From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
This is John Gallagher from learning herbs dot com. My guest today joining us from her home at the Save Mountain Herbal Retreat Center in Vermont is Rosemary Gladstar, and the class she's sharing tonight is wild greens and spring remedies. Rosemary Gladstar is the author of many books, including Rosemary Gladstar's medicinal herbs, a beginner's guide, and Herbal Healing for Women. Rosemary has been inspiring herbalists for nearly forty years with the herbal schools, conferences, organizations, and companies she's founded from the California School of Herbal Studies to traditional medicinals to United Plant Savers. And one of the conferences she founded is the International Herb Symposium, which is happening June twenty eighth to the thirtieth near Boston at Wheaton College. And, we are here to celebrate this great event tonight.
So welcome, Rosemary.
Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
And so, anyhow, how's it going up there in Vermont? Is it quite, we're talking about spring tonight, but, has it spring there yet?
Oh, god. It makes me chuckle. It is spring. You know, our days are longer. The weather's warming up. But up on the mountain where I live, we still have snow outside. So I'm still yearning for those early spring greens that most of the country is out already digging and harvesting.
But, yes, when it comes here, it's very riotous. It just comes full blown and it takes over, but it's slow. So yeah, I mean, I think for all of us who have gone through a long winter, just like our ancestors, we are hungry both on a physical and emotional level to be out there with our green friends.
And I think they're that way with us as well. It's just it's a traditional time when herbalists would go out and start to collect those greens and make you know cook with them certainly and make our remedies.
And it's been something that we shared with our ancestors around the world. So it's always you know just personally it's such a great feeling to go out there in the early spring days and see what's poking up and to nibble on the little things and then to watch them grow and then watching to sort of carpet the earth. So it's an incredible time of renewal and rejuvenation and rebirth and cleansing. I know some herbalists don't like that thought of the cleansing, but really when you look at all of nature, both the spring and the fall are a time and in the natural cycles of things that we kind of let go of things, we clean, we maybe eat a little lightly as our bodies are naturally cleansing.
Animals do the same thing. So it's not a matter of thinking of things as being toxic or dirty or in any means like that. It's just a matter of, again, just observing the cycles of nature and utilizing those natural things around us to enhance our life force. So we'll talk a little bit about that also.
I also wanted to in this time that we have together, I wanted to share a little bit about some of the ethics and considerations about going out and harvesting so that we share just that ethical responsibility we have to our green community.
But I think we'll just start by sharing looking at our yards and seeing what might be poking up. As I said right now, I'm looking at snow banks. But I grew up on the West Coast and I've spent a lot of time traveling in parts of the world. And I also, every spring when things finally do come up here I am out there looking at them.
So I have a really good idea what's coming up in your backyards anyway. And almost everything that's coming up right now, both the weedy species and the native species make fabulous medicine and food for us. And so we'll start by just looking in our backyard. And so for most of us, the enemy lines poking up, it's one of those new greens that come up shortly after the weather warms and the snows have melted.
And I would imagine that most of the listeners are really familiar with that plant because it's just one of the number one best plants on the planet.
I remember not so long ago, it's a few years ago, we were doing one of our international symposiums and we were following along on the heels of this brilliant botanist and elder from China who was highly regarded by all these international herbalists. And she was a professor at Harvard and also, she was also the curator of the Arnold Arboretum. So she was giving us a tour through this magnificent collection of plants. And when we were all done, there were about forty of the teachers standing around her.
And cascade Anderson happened to ask her, of all these plants, Doctor. Hu, that you showed us in your garden, which is your very favorite? And without missing a beat Doctor. Hu replied, why dandelion of course. And that's how important it is both as a food and a medicine. And I would say right now to focus on its food properties like it's nutritionally dense, just rich in Vitamin A that's healing to all of our helpful and healing to all of our membranes.
It's abundant, so we never have to worry about over harvesting it or decreasing the population.
Partly that is because it has a really magnificent strong propagation method and seed method. So it's ensuring its vitality by being very adaptive to where it grows, very adaptive to the type of soil it grows on. It reminds me a lot of how white people are. You know, if you just move in anywhere and colonize, But it also is a very beautiful plant and it brings cheer. I think in the plant signature of it is that it's cheerful. So after long winter, a long winter of rain, if you live on the West Coast or snow if you live on the East and anywhere in between, if you live between, our bodies and our souls are hungering for that bright bit of sunshine.
So on that level, it's just good to go out and eat. But as far as nutrient dense properties of Dandelion, it's so great.
