultivation, it's a lot, especially living in the tropics where cultivation can be quite difficult. So in my bio-region, especially when I live in Costa Rica, I tend to do more wildcrafting and some smaller cultivation. Where we are in Italy, we do a lot of wildcrafting and bigger cultivation. A lot of, for me, just depends on the ecosystem itself and how it's presenting and what you're able to work with. When we're in the tropics, there's just so much competition with the wild plants that it can be very, very energy-intensive to cultivate your plants, depending on altitude, of course, the amount of rain that we get. For me, it depends. It's the answer so often in our health practice and our permaculture practices when we're talking about land, that it depends. Then you have different seasons. Right now, I have so much jackass bitters growing in my yard that I will never need to buy it again. I'm actually to the point where I could probably start providing it to other people. And it's wild. I'm not cultivating it. It's a plant that we consider a weed. I very much move, I would say, season to season on whether I'm cultivating or I'm wildcrafting or I'm purchasing.

Yeah. So for myself, I would say that I'm a majority a wildcrafting herbalist, mainly because that was my background, my education. My first main teacher was Howie Brounstein of the Columbine School of Botanical Studies, and a lot of that school is going out, keying out plants, and learning the plants of your specific bio-region. So for me, I have a real soft spot of these stands I've been tending for multiple years, and sometimes since I was a small child. And so for me, wildcrafting is really the core of my practice. However, I have a Bachelor's of Science in Horticulture. I've worked for numerous medicinal herb farms, including Herb Pharm, Strictly Medicinal Seeds, the Thyme Garden, and all these large herb farms. So I definitely have a soft spot for certain herbs. I'm just like, oh, man, I can't go out and forage my own ashwagandha, or I don't have any blue vervain that grows near me. Got to keep that one in the herb garden. So I have a small homestead where I grow a lot of herbs that I either make herbal products with, but a lot of time I'm just doing a lot of nursery production, just trying to get the plants, get the medicine out to people so they can grow their own herbs. So I'd say, yeah, majority for medicine making, I got a soft spot for the wild herbs, but there's some special ones I like to keep in the garden.

Similar to you, Logan, I am a vast majority wild harvesting herbalist currently. And part of that is out of necessity because I have ended up moving around so many times, and it's circumstantial. The wild plants have been able to follow me throughout my moves rather than me starting a garden and then not necessarily being able to see that through the seasons. I've had more flexibility in being a wildcrafter. And part of that is because I'm just more drawn to wild plants. I started off 12 years ago harvesting wildcrafting for a company called Red Moon Herbs. So Red Moon is a small to medium-sized herb company based here in Appalachia in Asheville. And Red Moon has been amazing in the sense that, because of the size of the company, because they're not as big as, say, Mountain Rose or necessarily as big as a Gaia Herbs, for example, they're able to accept smaller weights and volumes of wild plants than other entities or institutions might be able to. So as a baby wildcrafter, I was able to harvest two pounds of burdock root or just a very small amount of a certain plant and be able to actually provide that to the company, which would then get prepared and turned into a vinegar or a tincture or dried for a tea. So the plants, I was thinking about it in a seasonal calendar in the staples that get me by every year that I've gotten to really know and love, the plants that I regularly wildcraft in quantity, which might be anywhere from 2 pounds to 50 pounds, let's say, either for personal use or professional use. Those would be during the summer, reishi mushroom, and black walnut hulls, and red clover blossom, and even lobelia here, and then St. John's wort bud and flower. And then in the fall, that would move on to hawthorn berry in great quantity, burdock root, dandelion root, really as much as I can dig because it's perennially popular. Everyone needs dandelion. And then in the winter, we don't stop. We do rose hips, and we do birch bark, and other barks, and then fraser fir tips, like Christmas tree tips for tea. And then that rolls around into the violets, and the chickweed, and the cleavers of the spring. So that's really my calendar of major tasks when it comes to wildcrafting.

Yeah, it doesn't surprise me that you all have both wildcrafting and cultivation as a practice in your lives. Both of these have strength and can be circumstantial, like Heather is speaking towards having the land and the space to cultivate the plants or the plants themselves. Some of them don't grow near you so there is this aspect of cultivation and wildcrafting. So let's talk about what are the strengths of both and what benefits do we find in each practice.

When I think about that, first I like to think about the wild plants because that's where they all originate. And they have all developed this unique genetics, and to be accustomed to the terroir, the unique constitution of the dirt, and the environment, and the climate. And usually it's not in a cultivated space where those plants get spoiled in a cultivated in his face. Sometimes I'll grow native plants in my garden, and you see them just like, push up, and they're big and elegant. And I'm like, man, you would not look that nice out in the wilderness. You'd be a little more struggling to get your nutrients. You probably have a lot more animals. You don't have the deer fence around you, so the deer are nibbling on you, and you're getting more pathogens. No one's like, oh, how do I take care of these aphids? And rather than that making plants, quote unquote "weaker," it seems to boost up their natural defenses. And a lot of these compounds, we look at herbs and we're all like, oh, yeah, this chamomile tastes so nice. It's so sweet. Thank you, chamomile, for making this. It's not doing that for you. It's doing that to keep the other things away from eating it. That's why you don't need a giant bowl of chamomile salad because it's like, yeah, we can enjoy small quantities, but at a certain point, it's like we're not eating peppermint salad or chamomile salad. Maybe we might put a little bit in there. Eating things in large quantities, so these plants, they're developing these compounds to help ward off heavy herbivory. And when they do experience herbivory, I remember when I was out leading a plant walk in New Mexico at the Good Medicine Confluence, I was showing everyone some of the Artemisia tridentata, the sage brush there, and I picked off a small bit, and one of the local herbalists was like, oh, guys, can you smell that? Do you notice how all the plants in the area... Notice that that one little branch got plucked. They realized once someone is getting fed upon, and now all the plants in the area are responding chemically by increasing the amount of aromatic compounds. You could just smell it wafting through the air. So there's something really special about wild herbs and how they have to adapt to these rough climates, and it bolsters them up. However, it goes vice versa, too. In cultivated spaces, you can really get larger quantities. You can really bolster these plants up. You can give them really rich nutrition. I remember at Bastyr University, when I worked there in the gardens, their soil tests were through the roof. Everything was just up on the organisms, all the nutrients. These plants were so spoiled. And man, you could tell they were just big, and beautiful, and luscious. And God, the amount of diversity we had there, it's like, you don't have to go order herbs from, you know, in other places where there's a lot of concern in Chinese medicine, for instance. What is the quality of some of these herbs? Was something being shipped from China? Not to put down Chinese herbs because there's a lot of really wonderful cultivators out there. But there's also a lot of mystery that comes over because organic China does not mean the same thing that it does in the United States. And so on the one hand, you're missing the plant being in its natural ecosystem. But on the other hand, you get this one-on-one care. For instance, I love to cultivate ashwagandha, and I can really trust, okay, I know where this ashwagandha came from. I can really give it its own unique space to flourish the way I want it to, and I know everything that was put into it. And also, that plant is connected to you. You put all this intention in. You know, I talk to plants. All right, I'm out there. I'm woo-woo. I talk to plants. So I think that's a really big thing, too, for me. And that's why I like to cultivate herbs, because there's no herbs I can find in Oregon or elsewhere throughout the Pacific Northwest that does what ashwagandha does or does exactly what blue vervain does. So that's for me why I like to have this cultivation practice, because, man, I spend a lot of time just nerding out, just reading books. I'm reading a book by Marc Plotkin on studies in the Amazon, and I'm just like, wow, all these cool plants in the Amazon, that's so awesome. And to actually get to grow them in your greenhouse, you're like, oh, my God, here it is. So I don't know. I guess that's a long-winded answer to say, there's pros and cons to both. I think having that personal relationship with plants that you read about, and then actually having them. I worked at Mountain Rose Herbs. I had tons of dry herbs coming in. I'm like, oh, cool. Like, shatavari. It just looks like a bunch of cut up root. And then you actually grow it. You're like, oh, wow. Look at the spines on it. Look the way it climbs up the tree. And I don't know, it's really special to be able to be able to cultivate these plants that you only read about. So that's my answer for that one.

Well, I'm guilty as charged because I'm also a plant talker. And if that makes you woo-woo, then so be it. But I think that it's a win-win. The plants benefit by getting chatted to, and I benefit by them talking back. It's wonderful. Of course, you make great points. The cultivation is what humans have now been doing for some thousands of years, and there are these wonderful benefits about it. There's predictability. There's a possibility for controlling the variables. It's all about controlling these various variables, which is needed in commerce when there are specific demands for quantity and volume and timing and output. And cultivation provides us the potential to have these uniform results, these harvests of a certain weight or certain volume that are needed and controlling for chaos or disaster or pests or weather. But from where I sit, wildcrafting and working with what the land is already providing is what I love to focus on because I love to spotlight the weeds. And the weeds are these universal mineral providers and nutrient givers that are just so generous. So the hybrid, though, between these two camps, as I see it between the cultivation and the wildcrafting, is this ethos of wild tending, which I would define as the hybrid between the two. It's really cultivating and coming into a relationship with wild spaces, and tending that patch of Solomon's seal that you have. This wild tending is a real sweet spot that I think deserves more attention. In practice, in my life, it looks like often—Solomon's seal is a great example because that grows as a forest medicinal in the Southern Appalachians where I live. And it's not necessarily super abundant, but I do wildcraft the root at certain times of the year, in the late fall or the early spring. And I always do the partial root harvest and the root replanting so you can actually grow a larger stand after you take that certain percentage of the root that you're going to need for your harvest or your preparation making and replant that, which often I see really provokes that stand or that patch to multiply and become more abundant. And that practice can also be done with seed saving, doesn't have to be done with the roots, but it's a really nice hybrid between the two that gets you out there working with a patch of something. And with Solomon's seal, that's not necessarily a weedy plant, so I want to caveat that. But it is a wonderful example of something that is growing in the wild that you can tend to and sort of shape in this way to produce the results that you might get out of a cultivated patch.

