How To Make A Kid’s Fairy Garden With Foraged Materials
Raise your hand if you want to live in a tiny mushroom house in a magical forest (ME)! Surrounded by regal trees, waking up to dewy moss, serenaded by nature’s creatures…ah, the stuff fairytales are made of. According to my five-year-old, building a fairy house brings fairies to your house. Naturally, with that profound logic,…
Agni: Understanding the Digestive Fire
Digestive fire or digestive strength is discussed with some frequency across different herbalism and wellness traditions. However, oftentimes we don’t take the time to really break down our understanding of what is meant by digestive fire. Ayurveda has a unique, well-articulated, and beautifully poetic model for understanding digestive wellness. In Ayurveda, one’s agni (digestive fire)…
How to Make Oak Gall and Coreopsis Botanical Paint with Rebecca Desnos
With the launch of our new Botanical Drawing for Herbalists Course, we’ve been extra inspired by projects that involve making ink and dyes from plants. For this project, we teamed up with plant dyer and author Rebecca Desnos to learn how to make botanical paint from oak galls and coreopsis flowers. You can start your…
Undercover Women: Historic Botanical Illustrators
In the modern age, the title of “artist” is an acceptable profession for both male and female persons, but it wasn’t always this way. Historically, the art world was a male-dominated one. This was most likely due to the fact that men were considered the “breadwinners” of the family while women tended to more domestic…
Planting the Rainbow: Incorporate Plants Into Your Garden Based On the Color of the Blooms
Gardening is a hobby that can fulfill both the utilitarian as well as the aesthetic sensibilities within the human soul, but you don’t always find both in the garden. I grew up with gardens that were either designed around production and output or designed for aesthetic purposes. However, you don’t have to choose. Planting the…
The Father of Medicine: Was Hippocrates an Herbalist?
“Where there is love for mankind, there is love for art of healing.” – Hippocrates Considered the father of medicine, Hippocrates was a renowned ancient Greek physician and teacher born on the island of Kos in the Aegean Sea. He lived during the Classical Period of ancient Greece, which was a time marked by a…
Herbal Academy Student Feature: Farai Harreld (@thehillbillyafrican)
We sat down with Herbal Academy graduate, Farai Harreld, to learn more about her herbal journey. Farai enjoys teaching folk herbal remedies on her Patreon channel called Folk Herbalism. She has completed Herbal Academy’s Botanical Skin Care, Foraging, and Mushroom courses. You can also find herbal inspiration on her Instagram account, @thehillbillyafrican. HA: Please tell…
Gardening By the Moon: How Lunar Planting Deepens Your Relationship With the World You Live In
When we hear a phrase like “gardening by the moon,” it can elicit mystical and magical thoughts. However, this is an ancient (rather than new age) method for managing agricultural work that continues to be a tool for farmers today. One of the most popular planting guides ever produced, The Old Farmers Almanac, uses lunar…
Tribute to Herbal Academy’s Founder and Director, Marlene Adelmann
To Our Herbal Academy Community: It is with very heavy hearts that we share the news of the passing of our Founder and Director, Marlene Adelmann, at age 67. For the last year and a half, she bravely battled a rare form of cancer with a strength so characteristic of the woman she was. …
Reconnecting With Nature Through DIY Skin Care
Now that it’s the wintertime, I’ve had to up my DIY skin care routine due to increased dryness and irritation. At first, it seemed like a chore, but skin care has now become something I find very meditative and relaxing. Being able to source many of these ingredients directly from the earth has allowed me…