So abundant, available, it's a bitter. It's a wonderful bitter and it stimulates digestion.
The bitters are so needed by our body, especially our bodies here in the West where we're so used to sweet and salty. Bitter often doesn't taste good to us. For many parts of the world, bitter is just as pleasant as they sweet it. They look forward to the taste of bitter.
And they may not recognize this so much intellectually, but their bodies know that that substance that bitter substance, the chemical constituents of bitter are necessary in the deepest level to us. So it's such a great herb. I mean, you can't speak about it enough. As Doctor. Hu said, what's your favorite plant? Why dandelion for certain?
And Mine too.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a good one. And of course, you don't want to ignore the root. The root, especially this time of year, is still fairly tender.
It's still it will be bitter but not overly bitter as it gets when it develops as it ages through the summertime. So this is a really good time to be out digging those dandelion roots and harvesting the leaves and flowers.
There's many people are trained that when a plant is in flower most of its energy, most of its vitality is in the flower. So if you're harvesting roots and leaves it's better to get them before their flower. But certain plants like dandelion and many of the mints, you don't want to pay attention to those rules. If you paid attention to that rule with dandelion, you'd never be able to harvest because it's in flower at least three fourths of the year. But Laura, you're really looking more than any particular rule is when the part of the plant that you want is strongest and really dandelion is going to be very strong, very potent even when it's in flower. So I would say the ideal might be if you can gather your roots when the plant isn't in flower, but really it's quite fine even in flower to go out and dig some and saute and add it to your carrots, add them to your soups.
I like to pickle them actually. It's one of the ways I really like the dandelion leaves and the roots is to pickle them, which I'll talk about methods of preparation later.
I I love one of my favorites is Kimberly, just the other night. I come eating some greens, some steamed greens, and just stir fried some little bits of roots and threw it in there, and I just love that flavor.
I know. It's wonderful. Yeah. And your and your body, your taste buds, you train them. Like, you know, the first time people tasted coffee, for instance, it wasn't gonna taste good. It's very bitter and acrid and so people get used to these flavors and of course getting used to a cup of dandelion or pot of dandelion soup is much better than getting used to that accurate bitterness of coffee, I would believe anyway.
So, and then plantain is another one of course, it's a cousin, not related necessarily to dandelion, but always found in the same kind of habitat as abundant. Again, it has a seed head that produces just hundreds and hundreds of seeds and it has the ability to survive in lots of different habitats, which I always think is very important when we are harvesting things to think about the energetics of the plant. The old way that people observed that was you called it the doctor of signature kind of been simplified to say like what plant looks like a lung so therefore it's good for lungs or have spots on the leaves.
You know, therefore it's good for spots on the skin. I'm just joking it out. But it was much deeper than that. It was observing the entire energetics of the plant. It wasn't so much visually how it looked.
Though there might be mirrors of the human body in that, it was more really where it was growing, how it was growing, whether it grew early in the season, whether it was robust. There was a whole system and it was developed over really many, many lifetimes as people observe these plants. We still have those skills and as we've rather forgotten them because we spend so much time looking at little tiny computer screens or little tiny words and not looking at the bigger picture of nature.
It's just important to take that time and that's why going out now and harvesting and being with the plants are always reminding us, always teaching us. So plantain also has a very robust energy and it's very prolific and it's another one of those plants that we don't have to worry about over harvesting.
Fact, I think it does well when we use it. In fact, when you look at both dandelion and plantain and most of the plants I'm going to mention right now, they position themselves near people and oftentimes in areas where we've done major disturbances. So you'll find them next to parking lots and old empty lots and you'll find them in soil that's been plowed over etcetera.
They like disturbance, they like things that have been changed. They're not like hungering for the old growth forest and for undisturbed territory.
So in that sense they're also really good for a lot of our common everyday illnesses.
We've evolved in relationship to the medicine of these plants and perhaps in some way that we're not aware of they in relationship to us as well.
So I think of it, you know, when we talk about plantain, we think of it as the primary boo boo plant. You know, children learn it that way, right? Your kids probably learn it that way.
So, you know, and it's so effective for that. It's kind of one of the very first plants that the mother or the father or the grandparents use on their grandkids and you get a bee sting and you put a little plantain pocus on and within about an hour, sometimes even sooner than that the pain is gone where these things generally aren't a problem for most people unless you have a severe allergic reaction, but they can be painful for a full day, sometimes up to two or three days. So you put a plantain poultice on and it's gone in twenty minutes. Kids are really impressed by that.