Yeah, it's interesting. When I look around my garden here where I am in Costa Rica, we have a fair amount of plants that have naturalized through colonization and migration of humankind coming into the Americas. It's interesting because many of the introduced plants, a lot of the favorites that many herbalists work with, like turmeric and ginger and moringa and these types of plants, they're actually very hard to go wild. You don't see them just popping out of the garden and doing their own thing. A lot of the native plants are very, very hardy here. It's interesting, when you're working with these plants and cultivating them and what are they like maybe in the wild, especially something like turmeric that is so, so common—and it's our plant of the year here—a plant that's just so, so common in so many practices and so many different culinary traditions and in everybody's garden, in the tropics, at least. When you come around, you see it everywhere, but it doesn't jump out of its bed. It really likes to stay where it is. But yet you can mimic, we call them analog forests, or mimicking the forest and what is the role that this turmeric actually plays. It doesn't need a lot of tending. It actually stays... It's rustic out there. It's not wild, so to say, but it takes care of itself where you put it down into the soil. I love watching the plants do that. I think that there's a lot of benefits to wildcrafting and allowing your plants to be wild and not wild in that that's where they're from and that they are part of that native ecosystem, but allowed to do their own thing. I'm a little bit of a lazy gardener, I'll admit it. I'm definitely not one who's out there all day long tending my plants. I weed and I harvest and I prune and I do my little things, but I really love to let them be. I think with cultivation, of course, we can really scale at that point, depending on how you want to work in your practice, depending on what your work is, listening to Heather and Logan, how you provide for other companies. That is the reality for some herbalists, and for some herbalists, we're just making for our own apothecaries. For some people, we're just making for our farmer's market sales or our little local bioregion sales. For some people, we're dispensing our apothecaries. For some people, we're providing for just our families. I think sometimes it can become overwhelming when we really get into cultivation. I think that's one of, you know, we're asking what are the strengths of it, but I think cultivation can actually be a limiting factor for some people because you can get really excited. You go to the herb shop or you go to the greenhouse and you get your seeds and you start to get everything out there. Then perhaps other things in your life come up and you're like, oh, my gosh, how am I going to take care of all of these plants? Then you start to have that green guilt of like, oh, they're dying on me or they're not doing this. I can't keep up with it. And so this is where I do find wildcrafting to have perhaps a little bit more of a strength because we're allowing the plants to just be, and we can go and collect them as needed, and we don't have to put that stress on top of ourselves to have to be nurturing the plants constantly when we're trying to cultivate. But of course, as you said, Heather, one of the greatest strengths to cultivation is that controlled environment. Plants, for example, bacopa that I love to have at my house, which just struggles when it's out in the open air, but once it's in a greenhouse, it's just like, and it just takes over and it's so big and it's so abundant and it doesn't need a lot of tending. I think that that's something to really consider for people as you're deciding what is better for me—and we're going to get into the ethics a little later in this conversation. But as we're looking at, do I cultivate? Do I buy? Do I wildcraft? I think it's important to look first at your own practice and the needs of your family or of your business before you really jump in and invest a lot of energy into beds and stands of plants that you're not able to maintain. Then also asking yourself, am I okay letting things go a little wild and letting my yard look like the forest a little bit? Sometimes we get into that mindset of that really English enclosure neat style. And it's really beautiful. I was raised with an English enclosure garden style with my grandparents, and very pretty, but it's very energy-intensive. And so I think that's something to consider, where with wildcrafting, your energy input is very different because you're dependent on the weather, you're dependent on the plant. It's a hustle in a way. I'm like, okay, this is ready. I've got to get out there and get it because it's going to be gone in a few weeks or in a month or in a few days even. Some plants are so just temporal that they're just like, okay, I'm here and I'm gone. We actually have a plant here called "here today, gone tomorrow." It's like, you got to get it when it's good. I think that there's strengths and limitations to both, but I do recommend people to start first with your own energy piggy bank that you have saved up for yourself and how much you're able to put into your plants and into your own personal apothecary in practice.

I really love that messaging, Sarah. I feel like I've never quite thought about it exactly that way where wildcrafting is allowing the plants to be and you access as the needs arise. That idea of wild tending, I feel like you're all doing in different ways. In the garden itself, it sounds like that naturalization process is that in action as well as when you're in the woods and replanting that Solomon's seal. It's really beautiful. It's those relationships with plants that you're developing throughout. When we are cultivating, though, or wildcrafting, we have this idea of losing or gaining, specifically, phytochemicals or the nutrient content based on how the plants are grown. Let's start with cultivation. What do we lose or gain when we bring a plant in from the wild and start cultivating it?

Such an interesting question. As with all things in herbalism and maybe just in life in general, I think it depends on the plant. It depends, as always. But in general, I think of it as a bit of a trade-off in the domestication or the cultivation of a wild species. We might lose some of that phytochemical complexity and nuance that we don't even know how to define—scientists don't even necessarily know how to define. But it is that that makes the wild plants be so incredibly adaptive in any scenario and not spoiled, as Logan was saying, not those lush, big, spoiled beasts. And perhaps, and this is my conjecture, some more broad spectrum medicinal benefits in those wild plants that we have not even identified yet, along with often what we see in the wild plants is a higher mineral and nutrient content—and we'll get into that variation later, but we might lose some of that. We might lose an increase in some of those bitter, those intense bitter compounds and phytochemicals, and also in that variation of the volatile oils and so on. But on the other hand, if it's a trade-off, we gain these intangibles that humans are always so often historically in search of. We gain more fats and sugars in these cultivated plants, and of course, increased size and yield, for example, with hawthorn, a hawthorn berry, which is in the apple family. A wild hawthorn berry is much more scrubby. It's much more ratty than a cultivated hawthorn berry, which is more of a mini apple, and is sweeter than the wild variety. And then we gain, of course, this reliability, this controlling of variables that we're talking about, the reliability of a harvest that can be counted on. The person who's purchasing, if there's a purchaser involved, they can count on the fact that they're going to get 100 pounds of this on this day or during this season, and a certain amount, in a certain time, which is a necessary evil of commerce, if you want to think of it like that. But it's essential, especially when we're about value-added products, and controlling for variables like the unpredictability of pests, and weather, and threats, and so on. So it's, in my mind, a bit of a trade-off. We're losing some of these constituents, perhaps, and we're gaining some of these intangibles, and we're just gaining control overall.

Yeah, I actually noticed that the plants that I cultivate tend to be more susceptible to insect damage versus the plants that are wild. Just through observation in my gardens and food forest is that the wild plants always seem to be stronger and more resilient, and so I hybridize a little bit with the wild cultivating. So it's like my dandelions. It's like, okay, I'm not going to try to cultivate you, but I'm going to keep you in this wild area of the farm. And disperse your seeds out there. But I'm not trying to put them in rows. But then there's some plants like lavender, where it's so hard to find wild lavender. I spend summers in Europe, and in Italy, you don't find really wild lavender anymore. It's been in cultivation for so long. I was in Portugal doing a really amazing plant walk with a phenomenal elder herbalist, Fernanda Botelho. She was pointing out the wild lavenders, and they're like these teeny, scrubby little things. And you're like, oh, wow. And the smell is super unique and everything. And so it's like as we're selecting for these plants that we want through human history, I mean, how long has lavender been in cultivation? Many, many thousands of years. I mean, it goes way, way back, and we see it at least in what we know, what humans have written down. We find plants like lavender present in ancient apothecaries or in materia medicas, however we want to call it. It's like, that plant, we're not going to really find it anymore. If we do find it, it's not what we're actually seeking based on the therapeutic actions that it serves for us right now. I think that, I don't know, it's a tricky one because I don't know if it's a loss or a gain, really. It's just a nuance to the plant itself that happens when they're put into a controlled environment or not. Of course, when we're talking about production and so many farmers, it's like they're the ones that suffer the most in the supply chain. They take the most risk and they get paid the least amount. For them in cultivation to know that, okay, I'm going to have a harvest and I have a buyer, they got to meet that need, that is then a strength for them. It's a need for them to create their livelihood.

Yeah, it's an open-ended question, I feel like, because there isn't a fixed answer. It's that it depends, which is the answer to pretty much everything that we do here in herbalism or when we're working with the ecosystems.

Yeah, it's hard to add on, Sarah and Heather, you just gave some really excellent answers. However, one thing that did come up for me is I think the main reason we're so promoting herb farming is due to sustainability issues. There are so many herbs and plants out there, in your example of the wild lavender, imagine if we took all the lavender production and put that desire for it onto our wild populations. We would not have any wild lavender left. And also, the interesting thing with lavender, too, is even though the cultivated lavender is babied and grows nice and big and tall, it's so potent. We really need to make lavender that much more potent. Have you ever tried a pure lavender tincture? You got to dilute that. So I think there's something to it where it's like, when we need these, quote unquote, "need these bulk quantities of herbs and stuff," we can really supply people with really good quality medicine, especially with some of these more potent herbs. And these are some things like wild calendula, Calendula arvensis, it's like we can get by with some of our cultivated calendula and creating these cultivars. And I really liked what Heather was mentioning about there's a change in the amount of secondary metabolites versus primary metabolites. It's like secondary or specialized metabolites being the defensive compounds versus getting more lipids, getting more carbohydrates. And so you're getting this more greater bulk, and that's what a lot of our cultivated plants are designed to be, big and bulky. And like Sarah was mentioning, that makes them more susceptible to the pest. And the whole time I was studying as a horticulture student, they're like, all right, we're trying to find the genes that are going to make this thing big, a lot of crop, and pest and disease resistant. But it was always this little battle. They're like, okay, we came up with this resistance gene, but, oh, no, they overcame the resistance gene. Now it's gone. Now we have to have a new one coming in. So it was this interesting battle that horticulture has been going through of selective breeding, adaptive seeds, and selecting genetics. And I think that's part of the art of horticulture as well. So yeah, I think you all give some excellent answers. So I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here. I agree.