And it's often the first herb that people use in their salves. It was my first herb, one of my first herbs and it still is one of the herbs I always go to. It's a very, very powerful detoxifier to the system. Your term would be blood purifier.
It really altered the condition of the blood.
And I'd like to mention, we think of it normally for things like wounds and cuts, insect bites, bee stings, etcetera.
But when my husband was hit by a brown recluse spider bite a couple of years ago, it was the primary herb I used.
And he had full recovery. It was a very severe bite with enormous amount of swelling. We also used in all honesty, we also used, I had antibiotics but when the antibiotics weren't working as well as they should then we went ahead and I was using the plantain but I upped the plantain and I also used another herb, a resin called Dragon's Blood that my friend Rocio had given to me. So that was a really great example of the power of plantain. But also plantain is really good to put in food. It's a little tough and fibrous and it's been a lot of time to people to go bitter, bitter.
And but again, it's it's one of those good bidders. It's a good bidder for us.
And should I just keep going, John, on the Yeah.
Well, you have this great list and I just think they're just great ones and so many of these are grow all over.
So They yeah.
D'Align, plantain and Yeah. What else?
And and maybe I won't quite so long with each of them. That's the thing about these plants. I'll just touch on them. But, and I did think of those plants that were going to be found everywhere.
As soon as the snow's not, we'll find them up here too. So I'll just speak a little bit quicker about each one of them. One is self heal prunella vulgaris.
It's way underused in our Materia Medica, but it's one of my beloved plants and in fact it's always been a plant ally of mine since I was very small. It's a plant that you find in all lawns.
If you let your lawn go within a week or two you'll see that beautiful little mint, typical purple flowers that square stem, opposite alternating leaves, they're all meant to have.
And that's a little self heal. And even that title should make us sit back and go any plant that was titled self heal has to mean that was really valuable.
And again, it's a nice little herb that you can steam, you can add the herbs to salads, you can saute it, it's tasty.
But primarily it's just an amazing medicine for the immune system, for colds and flus, for the lymphatic system.
I think we just need to explore the use of it more. There's a wonderful herbalist up in Canada named Carol Gagnon, who teaches at a number of the conferences and stuff. She's a young brilliant herbalist and she's been using a lot of self heal in her practice and is kind of you know bringing it back to people's consciousness so and then metal of course.
Well, I just have a self heal, I mean when you're using it, so we're just talking about, do you think it's a good tonic, like a regular long term, like, just tea since we're talking the mint family, or would you add some to, nourishing infusion regularly, or is it more you know, or is it is it more of, like, a long term strengthener? Is it something that you take short term?
Well, you can use it every you know, you could use it every day. It's one of those herbs you can throw into your teas with red clover and nettle and alfalfa and thickweed, definitely you can use that. But it's also it's one of those crossover plants. You can use it as a tonic, as a rejuvenating herb, but it's also a wonderful medicine for specific illnesses given very specified dosages over a period of time. And primarily for things like for the immune system and lymphatic, for colds and flus, it's really excellent.
You'll find literature about it in the older herb books like the textbooks that were written in the 1800s and the early 1900s, but you usually don't find it in the modern books.
Alright.
So and then my the next plant on my list is absolutely one of my favorites. It's another of my allied plants, and I think it's, you know, kind of become one of these very well known herbs again is nettle.
I've been eating nettle soup all week. Yeah.
Oh, I'm so jealous. I just, you know, how I have my nettles, how I get my fresh nettles is in the spring of last year, I pickle, several quarts of them. I learned this from one of my early teachers back in, like, the nineteen seventies, a a man named Doctor. Swabel Brooks and he would take fresh nettle and he would layer it in both olive oil or vinegar whichever, you can do both. And then he would just put it in a cold place and then the following year when you're just craving fresh greens you have this delicious nettle and after it sits in that after it infuses in either the olive oil or the vinegar, it loses its sting. You have to leave it in there for a little while.
So then I can just eat that, but I'm all out of that now. So I'm waiting for our fresh nettle.
Nettle is another one of those amazing fooders. It's high in iron, high in calcium, incredibly rich in trace minerals that are missing in people's diets.
And then it's of course and so it's just and it's a tasty green. Once you steam it, which I think that's the only counter indication, the only warning that comes with it is you have to steam it otherwise you're going to get stung.
Right.
There are a few brave hearted herbalists like myself who occasionally eat it raw, but it's the show off, you know, and I do know occasional few show off herbalists have gotten welted in their mouth from eating it. So, you know, what it is is that anybody can do it, but, the point is why. But it has little hairs on it that are like needle like projections and they're filled with formic acid. It's actually the same acid that's in bee stings and ants and ant bites. And so if when that brushes up against you, it's released and you get these big wells.
So, when you take metal and you crush it or you roll it really tightly and you break all those hairs up, you release that acid, you don't get stung by it.
So anyway, but nettle is also one of those herbs that cross over from being a delicious food to a specific medicine.
So For for food though, how simple is it to to eat it? Like, what's a way it's just the simplest way you can imagine just, having some if you find it.
Yeah. You know, my I can I have so many recipes? My very favorite though is to go out and pick a large grocery bag because it will reduce just like spinach. It reduces down to this tiny amount, like two or three servings.
So you pick a big grocery bag of ideally the young tips. And you usually hear most people will warn against using it when it gets older because some of the chemicals can get pretty strong on it and it can be a little irritating. But really I spent months at a time living on nothing but wild foods. I've done long backpack trips and long horseback trips and I've eaten nothing but wild food and I've eaten old nettle and I've never ever had a problem.
And when my nettle gets old here, old meaning that it starts to go into seed and stuff, I've eaten it up here a lot too because our winters are so long that I want to take as much of this wild stuff into my body as I possibly can. So, but the idea is to pick those fresh tips and then you want to steam it and you steam it well. If you're cooking up a big shopping bag full, you're going to want to toss it a little bit inside because if it packs down in the in your steamer, the inside sometimes doesn't steam well, and there's a possibility that formic acid is just hiding in there waiting to get you.
So stir it around a little bit and make sure it's thoroughly cooked. And then what I like to do is just marinate it with just a little bit of fresh lemon and olive oil instead of cheese. It's just nothing better.
And then of course, you can take that steamed nettle, you can put it in omelets, you can put it in your roll ups, you know, those wonderful roll up sandwiches.
And another famous dish that I love to make, and I've been picking it for, I think, the last thirty years is, like, the Greek spinach pie, spanakopita, but instead of spinach, I use those.
But nettle That's my annual birthday dish, nettle.
We call it nettle kopita.
Yeah.
Yes, it's okay. And then there's also this I love doing this for people because they're just shocked, but you can make, what my friend Janice Scofield called nesto, fresh nettle pesto, where you take the fresh nettle and you put that in a blender with you know, you take a traditional pesto remedy recipe, but instead of using basil, you're going to use fresh nettle. And you use it raw, so of course people are going, what? I'm eating raw nettle?
But again, because you're breaking up those hairs and you break them up quite well in the blender, there's no possibility of getting stung. So you're making a delicious herb paste, and you can eat just tons of nettle that way. And you get you actually for people who are coming into this time of year and they're feeling a little congested, a little worn out, a little lack of vitality, this is a great remedy. Any of the herbs that we're just speaking about, but even just nettle by itself will revitalize your whole physical being.
And on the deepest level, it revitalizes our soul too because those plants have this.
I would just I don't know how to say this in the most incredible way that everybody gets it, but it's almost like every cell in our body is a receptor site for these herbs. We have evolved in relationship to them for so many centuries that our bodies just recognize and you sit down with a cup of nettle self heal dandelion tea and your body is just leaning towards it like a pendulum going in the right direction.
So, and then just a few more that we'll mention Chickweed. This might be a little early for Chickweed. I don't know, have you seen any Jonathan's garden?
Oh yeah, chickweed's been well I left because we just bought a house and we we haven't moved yet but in, in Port Townsend, right, in Washington.
Beautiful area. And, and so we in in in January when we bought the house, we were looking around at the gardens and and and the herb gardens that were there. And the herb gardens was amazing, and there's chickweed growing in January.
So so Oh my goodness.
But, but a lot of people would, like, be going through the house going, like, you know, what kind of windows does it have? What kind of heat? And what happened to the condition? And meanwhile, Kimberly and I are out like, well, look at this chickweed. We'll take it.
For sure. It's we're fine to have for a good standard chickweed.
There needs to be a house hunting show like these shows they have on TV where there's herbalists going around finding houses based on what's weeds are growing in the garden.
Yeah. Really. I agree. It'll happen.