I feel like for me, Queen Anne's lace is probably the prime example of what we're discussing here, right? So we have the primary metabolites. These are the plant compounds that plants produce for their own reproduction, growth, development, and then the secondary compounds which are used in protection, communication, defense, all of these secondary metabolites like the alkaloids, terpenes, phenolics, basically giving an overview to the audience and then looking through that lens at Queen Anne's lace, which is wild carrot. We have this very bitter root I've harvested in the wild compared to our cultivated carrot, which is so rich in sugars today. The nuanced discussion you all have provided just helps to highlight that the variance and the benefits come with each. There is this common belief, though, that wild plants are stronger and more potent. I feel like we've touched on this already, but do you have anything to add to the idea that the overall potency of a plant is stronger in wild herbs?

Yes. I think about with this question, our own human body and our nervous system in particular, and how we actually need moderate amounts of stress to be more resilient. If we're just in our bubble and we're no stress, we're in pure comfort zone all the time, we don't want to be in panic zone. But when we're in growth zone, we actually learn to be more vital and more resilient to various types of stressors as they come. And so I think that in certain cases, the wild plants potentially could be more potent. Of course, we're speaking to the different metabolites, and we can look at that. But when they're exposed to droughts or extreme wind or extreme rain and you see who can survive through that, that's also how we choose some of our plants. And even as we're planting into the tropics here where I get this very distinct wet season, three meters of rain a year to extreme dry season, in the dry season, we actually will withhold a lot of water from the plants because I want them to just not be spoiled with rain all year round. I want them to be more resilient. I do see that when certain plants are spoiled and all of a sudden your water system breaks or something happens, and all of a sudden the plant's like "Egh!" And it keels over and doesn't want to live. But then there's also, I live in a bioregion where cacao is native, and the wild cacaos are actually much weaker than the cultivated cacaos. This is because of a yeast infection from Monilia, which decimated a lot of the cacao all throughout Central America And so when you see old wild species, the pods don't really mature, they start to rot, and they fall off the tree. And so pretty much all the cacao that you're eating in the world is coming from bud grafting and very specific selection of these Monilia resistant plants, which now can be put out into food forests and into all types of monocrops also, depending on where you're living and where it's being cultivated. A lot of the West African varieties are monocrops. As we get into Latin America, it's a lot more understory, analog forest type of cultivation. But these plants that have been genetically modified because that's essentially what grafting is, right? We're taking a bud from one resistant tree and we're putting it on these tiny little plants. They are actually more resilient once they get out there and treated as wild trees. So it's an interesting one and a fun one to observe. And that's what I encourage all of you to do who are watching this is, like, our first principle permaculture is observe and interact. And then I always add, write it down, take notes. So as you're looking, pay attention to the wild plant or pay attention to the one that you brought into the garden, or pay attention to the one that has the slightly different little microbiome on the back of the house versus in that full sun area. And you're just going to start to get an idea about what this plant needs and what its level of tolerance is. And that's going to help you to understand potentially what is the medicine of this plant? What is the food of this plant? What is the relationship that this plant even has in an ecosystem?

Thank you. You know, this really brings up something for me that my teacher, Howie Brounstein, would always say, which was, "Gentle does not mean weak." Gentle does not mean weak. And in our culture, we're so accustomed to being like, what's the maximum potency? What's the strongest possible thing I can take? It's like, oh, do you want to get the energy drink that has 1,200 milligrams of caffeine, or you want the one that has 1,800 maximum potencies, got ginseng and all? It's like there's always this idea that stronger is better. And I don't think that's necessarily the case. So when this idea is like, sure, some of these plants may have more potency to them, but is that really what we're looking for? I mean, for instance, if you're making a tincture and you're like, okay, this is a really aromatic plant, you should probably use some higher percentage alcohol to get some of those more like terpenes and volatile oils. But you ever tried a 95% alcohol extract of chaparral? It's like drinking turpentine. So sometimes it's nicer to have these more gentle plants. I really love this one documentary I saw, for instance. And it was interviewing this Mongolian herbalist, and he was nomadic, and he's walking around, he's drinking some tea, and they're like, oh, what's that you're drinking there? He's like, oh, yeah, this tea gives you a lot of energy. You drink it every day for two years, and at the end, you'll feel a lot of energy. And it's like for us in our society, we're like, two years? I ain't got time for that. I got a business meeting tomorrow. I'm trying to climb the corporate ladder. Give me something that's going to kick me up. But it's oftentimes those gentle herbs herbs that are just slowly adding nourishment and giving us that mineral nutrition, those various nutrients that are going to help to actually bolster us up and give us the resilience. So rather than giving us something that'll make us feel like jacked up and stimulated. So I think sometimes when people are pooh-poohing cultivated plants because they're not as potent, it's like, well, it doesn't need to be as potent. What's the end game here? And I know that a lot as an herbal products maker, people are always just trying to make sure they got 20:1 extracts, and all the stuff is like, Do we really need that, though?

That's a great question. I love that this conversation is taking shape as a discussion about nourishment and cultivating resilience and really what that looks like. I think that's an excellent point because jacking something up and amping something up is not necessarily always the end goal. So what I'd add to this question is just that I think that the science is there. It's the science that some of these weedy plants are maybe more nutrient dense and mineral dense than our store bought kale, or even comparing a Whole Foods dandelion, a Whole Foods cultivated dandelion, to a wild dandelion. These plants have been looked at by, for example, the University of California, Berkeley. They looked at chickweed, and dandelion, and yellow dock, and mallow, and nasturtium, and oxalis, and they found that these plants were higher in fiber and protein and vitamins A and K and calcium and iron, and all these things that we're after. And I do think that there's a point in there, because as we know, the soil for either the wild or the cultivated plants is not what it was 25, 50, 100 years ago, so all of us humans are deeply seeking more mineral and nutrient abundance. Just, we have to. But I don't think that this means that we should only use wild plants. I think that that would be tunnel vision because we believe them to have greater benefit. It can't mean that because our populations would depreciate so much. What it does mean is that it depends. It's on a case by case basis. Each plant that we decide to use, either for ourselves or our families or our clients, has to be used in a conscientious way with a conscientious intentional choice of whether we're going to choose wild or not. And it's going to be different for each plant. So going through the ladder of some of the variables that we've talked about and what your end goals are and what the plant particularly has to offer and how it specifically grows and looking at that and examining it from a deeper lens, I think that those questions will help you get the answer that you need when it comes to answering, is it the cultivated that I need here or is it the wild?

I think that's a really important point. If we're looking back at the wild carrot discussion, we're not going to be eating Queen Anne's lace, wild carrot, in the wild as a food source. We're going to be looking towards the carrots, hopefully, that are grown in organic nutrient and soils with regenerative principles to offer us the carbohydrates that we need, the nutrients, the mineral content that comes with that plant, and really that question of what are we trying to get out of our medicines. When we are looking at particular herbs that we desire an expression from, whether that is a food or a medicine, they're going to present differently, whether they're cultivated versus wild harvested. Can you guys speak to some particular herbs that you found that expression of their medicine done differently based on the way that they're grown?

Man, this is so interesting. I mentioned hawthorn earlier. So I do think about hawthorn, wild hawthorn versus cultivated. I would compare it to crab apples versus this big red, delicious, juicy grocery store apples or farmers market apples. And of course, hawthorn is in the apple family. So we're talking about two totally different things, right? The wild hawthorn is a larger seed, but smaller flesh. It's much less sweet. It's much more bitter. So we've got some more of those phytochemicals. And whether you're going to use the wild versus the cultivated in this situation might depend. It might depend on your end goals. It might depend on what you're using hawthorn to support, whether you're seeking those cardiac glycosides or whether it's more nutrition that you're seeking. I also think about St. John's Wort. In this example, there was a really interesting study that showed that in the wild, St. John's wort, so Hypericum perforatum or the Hypericum punctatum, there were actually 14 different essential oil, volatile oil, constituents in the wild variety of St. John's that were not present at all in the cultivated, which I think is interesting because we're not talking about two different amounts of the same constituent. We're just talking about it not being present at all. So I don't know how to speak to those things that do exist in the wild varieties that don't exist at all in the cultivated. I think it's a very interesting question, and my guess is and ideas and conjectures would be that, like I mentioned earlier, maybe there are some more broad spectrum benefits in the wild varieties. Maybe there are some more energetic benefits. I don't know how to prove that. I think it goes along with things like flower essences, right? We rely on flower essences for their energetics and their vibrations and things like that. And maybe there are different energetics and vibrations in the wild, for example, St. John's wort, than in the cultivated, Another example that I would think of is if you've ever made a tincture of dandelion or burdock, you'll notice that white stuff that's in your jar, and that's that inulin. And the hypothesis here is that the more stressed a plant gets, the more inulin it produces. Because if the plants get colder and they get more stressed, they make more starch to get through the winter, which is this inulin, which is this prebiotic starch, which is so beneficial to us. So that is certainly something that you can see with your own eyeballs. It's going to be more present in that jar of the wild burdock tincture or vinegar than in the cultivated one. And it doesn't necessarily make it better or worse. It's just a difference. And I don't know what the answer here is. I think it actually brings up a lot more question marks than answers.

For me, a clearer example I could think of was yarrow. Because yarrow, Achillea millefolium, is one of those plants that you can find all the way in the lowland, right at sea level, in a huge variety of different climates, all the way up to subalpine—and it's also really popular to cultivate in the garden. So you get to see yarrow as it goes from these really low lands. Maybe it's growing by the coast, maybe it's by the river, and you can see how it gets more succulent and juicy in those areas and grows larger. And then you get up into subalpine, around 7,000 feet, and that thing's a lot more reduced, really pungent, aromatic, though. It is really cool. And if you're someone who does essential oil distillation like I do, you definitely notice a difference in the amount. So I went through back to one of my old gardens down Southern Oregon, and I gathered a bunch because it was the most spoiled yarrow. God, these things were almost as tall as I was. I'm about six feet tall. The flower stocks were huge. I was walking through this meadow of yarrow, and I harvested. And man, the amount of chamazulene you got in this final oil just gives it that beautiful blue color when you're distilling. And I was just noticing it had a ton of material, but the amount of essential oil was far reduced compared to stuff you get up in higher elevations. So you know they're definitely creating less of those primary metabolites, and it's concentrating those nice, aromatic compounds. So yarrow, for me, is something you definitely notice. Even for

Wild stands, the lower elevations in more moist areas, it's going to be far less aromatic like that stuff on the top of the mountains—it's pretty nice. I love how you brought up organoleptic evaluation, the use of our senses to determine the phytochemical composition found within a plant. You can smell the yarrow at one elevation and smell it in your garden and see that there's a variation. Or simply tasting a dandelion leaf that you got off a grocery store shelf versus going out and tasting a dandelion leaf even in the early spring versus maybe the heat of the summer and the bitter compounds that are present. It's really an important part of what we do to assess the ways that plants are presenting in their composition. I'd love to hear from all of you how you approach this idea with the organoleptic usage towards consistency and quality in your plant material, especially really, since we know that plants are inherently variable, whether they're cultivated or wildcrafted, depending on the soils and the environment.

I think one of the most important things is preservation and how we dry them and store them—that's where we're going to get some of the most consistency. If we're making medicine, then it is trying our best to stick to the same ratios every time we're making our medicine over and over again with the tinctures or our tea blends or our saps or our oils or our honeys or whatever it is.

I think when we're talking about our cultivated plants that we do purchase, this is where we're going to get into the companies that we're buying from and trying our best to investigate where these plants are grown. Unfortunately, in the US, you don't have to always name the country that plants are being sourced from anymore. It's harder to actually track where in the EU, they have the higher standards. You're going to see where the plant comes from. Even the organic standards are much, much higher than in the United States. It's hard because as you're getting to know these companies, the packaging might look really good and the message sounds really good, but then you have to dig around a little bit and take a look at, well, what country are they coming from and what's it like there, in particular in terms of soil condition and soil quality and health standards and all of that.

Then sometimes there's just the consistency of the person that shows up all the time with the plants and knowing that I can go to a little market stand where I was just in Guatemala, where I spend a lot of time. There's one little market stand where I just know the ladies there, as they pick it out, the herbs always look much fresher, they always smell much fresher. There's just this energy about these humans working with the plants. It feels a lot different than another one of the market stands where things look a little bit dry or a little ratty or they're not as nice, you know, the humans being not as nice. I think that some of that consistency, it spans multiple layers from the human experience down to harvesting.

Also, for me, I do a lot of lunar harvesting and pruning and those types of things. I do find a big difference in the quality of the plant, specifically when I look at some of the roots, like the ginger, the galanga, or the turmeric, when they're harvested full moon, a lot of aerial parts, it's just they're watery and they're not as juicy. It's like, if I need it, sure, maybe I'll go grab it, but I wait it out. I do find there is a little bit more consistency that way when I'm working with the bio-rhythm of the plant itself. But yeah, I do as a practitioner and someone who's harvesting my plants and working with the plants, I think drying and storage is going to be one of the most important practices that you really try to maintain, because if you're not staying consistent in that, in making sure your plants are preserved well, then you are going to lose potency or vitality, or they're going to get moldy or they get infested. And so there's, I think, a lot of human participation in the consistency of our plants.

Yeah. I don't think there is any consistency really. When you're out there, it's like you have a wet year, you have a dry year, you get the plague of locusts that one year. It's like there is no consistency. And it's very much a pharmacological mind that is like, okay, we can isolate these specific compounds get them the exact doses, and we know exactly what we're giving people. We don't as herbalists, let's be honest here, and I think that's for me is why I'm really passionate about herbal formulation. And I tell all my students, start with one single herb. Just make tinctures of single herbs, dry herbs singly, and then taste them. Get to know... Don't just go start throwing calendula into all your formulas. Try out that calendula. How was it this year? Did it come out really like, oh, this is really resinous or strong? I only need a little bit to add to this to have an effective dose. Or do I need to really kick it up?

I would say the only way you're going to actually have consistency is, for me as a small products maker, my formulas are changing as the herb harvest changes each season. This year, the valerian was really potent, so I can go very light on it, versus this year, it's like I had a larger harvest of skullcap, so I'm going to add more skullcap to my calming formula. My formulas are always changing and shifting based on what I have available, what the season is as someone who's doing small scale production. If I really wanted to keep things consistent, I would just make a large batch in a preservation method that's going to be pretty much indefinite making a tincture. I just make a five-gallon bottle of tincture of my skullcap. That way I know the skullcap is going to be pretty darn consistent throughout however long it takes me to go through a five-gallon batch. Of course, I'm not making things at quite that scale. I don't have any five-gallon jars of tinctures. Mostly, if I'm going to make larger scale, maybe I'll make a couple of gallons of a certain type of tincture. But as far as I can see, that's the only way you're going to maintain a consistency, because year to year, season to season, it's always going to be different. So trying to find consistency, and people are always asking me that, what's the dosage of this herb. It's like, I can know a relative dosage, but I always tell people, listen to your body. I'm going to give you this herb. Taste it. See what happens. And some people just take herbs just because they're told they're good for you. And I say to people, don't just take something because your told it's good for you. Sit with it, do a full body scan. How are you feeling now? Take a little bit of the herb. Do the body scan again. How are you feeling now? Do you feel any different? Do you not feel different? Just check in with your own body and ensure that nature is diverse and different and inconsistent in a beautiful way.

I agree, Logan. I think in lieu of consistency, if we all are in agreement that we don't have consistency, but we still do have quality, then the key is flexibility, right? This is a hard one for wildcrafters because there's so many variables involved. How much did it rain? Are your roots water logged? Are they heavier, but they're going to be less potent? Was there a hard frost before you harvested your rose hips, which is said to then boost up their vitamin C levels? Or did you harvest your red clover blossoms, for example, really early in the morning when the dew is still on them with gloves on so that the oils from your skin don't get on them at all and change the color? And did you also dry them in a single layer at a low temperature in order to try and preserve their beautiful, vibrant purple-pink shade? Ask me how I know, because I lost many, many, many pounds of dried red clover in this way because I didn't do those things when I was first starting out. I picked them with my bare hands, and I got my skin oils on them, and I didn't dry them in a single layer. And I was learning. I was figuring it out. But this process demands inherently a tremendous amount of flexibility from both the wildcrafter or the cultivator, and if there's a different person involved, the preparation maker or the buyer, if those folks are involved, if you're selling raw herbs, because the harvest that you think that you're going to get is not necessarily the harvest that you're going to get at all. And for me, what that has looked like is, okay, instead of bagging up this red clover as a single herb and displaying its beautiful, vibrant color, it didn't dry out so well. It lost its color. And it might be a good quality. It might still have those minerals and those nutrients, but it doesn't look as great visibly. And so we're going to throw it into a tea blend where it's still adding those nutrients and minerals, but it's not a real looker. And so it just demands a whole lot of flexibility on everyone's part, because it's inherently variable, as you said, Lindsey. It's not predictable. And the best we can do is try to learn from our mistakes, which as a baby wildcrafter, I made so many of.

I think this is where guidelines for harvesting do come into play, though. We do have predictability where the morning is going to be wetter than, say, the midday sun. Finding that sweet spot between the two to dry out the moisture. But the most important... so learning the guidelines, learning when to harvest, but paying attention to when you are harvesting like you're saying, Heather, right? What did that harvest time frame? How did it impact the red clover? Then using your senses, you were able to visually see that the phenolic compounds providing the pigmentation for the red clover were no longer there. And so shifting from that and really building a relationship with the plant, knowing what it's supposed to look like or what it's supposed to taste like when harvested, and picked in this time frame and grown in this way, and then shifting from there. Logan, I loved how you said you shift your dosage based on the herb, like how it was grown, what you are finding when you are building a relationship with that specific batch, the strength of the plant in that preparation itself. I think that this is so much good information and just recognizing that we have the power to build a relationship with plants and then in turn, determining what the phytochemical makeup is to guide us in our usage of the plants.

Guys, I'm going to shift a little bit and really make sure that we touch on an important topic, and this is wildcrafting and the ecological impact. We've kind of spoke to it briefly already, but I want to hear from each of you what ethical wildcrafting looks like to you and how you practice that in your own life.

Yeah, so this is a really interesting question. Actually, my first job during high school was I was a commercial wildcrafter, and it's very hard work. It was very rewarding, but it was a lot of, you know, we're out there to harvest what we need so we can actually make a living. And that's how most people who are out there—most of the wild herbs you get out there—are people who aren't necessarily ethical herbalists who are waiting for the proper moon cycle and things that all perfectly align and praying to each plant. It's like, no, these are people like, you know, a lot of immigrants in our area who are doing that work because a lot of them didn't have legal status. And so that was some work that they could do where they were just selling to a middleman so they were able to get by. But I've been actually looking forward to this question. So I have a resource for everyone. It is called the Wildcrafting Checklist. And this was a checklist developed by my teacher, Howie Brounstein, at the Columbines School of Botanical Studies. So look up the Wildcrafting Checklist. And this was the series of questions we would go through before we'd harvest any plant. So first one, do you have permission or permits for collecting at the site? Or are you just illegally harvesting things out of a national park? Try and think about those things. Do you have a positive identification? I've seen a lot of herbalists, see people post on Facebook like, oh, look what I found. And you're like, oh, so that is not what you're claiming it is. Positive identification. And really taking the time to learn to key out plants is super valuable and not just assuming you have it right or everyone on the Facebook forum said you're right. Actually reading through the plant description, make sure you got the right plant. Are there better stands nearby? Is the stand big enough? Some people just see the first plant that they see and they're like, oh, wow, I found a hundred pedicularis plants. I got to harvest these and stuff, and they don't take the time to look around and see, well, it seems like a lot, but it's a really small area. Was that the only stand in this area for the next 100 miles? Or are there nicer stands over there so you don't have to pick this plant that's on the edge of its range and it's going to be depleted? Are you at the proper elevation? How does elevation impact plant communities? Is the stand away from roads or trails? Yeah, you don't want the neighborhood taking the dog for a walk and peeing on half the plants that you're out there gathering. That's no bueno. Is the stand healthy? How can we know that? Really, it comes from actually building relationships with these plants, seeing them year after year. Was this a big harvest this year? Was it not so good? Looking for those biotic and abiotic stressors we might see. Is there chemical contamination? A lot of industrial timber around in my area, so yeah, there's a lot of aerial spraying that goes along. And how are you going to know that unless you've learned to be able to see the signs and know what each company is doing. Natural contamination, like I mentioned, that could be dog pee, could be all kinds of natural contaminants going by, people pooping off the side of the trail. Are you in a fragile environment? Like lots of things, the Alpine. Are there rare, threatened, or endangered, or sensitive plants growing nearby at any time of year? How often are people out there foraging and actually coming back to know those things? Something to think about, food for thought there. Is wildlife foraging the stand? You don't want to be depriving all the animals of this plant that you're taking home to harvest. Is the stand growing, shrinking, or staying the same size? Once again, that's only going to come from building a relationship with these plants and coming back year after year to see, is my harvesting having an impact on the stand? Is it actually benefiting, because sometimes picking a little bit can actually stimulate more growth, or is it actually having the opposite effect? And we can't know that until we've really taken the time to learn these places. Is the plant an annual or perennial? Is tending necessary? What kind? Coming back to the wild tending that Heather was talking about, I think that's really important to consider there. How much to pick? What's an ethical amount to pick? Here's things like, oh, don't pick more than 30%. Well, there's only 100 plants there, you take 30%, you've destroyed a third of that population. So don't just take, really think about it and get the time to know the place. Time of day, time of year. Is it the proper season? Are you harvesting all your plants right at very late time of day, so you're not going to have time to actually process anything? What effect will harvest have on the stand? Do you have proper emotional state? Move around during harvesting. Don't just pick from one spot. Actually move your harvesting practice around. Look around after harvesting. Any holes are clean up needed. You ever gone to an area where someone's already wildcrafted that spot and it just looks like someone just dug up a bunch of roots and it just looks like a bomb went off under there? Oh, yeah. We get that with the truffle season. People just rake up all the bottom of the ground. Really try to keep your places neat and clean and don't make it look like wildcrafters are going there because people are going to judge us as a community if they see that wildcrafters are coming through and just disrupting the ecosystem, there are holes everywhere. And also, you don't want other people like, oh, what are they digging over there? Like, oh, look at that plant. Maybe I'll harvest from this area, too. Let's be a little more sly, a little more elegant with that. Are you picking herbs in the proper order for a long trip? Man, have you ever gone out in the desert? You're like, oh, I'm going to pick all these plants, but then now you have a bunch of herbs that are drying on your dashboard, and they went from this beautiful, vibrant green. Now they're turning like brown and crusty, and you just harvested all this plant in a delicate ecosystem that's now not good. Things start spoiling in the back. Picked a bunch of mushrooms on a week-long trip, and then by the time you get home, they're all moldy. It's like, we can do better than that. Are you cleaning herbs in the field? Keep your herb processing stuff with you so you don't run into those issues. Do you have the proper equipment for infield processing? And then finally, final question, wildcrafting is stewardship. What does that mean to you? So I think this is a really excellent... I encourage anyone listening to this, get the Wildcrafting Checklist. And next time you're out wild harvesting, go through and sit with a plant and ask all these questions. And really, you do it enough times, it just becomes second nature. These questions are already occurring to you, but a lot of people just don't take that time to see the herb, they want it right away. They say, oh, I sat and I talked to the plant, and the plant told me it was okay to harvest. It's like, well, how often does the plant say no to you? And honestly, go through all this, then talk to the plant. Because then you're actually going through asking all these questions, and what if the plant says yes, and you're just like, wait, half of these questions say no? It's like maybe the plant doesn't understand the whole impact. So I'm just going to leave it at that. Wildcrafting Checklist, Columbines School of Botanical Studies, look it up.

That was very comprehensive, Logan. Thank you. I will add only a couple of things, because I think that you've got it really well covered. What comes up for me in this to sort of preface your list is it's all A's. It's like, Answers, Awareness, and Accountability. And that's all right there in your list. That's what we mean in practice, in practical terms when we're talking about being in relationship with a plant or with a stand or with an area of land. That's what we mean when we talk about stewardship. I would add paying attention to the conservation status and whether that plant is native or invasive as little variables in there. And also asking yourself about the part of the plant, specifically that you're after. Are you harvesting the roots? Therefore, you're taking the plant's life entirely? Are you harvesting leaves, and therefore you're impacting its productivity and how it creates its energy and food? Or are the flowers and fruit what you're after, or the seeds, in which case you're, of course, altering its means of reproduction. And finally, I would think about something that I really didn't have in my early days, which was a plan. What is my plan for this five pounds of lobelia aerial parts? What is my plan? Do I have the practical things that I need to accomplish processing this plant in the appropriate amount of time? And the green wall, plant lust is real for all of us, right? We all, or I'll speak for myself. It's very easy for me to go out into a field or into a forest and get greedy and get ownership feelings and be like, oh, man, I could make this and this and this, and for all these people, or I could do this product or this sale. And it's very important, I found, to remind myself that it's not a grocery store. It's not a free for all. It's not a market. This is not mine. I'm not the owner. All I can do is to try to remind myself of humility and while tending, as we've all discussed. But I think part of that in practice is having a plan so that you don't, like me, lose your 20 pounds of St. John's wort to sunburn because you've gathered too much. And then the plants that are around the edge of the tarp where you're gathering all get this crispy brown thing going on because they've sat in the sun for too long, and you didn't think that was going to happen. And then you end up losing this plant material that is so incredibly precious. So that's all I would add to your amazing checklist is make sure that you've got some type of plan really to process this appropriately.

Yeah, for me, there's this concept of bioregionalism where we might see this abundance of this plant. And so we feel like with that plant lust, I can just harvest, it's fine. But what we have to constantly do is zoom out and think about global demand as well. And are these plants desirable in a market that we might not participate in or we might not see. If that's the case, how are we impacting this population on that larger scale? Because I think it is easy for us often as herbalists to get very stuck in our bioregion. It's that ecological proverb of think global, act local type of a thing. If we're just acting local, but we're not thinking about the global scale, then we could actually be harming the population organizations. This is where we can turn to some really great organizations out there. Of course, many of you watching this have probably heard of people like the organization United Plant Savers or FairWild. Org or the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Turn to some of these organizations as well as your local organizations to try to understand what is the status of these plants. I really do like the organization FairWild because they do give a very strong criteria of how to harvest, when to harvest, the types of providers that they're working with, how they're also helping the people out there who are wildcrafting to actually be wildcrafting and not just foraging. And I think it's a really beautiful thing that we've only been using the the word wildcrafting in this talk and not foraging, because foraging implies that we're just taking and there's not a type of reciprocity coming through where wildcrafting, I think, is speaking to this reciprocal relationship that we have with our plants, with the ecosystem, with our communities, with our families, with culture as we're working with plants that are both wild and cultivated. I'm so glad you brought up United Plant Savers. We'll absolutely make sure to get the link to their at-risk species, endangered species list, so we all know when we're going out into the wild to harvest to just stay away from these plants. Logan, I will also just say that I too love that you brought up Howie Brounstein's checklist, I taught wildcrafting to our students in a clinical intensive training program where I taught for five years through the Eclectic School of Herbal Medicine. That was my wildcrafting Bible for the students, making them walk through it every time. It asks so many questions of you as a wildcrafter that are so deeply important to the practice. So thank you all for those wonderful and such important answers and perspectives.

I want to talk a little bit about when we're choosing wildcrafting versus cultivation, what bioregional considerations are guiding you in your choices?

Well, I think that this is where a sense of place and place-based herbalism really ground and make an impact. As Sarah was talking about, we use the term bioregionalism. And so as a bioregional herbalist, I am going to commit to first paying attention to and seeking out those things that are growing right outside my door or growing in my yard or in my neighborhood. And second, the things that I could grow right outside my door in whatever region I'm in. So for me, in Appalachia, where I'm based, if I am wanting ginseng, this incredibly storied herb, of course, for a formula for a client or for myself, I'm going to choose to cultivate it myself, or I'm going to choose to source it from better cultivators than I rather than further impacting its population, its wild stands, especially in this region where it has been stripped from these mountains for decades and has been such a part of commerce here and livelihood here. And I'm going to choose, of course, not to wild harvest it in this scenario. And furthermore, I'm also going to be very picky about the plant part that I'm using. I'm going to choose not to use the root, which is more common these days, although not necessarily traditional. I'm actually going to choose to use the leaf and the stem of ginseng because of my understanding that one of the desirable compounds that we're after, the ginsenosides, is so high in the leaf and the stem. And of course, if the leaf and the stem are harvested properly, that preserves the life of the plant, and it gets to keep producing, and so on and so forth. Similarly, if I am wanting goji berries for a recipe. Before I look at importing them in from China, which, of course, is a one-click easy peasy touch on Amazon nowadays, I'm going to first look into something similar, an analog, an alternative berry that is perhaps native to my area. So I'm going to look at serviceberries. Or I'm going to look at even strawberries, something similar that has that antioxidant content that we're after, but it's more weedy in my particular area. And if that doesn't work, then secondly, I'll look at acquiring goji berries that are perhaps grown locally since they do grow here well in the mountains. And it's that thinking that I think makes one pay attention to bioregion and be part of this universe of a bioregional herbalism that we're talking about.

Yeah, I notice a trend in my bioregion or the bioregions that I'm working in in the needs of the humans. And oftentimes that dictates what I cultivate or what I'm wildcrafting. In my bioregion, which is a very tropical bioregion, we're only six degrees off the equator, we deal with a lot of things like vector-borne illnesses from mosquitoes. We deal with things like bacterial infections of the skin, fungal infections of the skin, parasitic infections. Pretty much every plant in the tropics is helpful for diarrhea. And so I do notice that often what I'm looking for are what the people need the most of. And I just love how the bioregion speaks to that so much. And if you're going into a different bioregion, you're going to have different things come up. And of course, we have always nervous system support and needs for new atropics with so many people working behind the computer and doing work that's not so somatic. We have needs of people trying to sleep and find their resilience working with adaptogens and endocrine support. We see that always. But you quite often will see a majority of the cases or the requests for your services, it's like that 80/20 principle, where 80% of the people reaching out to me, it's like, what is this rash? What do I do with this rash? I definitely will tend to stock up and cultivate these, whether it's wildcrafting or I'm producing it for the needs of the population in my bioregion. I do find that that is probably the biggest influence of how I work with the plants.

One herb I can think of that, it really stands out to me as one that I both wild harvest and cultivate in my garden is arnica because arnica is one of those plants where we have a lot of different species of arnica that grow in Oregon, in Washington, and the Pacific Northwest, but they grow up at high elevations. So I'm often having to hike up into the 5,000 to 7,000 feet in elevation during the summertime. So I need to make sure I'm at the right time of year where the snow is melted, that I'm coming to a stand that is healthy, and that I'm coming there at the right time of year when it's in flower. Sometimes to have all those factors just line up perfectly when you go take that backpacking trip up in the Cascade Mountains with the hopes of getting some. Sometimes you're like, well, there's a few of them are in flower, but most of them are dormant or like, oh, you just missed it. They're all in seed now. So with arnica being such a useful herb, it's one of those ones I would not want my apothecary to be empty without. So I like to grow a little bit of Arnica chamissonis in the garden. It's a nice one to have as a backup. Also with this question, this made me think about bioregional considerations because as a Pacific Northwest, born and bred boy, I'm so entranced with the coniferous forest of the Pacific Northwest. However, I've really gotten into the past few years going out to the Southwest, going out to Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, and getting to know some of these plants like Larrea tridentata, chaparral, getting to know the wild sage brushes, getting to know ocotillo, Fouquieria splendens. So it's been something for me, it's interesting going to a new place where in the Pacific Northwest, things are just lush. You can chop an area down. We have big timber. I see forests get chopped down all the time when I was a kid, and now they're back, and they're lush, and the plants are returning. In the desert, it's not like that. It's such a sensitive area. You drive like a ATV out in the middle of the desert and stuff, and those tracks that you left in the ground are going to be there for... My teacher, I remember we were up in the Alpine, how he was telling me. He's like, oh, yeah, I remember back in the '80s, you see that track over there? That was a truck who drove his truck across this lane back in the 1980s. And there we are in the 2000s, and we can still see it almost 30 years later. So it's pretty incredible how when you get up in elevation, things get more sensitive. And when you go into these desert ecosystems, your impact is a lot more. These plants are just... Even just picking something, like, oh, I'm just going to harvest them. Like Larrea tridentata, some chaparral because it grows absolutely everywhere. And you think, well, okay, the Larrea could be fine, but maybe that little branch was making that little patch of sunlight, little patch of shade right there that was able to make it so the annual seeds that were sitting in that sea bank waiting years for that nice rainfall so that they could germinate. Now it's going to get slightly drier in that area because you take that tiny little branch, now those annuals are not going to come up during our next spring. So it's really interesting being tapped into the nuances of different bioregions. And for me, the deserts really taught me a lot about being in these sensitive environments and how much even just breaking off a dead branch could give away something like shade, which is so valuable.

In my bioregion, a lot of people rely on—because there's so many foreigners that come into the area where I live—and so a lot of people rely on importing their herbs and their supplements. And specifically during the pandemic, I had a lot of people reaching out to me asking, what do they do? They can't source things anymore. And I really actually loved that because it was a beautiful opportunity to get people to know their bioregion and to seek out the analog plants. So we'll have a lot of people will write me. I had a neighbor write me the other day. She broke her elbow and she was asking me for comfrey. I can grow some comfrey here, but it doesn't do as great as you would think it would, even though it's so hardy. So I suggested to them, we have Piper ornatum, we have noni leaf. These are our tropical arnicas. These are our tropical wound remedies that are going to really help you in this time. I think it's important to take a lot of opportunity to get to know the bioregion that you're in and not just turn to the classic materia medica that we have available to us that so often we're taught. I think that can be a great limiting factor for many people, too, when they are living in one bioregion and they're just learning about plants that are perhaps global or from other bioregions that they don't have access to. I do think it's very, very important to learn about the therapeutic actions of plants that are the analogs to the ones that we are so often taught or that we read about. That's such an important message, Sarah. Thank you for sharing.

I'm curious from all of you, what role does reciprocity play in your harvesting practice? How do you give back to the land and to the plants themselves?

I feel like that's a really nuanced thing because it really depends on the plant. For instance, I could give one example with Mahonia aquifolium or Mahonia nervosa, Oregon grape. So there's different ways to harvest the rhizome. People call it Oregon grape root, but it's technically a rhizome. I'm just going to be a little stickler about that right now. So when you're harvesting the rhizome, a lot of people will just pull up the plant and just cut off the top and then throw off the top and just take your section of rhizome. However, you can leave... Pull it out, come more to where the top is, and see where you get your first rootlet, your first node or junction, and you can cut it there, take the rest of the rhizome, and then replant the tops. And so it's like those little techniques that you gain from getting to know certain plants. For instance, Howie, he's been doing that for countless years now and he comes back to these patches. He says, every time a student takes one of the ones that had to happen, he just notices the area where it got cut it creates a little juncture right there. It almost comes out at a right angle where the root regrows. And I also feel to me that a lot of what Heather was mentioning about wild tending, I think, is just such a huge part of this. For instance, camas was a huge food for the indigenous people of this area, the Kalapuya. And what's really interesting about camas is as you harvest it—it's like a tourniquet bulb—so as you harvest it, it has these teeny little bulblets all around it. Cutest word ever, bulblets. So you pull out the bulb, you harvest the main bulb, but then you get all these teeny bulblets and you actually plant those little bulblets around the area where you harvest it and bury them back. And so as you're harvesting, you're actually increasing the size of the stand because those bulblets that were once concentrated right here are now being spread atop. You wait for the flower to go to seed, now you're planting those seeds in the soil as well. So there's these different ways you can have reciprocity. And I feel for us who are also horticulturists and cultivators, I feel a lot of what we do is, for instance, the property I grow on out in Noti, it's a five acre property. One acre of it is cultivated, the rest is all forest. And there I'm tending these stands of wild plants and making sure I'm actually increasing not just the biodiversity of these cultivated plants, these other native plants from other parts of the world, but I'm also increasing the biodiversity of the native plants here, trying to increase the amount of diversity on the land that I'm tending. And just really, years of coming back, and it's about building relationships with these places, with these plants, just coming back year to year.

So beautiful. I love the bulblets. We're talking about wild tending, and I've mentioned in my practice, it might look like seed saving and later dispersal, or these partial root harvests or replanting of roots. I might deal with ginseng or with Solomon's seal, or even with bloodroot, a lot of our woodland forest medicinals here in Southern Appalachia. But there's also this reciprocity that's involved in this potentially truly sustainable loop of planetary health and human health being one and the same. The way I see it is this loop of the plants gives us so much for our health and healing, physically and mentally, and we, as a result, become stronger and healthier and more knowledgeable and more capable and better versions of ourselves. And ideally, we take this and we give some portion of our vigor and health back because we have better capacity to take care of the plants, to take care of our wild spaces, to be solution-focused and cultivate more plants, and put our brains together to solve some of these larger scale environmental challenges that our generation is faced with as a whole. And we're able to use these resources, our resources, to improve the health of the plant and the planet, which in turn improves our own health and so on and so forth, and it just keeps looping and looping.

Speaking to the loops, I specifically work in a closed loop system, so I use composting toilets at my house exclusively. I love that because we're taking what's coming from the land, moving through our bodies, and then what so often people consider a waste product is actually food for the soil. And it's one of the very majorly impactful, yet small things that we can do to give back to the microbiome, to give back to the soil in our bioregions. And so how I give back to my plants is they receive all the compost that comes straight from my own body back onto the land. And it definitely will go into the garden beds, but it also like this is a compost pile that lives out, you know, as it's removed from the bins in my house, it's actually moved out also into the wild as well. So really bringing that relationship through the unseen, through the microbiome, from my body to the plants, back into my body and to other people's consumption practices when they come into my house. Actually, in the community that we live in, we all work with compost toilets. It is a way that we give back in that way, and I just love it. I think it's maybe not a celebrated way of composting. People are a little fecal phobic, but it's definitely a way of letting the plants know you on a very intimate level. We produce so much amazing nutrient that comes right from our own bodies that we just so often flush away or put into water systems, which can cause so much harm to human populations and animal populations as well. So yeah, that's how I do it.

Sarah, I love hearing about this full circle aspect of your life. One thing I want to share just briefly is presenting with deep gratitude in our harvesting practices. That's not to say that we only need to give our gratitude, but when we stand from a place of gratitude and recognition of our place in this Earth, that we are a part of nature alongside the plants and the environment. If you want to learn more about this from a very a wise person, do read Robin Wall Kimmerer's new book, The Serviceberry, which is all about reciprocity in our place in this world, in the web of nature.

Speaking of nature and these wild spaces, not everyone has access to nature or land to grow on. I feel like we are in a privileged place to be here and having the access that we do, so when you look towards people who maybe live in urban environments, how do you recommend that the engagement happens with these practices?

It's a wonderful question. Of course, there are so many possibilities here from square foot gardening to vertical gardening and container gardening, and sharing community garden spaces. But the one that I want to highlight in particular here is, first of all, engaging with weeds, which is going to look It's different for everybody depending on your access, and your mobility, and your climate, and your city, and other variables. But I want to assure everybody listening that there is always a way to connect with plants in your area, even if it doesn't look like physically taking them, and harvesting them, and using them up. I think being open to creativity here is the key, because a harvest might look different in certain areas, right? You might harvest the joy that you experience when you're becoming friends with that particular dandelion that's growing through the crack in your sidewalk outside of your apartment. Or you might harvest a feeling, a sense compensation of connection with nature, which we know is beneficial for mind and body, or a photo, or a journal entry, or a drawing of a plant or a patch near you. It really takes some creativity. And on a very practical level, another idea that I love for city dwellers is joining wildcrafting or foraging groups that actually map out harvestable plants and going together as a group to collect them. There's a website called FallingFruit. Org that puts wildcrafters and little groups together and goes to map out, you know, a persimmon tree, for example, in your city. Or Find a Forager is another resource that you can search online to become part of a group of like minded foraging folks.

In the first 10 years of my practice, I lived in an urban environment. I was in Philadelphia, and it was hard. I would go for plant walks with one of my early teachers, and we'd learn what was around, whether it was like celandine or the wild lettuce or the plantain or the violets, and trying to see who's there. But then there is also that consideration of we're in this urban environment. There's brown zones. There is so much street traffic, and it's risky. But nonetheless, you cultivate, like Heather was saying, you cultivate a relationship with that plant. That is just such an invaluable component of your herbal practice is to know what that plant looks like as it's growing, whether it's from the sidewalk or if it's in a meadow or in a forest. It doesn't matter so much because you're really getting to know all the variable context mix of how this plant can behave. And I think that that's really beautiful. And for me, too, in that early practice, living in an urban environment, it was just teas and tinctures all the time. It was really hard for me to really be able to go out and make a garden tea. Right now, I am so privileged to go out and just snip little bits from the garden for my tea every day. And not having access to that was a limitation to the development of my practice. And so like Heather was saying, it's really important to find some of the plant people in your neighborhood because they're always there. The people to take you on walks or to take you into the parks and to explore in a way that is, yeah, just very somatic because if you're only reading, if you're only studying, and if it's only conceptual, it just takes away so much from your experience. And I want to say that maybe we're not going to be consuming some of our plants, but make yourself bouquets from some of the wild plants that you see growing from the sidewalks or in the park, and just bringing that little bit of life, that little bit of these seeing, feeling, responsive organisms into your home and having a relationship with them that way is also really beautiful. Then I think besides the consumptive practices of taking them as teas or tinctures or oils or honeys or whatever is making things like little poppits or the types of smoke wands or wreaths or these types of things that you can hang in your house to have relationship with these wild plants that you harvested that doesn't always look like perhaps herbalism, but it is herbalism. If you're still interacting with the plants and you're interacting with the vital force of these creatures in a way that's affecting you, that is herbalism right there. It's a really beautiful way to engage with the wild plants and who they are in your ecosystem.

First step, if you have a lawn, kill it. Get rid of your lawn, start planting native plants. Anywhere you can find them, any little scrap, even if it's in the little meridian on the side of the road. Do a little guerrilla gardening. Start throwing some native plant seeds out there. And this is a criticism I don't just have of urban spaces or whatever, but this is a criticism I have of just herbalists in general. Something I notice in the community is there's a lack of knowledge of botany and ecology. It's all about, how do these plants heal me? How are they good for me? How can I consume them? And it's such a consumptive thing. And for me,

It's just botany and ecology are at the core foundation of my herbal education. So I have a bit of a different perspective, but it's like, if you're in an urban space, there's tons of things. There's things popping up through the sidewalk. I was looking at the side of my truck mirror the other day, and I saw that there's a lichen growing on it. Life is finding a way to come through the cracks of our urban spaces and just have it be a common thing. Like, oh, what is this growing out of the cracks? It's like, oh, there's an abandoned building over here with some weeds growing out front. What are these plants? Start taking some pictures of them. Ask questions. Go on identification forums. Maybe post on iNaturalist.

When you find an identification, like, oh, well, what is this called? What plant family is it in? What plant is it associated with? Is it native or non-native? Oh, wow. How did a plant from Eurasia end up here in the backyard in Detroit, Michigan. And on the thing of Detroit, Michigan, my buddy Ja Schindler, who is an amazing mushroom cultivator who lives out here in Oregon, he said he's never seen more turkey tail, Trametes versicolor, in his entire life than he did in Detroit, Michigan. So even in these heavily industrialized, the motor city, these areas, there's still plant, mushroom, fungal life just booming. And so I think taking away of just how can we harvest, make herbal medicine to just like, how can we cultivate more native plants in our spaces? How can we get to know about the ecology? What plants are adaptive enough to undergo the disturbances of an urban ecology? And becoming an urban ecologist, an urban botanist, I think is a really great foot in your door.

Logan, I feel like that is a really fun answer for me because I actually became an herbalist in Detroit, Michigan. In downtown Detroit in a collective living house with 14 of my closest friends. And we are growing our own vegetables. We have goats and we have chickens, and I'm learning how to grow cucumber for the first time and seeing kale in real life growing as a plant. I was so incredibly taken with this gardening, cultivating practice that I was like, if these plants are so great, what about all these other ones that are around? Then moving into the urban space around this house in Detroit and learning the plants and definitely seeing blue vervain popping out of the sidewalks in Detroit and the turkey tails in the abandoned lot across the street where the pheasants ran every morning. I mean, there is wildness in these spaces. You do have to find it. I would just say that you don't always want to consume it based on knowing the soils in these urban environments. But you can absolutely discover your path to herbalism through this. I remember I picked up a copy of Botany in a Day, and that was the start of it for me.

I'm really glad to hear all of your perspectives on this and really opening up the door to folks who may be living in places where they feel like they don't have access to nature. One of the things that we find ourselves when we are not able to access wild harvested or cultivated herbs is turning towards commerce, which obviously has a place for all of us. I want to hear from you guys, how can we tell in commerce the state of our herbs, if they're ethically sourced and fair-grown from your perspective?

Yeah, this is a really hard one because in many places, companies are not beholden to share where they source from. I think that's one of the first steps is to try to see where is this plant cultivated? What is the social situation, the socioeconomic of the economic reality of the country where your plants are coming from? Many plants, especially if we're working with Ayurvedic plants or Chinese plants or even things that are coming from the tropics, these would be countries that are perhaps economically considered the Global South. Therefore, people being paid a lot less. In many places, there are... Migrant labor is real everywhere that we go around the world. Often, these are exploited peoples. I think it's really, really important to consider who are the migrants coming in. Is it North Africans coming into Southern Europe or Latinos coming into the United States? Is it Filipinos coming into Germany or Turks coming into Germany? There's a lot of... Humans have always moved around the world, and humans, unfortunately, economically have been exploited. This also takes a place in herbalism as well. I think if we are and feel that if we're consuming plants that were grown by people suffering, we are going to be affected by that. Maybe not constituent to constituent, but energetically, for sure. I do feel as an herbalist that the vital force of these plants are affected by humankind, especially when you look at something like the cannabis industry and the paranoia and the plastic and the chemicals. It takes a really beautiful plant and it perverts it in a way.

I think as we are trying to find our ethical plants, we have to really do some digging into the companies, into the countries, into the bioregions, going to those organizations that we mentioned earlier, especially one like FairWild, where they talk about their producers, where so much of our licorice, for example, is wildcrafted, not cultivated. And so which brands are working with the FairWild organization? Going to your local apothecary and asking, where do you get your plants from? And are they getting them from Pacific Botanicals? It's a good company. It's not a bad one at all. Are they getting them from Mountain Rose I work with Anima Mundi a lot in their apothecary here. I'm very good friends with Adriana. We were neighbors for a long time. And I know, I see the farms where she's sourcing from and the effort that she puts in as a formulator, as a brand owner, they really take the next step. Often that will be reflected in the cost of the herbs or the mushrooms as well. I think that that's something to consider. Of course, if we're buying from the Jeff Bezos Boutique, we may sometimes have to do that. If it's what works for our pocketbooks or our bank account, then that's also something to take into consideration because we're not always able to afford the headiest organic certified fair trade stuff out there. But nonetheless, we still want to practice and we may need that herb. There's a lot of consideration. I don't want to tell people, don't buy that because you can't afford it or don't buy it because it's not certified. A lot of small producers, for example, cannot afford certification, and they should not be punished economically because of that.

This is where we can, again, that global, local perspective of like, yeah, sometimes I do buy. One of the herbs I buy the most in commerce is tulsi. Again, like I said, because I'm just not cultivating enough for the amount that I like to take of it. And so I buy from Organic India, which is a women's cooperative. It's fair trade, it's organic, I'm sure it's monocropped, and it's hard to avoid that in certain cases. And so I think there is a series of questions to ask yourself as you're purchasing. And I think one of the first steps is go to your local apothecary and start to investigate the brands and ask questions of the buyers that are in your health food stores or in your apothecary and where they're sourcing from and what type of... A lot of those people have received a high amount of education from the brands themselves, telling the stories of the farmers or the producers or the labs where things are being grown in. So I think that those are some of the considerations to have as you're purchasing plants.

So I want you all to imagine you're sitting at the bus station in downtown Detroit, and someone comes up next to you. They're like, "Hey, hey." "What?" "Come here, come here." "What is it?" They open up their jacket like, "Hey, look, I just got some ginseng. I went over and I hopped into the protected plant preserve, dug up as much as I could possibly get, hopped over the fence, and got here. Would you like to buy some? I'll give you a discount." No one's going to tell you that. No one's going to tell you that they're getting these protected plants. They're going to say, oh, no, it's sustainably wild-harvested. It was ethically wildcrafted. They're going to try to get as many certifications as they can to prove that they've done all these things. No one's going to be like, oh, yeah. It's like, they're going to sell whatever message that they know people want to hear. And it almost makes you think, I believe it was Laozi who said, I'll paraphrase here, but something along, when you write something into law, the first thing that people are going to do is like, how can I find a way to skirt around this? How can I do the bare minimum to get what I want out of this? And so I think about that with a lot of certifications, and that's why we're always coming up with more because it's just like, oh, we see all these problems with the organic farming because they can do all these other practices that are so good. The water may be contaminated with pesticides. Now you have to get the regenerative farming certification, and now people are doing that. I'm not saying certification is a bad thing necessarily, but people are just going to try to skirt by the minimum to get these certifications to prove themselves.

And for me, it's like building one-on-one relationships. For me in my own practice, maybe that's a privilege myself, I'm able to build relationships with other herbless and other people. And sometimes when I don't have an herbalist who has what I want, I talk to my buddy, Kyle Denton, at Tippecanoe Herbs because I wanted some Solomon's seal. And that's an herb I know I don't have it growing around here. I know his practices. He tells me his practices. He and I are close. We're dear friends. We love each other. So I can get herbs from him. However, sometimes there will be times when I'm like, oh, remember a few years back, I really needed some black walnut hull tincture. I can't remember what it was for. I had some client who had something going on. And rather than going to the company that had the most certifications, I went on Etsy. And you find these little descriptions, someone's like, oh, yeah, I harvest these black walnut hulls. It came off a tree that's a couple of centuries old. It's on this old farmstead. And I harvested. These are the ratios. They had a picture of them harvesting. They had a picture of the tree itself. And they're even like, oh, yeah. And there's no cell reception. So if you're into the EMF thing, that's not there, too. You get all these little details, and that's why I like buying from small herb growers as much as I possibly can and people who are just out there wildcrafting. And so making relationships and finding people who are doing that work, and maybe just having some fun reading some funny descriptions on Etsy, too, and seeing these really small scale people who are just trying to... They're so small that they can actually put in the time and attention. That's why I tell people, it's like you buy from me, it's like, the time and attention takes years, and I'm the only one harvesting all these herbs, and you can't really buy that no matter how many certifications you have. But we all got to do what we can do. I buy from Mountain Rose Herbs, too. So it's a great company as well.

My answer for this, because you all got it covered, is just a shout out to if this is a topic that interests you, I can't talk about it without just mentioning that there are two Herbarium intensives that really shed light on this critical topic of herbs and commerce, and how to discern what is good and what is not so good. And it's just such a big topic. There's no possible way to cover it, but really in-depth. One that we have in The Herbarium that we've worked so hard on is called The Sustainable Herbal Supply Chain Intensive. And it's actually with Ann Armbrecht, Dr. Ann Armbrecht, who has an incredible book on this topic called The Business of Botanicals. And it really goes into her site visits all throughout the globe of what is actually happening on these herb farms that produce, say, the tulsi that you get in your Sleepy Time Tea at the grocery store. So that is one. The other one is called the Sustainable Herbalism Intensive. It's also housed within our learning library within The Herbarium. And it just really goes through the details of so many of these factors and variables and considerations that you want to look out for. Because I know for me, I consider myself a discerning consumer, but there are so many things that I wouldn't even think about that are in, like Sarah was talking about, the FairWild. FairWild is based in Europe, and they have what's called the wild dozen, which is these key twelve plants to look out for that are probably in products that you use in your home and just to be watched out for because they're likely to have been unsustainably wildcrafted in some way. And like you mentioned, Sarah, licorice is one of those, and then frankincense, and even shea butter, spikenard, and goldenseal, and devil's claw, and juniper. These are just things that—I'm a discerning consumer, I wouldn't think to think of shea butter and so I know other people haven't as well. And it's just good to have a basic awareness of those. So dive into those two intensives if you want to learn more. I learned so much by taking those. So much good information, everyone. I will also note that we do have Steven Yeager on this conference for a talk all about plant sourcing and regulations, basically what every herbalist should know. So check that out if you haven't yet.

All right, let's wrap this up, everyone. It has been so beautiful. I want you to provide one final piece of advice or message about harvesting for our audience, doing so in relationship with the plants. Thank you so much, everyone, for your time in watching this.

Just get outside as much as possible. We spend so much time in front of the computer, and I'm grateful for your time in supporting this conference in front of your screen, but take some breaks and just go out and observe the plants. Remember that herbalism is a sensuous experience, so it's touching, it's tasting, it's smelling, it's observing, it's feeling into the ecosystem. This is just like as we make our acquaintances and we make our really deep friends. It's a very similar process to doing with the plants. So just get out as much as you can. And if you're in urban environments, really try to tune your eyes to the green. Look at what's growing out of the sidewalks, out of the sides of the abandoned buildings, getting into the parks, what's in the yard even, or in these little green pathways in between the highway and just take some time and really see what's there. Even if you don't recognize who it is, you don't know the name, you don't know what it does or anything like that, it doesn't matter. It's about tuning your eyes to these other creatures that are present in your world.

Yeah, for me, I would probably say learn some botany. I feel like that is just such an intimate way to connect with plants because some people tell me they have like, oh, I have this deep, intimate relationship, this spiritual connection to this plant, and it feels so in-depth. I'm like, oh. And you're like, oh, does it have alternate or opposite leaves? I don't know. How many stamens does it have? How many petals does it have? It's like you're saying you have a best friend, but you don't never notice that they wore glasses. And I think there's just something really intimate about just getting to notice all these various aspects of the plant, the way it grows, where it likes to grow, and just getting to know about its morphology and its ecology. And for those who are like, oh, I'm more spiritually inclined, not into science. And it's like, well, spiritual is hidden within the material. Materiality shows us the spiritual dimension. And by noticing these little nuances like, oh, why does it have these little pink stamens here? And why does the stamens come out fused together into awns or pores? It's just these little characteristics, and getting to know the plant families as well, especially when we're talking about building relationships, I think that these plants come from huge evolutionary lineages, and you can look at them and be able to understand who they're related to, where they come from. And this opens up this whole realm of history that you wouldn't normally have access to. And as you walk through the world, it's almost like stepping out of the matrix, and you no longer see the wall of green, and you're just like, drive by botanizing. Oh, my God, look at that. Was that a Violaceae? You want to pull over and go check out these little things. So I'd say just start learning all these more botanical and ecological characteristics of the plants, because I feel like it gives you a whole new way of relating to plants rather than just, how can I consume them for my benefit?

I love that answer so much, Logan. Part of me tends to overcomplicate things, so I'm going to keep this really simple and say that the simple unlocks the key to the complex, right? If you focus on three different plants through all four seasons or however many seasons you have in your region that grow near you, three plants, four seasons, observe them, focus on them, build relationships with them. That is all. Because in our world of herbalism, there can be so much discrepancy between you're an herbalist, you're not an herbalist. What does that even mean to be an herbalist? Did you drink coffee this morning? Hey, you're an herbalist. Did you maybe drink a beer last night? It was made with hops. You're an herbalist. Did you put some black pepper on your eggs this morning? You're probably an herbalist. Did you put some cinnamon on your apple slices? You're an herbalist. So if any of those criteria fit you, just remind yourself that it doesn't have to be complicated to be an herbalist. You're already doing it. Three plants, four seasons. Go pretend that you're friends with them. That's all.

These are all such great answers. Thank you, everyone, so much. Before we go, I want to make sure that we take a moment for all of you to tell us where our listeners can find you out in the world and the work that you are doing.

Yeah, so my name is Logan Keister, and I run my own small business called Noti Botanica. That's N-O-T-I Botanica. And for those of you are wondering, Noti is the town I was born and raised in, is still where I have my main medicinal herb farm, and I do a lot of my harvesting practice, so very much a bioregional herbalist. If you want to find me, I'll be at this year's Northwest Herbal Fair, the Good Medicine Confluence, and I'll be on the special gardening course that we're generating with the Herbal Academy, where I have a whole written portion on permaculture for the herbalist, as well as a series of videos. So I'm really excited for that. Otherwise, keep up with my latest activities on my website, NotiBotanica. Com, or follow me on Instagram and all the usual socials.

Awesome. My name, again, is Heather Wood Buzzard, and you can find me most often in our learning library of Herbal Academy, which is called The Herbarium. Got my hands in lots of projects over there. I'm also proud that my book came out last year. My book is called the National Geographic Backyard Guide to Edible Wild Plants by myself and my incredible co-author, Mimi Prunella Hernandez. So you can find the Nat Geo Backyard Guide to Edible Wild Plants anywhere books are sold. You can find me at @PlantsandStory on Instagram or @RedMoonHerbs or on my website, HeatherWoodBuzzard. Com. And thank you, everyone.

I'm Sarah Wu, your friendly village witch. You can find me at VillageWitch. Org. I am a writer, I'm a teacher, I'm a clinical and a community herbalist. I teach in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Portugal, Italy. I'm all over the world. I actually don't come to the US very much, so you can't find me there, but you can find me online. So I teach in person as well as online with various programs from The Herbarium and Herbal Academy to the School of Sacred Wild with Anima Mundi and a bunch of our other friends that we can find here around Costa Rica. I teach in both Spanish and English, so if you're looking for that. I'm a clinical herbalist, like I said, and I love seeing clients and helping you out. You can find me at my website as well as all the socials. Thank you.

Thank you all so much. You three are not only incredible herbalists, but incredible educators. I'm so grateful for your time and your teaching today. I definitely want to plug that all of us are educators over at the Herbal Academy, as we've stated, so you'll definitely find us there. Thank you, everyone, for your energy today. It's been wonderful. Thank you.