So, you know, it's that's an interesting thing when you say that chickweed you found in January because if you look at the energetics of chickweed, it looks actually like a very delicate and fragile plant. It's kind of it grows along the ground, it's full of water. It's very delicate little flowers. The botanical name, Stellarium Medea means a little star, and everything about it seems delicate. It's actually really a tough plant and it can survive under snow and then just start out fresh in the springtime. Up in our climate because we have such long winters and it gets so cold, it does die that itself sows and it comes up again.
And then again because it's so delicate people will just think well you know it's not a very powerful plant, but it's one of those plants that has this very soft power, it's very gentle and sweet and delicious taste from this very powerful plant. It's one of the best plants we have as an emollient for skin rash, really bad skin rashes and for, very dry skin and for eye agitation, irritation for actually any kind of irritation that has to do with the membrane. Chickweed is going to be soothing both internally and externally.
And it has infection fighting properties. So it's again it's benign and sweet looking, but it's a very strong herb and it's another one of the herbs that we use frequently in salves for rashes and infections.
But it is a delicious herb and if you get it young before it starts getting too leggy, it's a wonderful addition to salads and you can see that it kind of loses its when you steam it, it's so watery anyway. It will cook down to just like a you take a big pot of it, it cooks down to like two tablespoons. But you can eat those two tablespoons and be very nourished.
So, a beautiful incredible plant for most eye infections. It's also really, has a strong affinity for children and skin problems and little babies and stuff. You'll find it a lot in along with calendula and diaper rashes for diaper rashes and baby issues and things.
And then the mighty mallow family, the now BAC family, which is such a benign family. It's one of the only families that I know of that has no talkative members, which is kind of interesting because almost in every family you have the black sheep, you know, you have somebody that's toxic or counter indicative. It makes the family interesting.
Oftentimes, they're the most interesting character in the family.
But, in this family, they're all medicinal and all edible. And so, you know, you have, especially on the West Coast you have all those weedy mallows, the cheese mallows, those beautiful big mallows that are growing and all the empty lots in the towns and you know, old dried up fields that have been plowed and not, you know, re nourished. You go out there and there's mallow reclaiming, rebuilding, and healing the soil.
And it's just delicious. Even when it gets old, it's good. It's a mucilage. It's very soothing. And because it's very rich in that mucilaginous constituent, it has sugar molecules in it that are sweet.
Of course, it's not sweet like sugar, but it's sweet like plants. It's got that and so very good for us and very delicious. It used to be one of the favorite I had this, like, foursome of favorite herbs that I would use in every cooking dish. So I would make cashew mallow soup and you know wonderful stews and wild herb casseroles and mallow was always one of the ingredients in them.
We don't have as many varieties on the West Coast. We do have a couple that are quite prolific here, but some of my favorite weedy species of the mallow are not they're not out here.
So, you're lucky out there, John.
We don't have as much, wild ones as down in, like, California. Yeah. We're going to where it's a little drier, and I think maybe that's the thing.
They provide some soothing energy for a drier So the drying place place. But up here in the total wet, you know, at least in the western cascade area, it's You don't need more slime up there.
We don't need anymore. We got enough slugs. No.
Yeah. Also, to remember that the flowers are also edible. They're as edible as the leaves are. They have a mucilaginum too.
They're a kissing cousin of hibiscus. And actually, there's a beautiful blue malva that's, comes from France. You have to get the seeds. But it's one of my favorite favorite plants to use in teas, the blue malva, like when I'm making a flower tea, because the blue malva turns the water blue.
It's very beautiful.
And I just learned something about that. You know, I've I've been demonstrating making, you know, this wonderful, like, evening tea with relaxing tea like with lemon balm and chamomile roses and all those beautiful fragrant herbs that help us relax. And I always use Malva in it because it's soothing and also just because of that beautiful blue. And then I would demonstrate it.
I would pour the boiling water over it and I would let it seep and it would turn that beautiful blue for, I would say, it just lasts for a few minutes. But this summer, I was making some. I did a cold water infusion and the blue stayed. It didn't go away.
I learned something new. It was pretty exciting.
Yeah. That's cool.
And, of course, miner's lettuce. Now, again, miner's lettuce, we don't have out on the west on the East Coast, but it's prolific right now. It's an early green that's just coming up. When I was a child we'd go out and pick this all the time, you know, and just bring it into the house and eat it. And whenever I'd see it when I was hiking and out in the woods, oh, it was just it's so delicious.
We have a lot of that here. Yeah.
Yeah. And And it also has that little cape of flower, you know, has the cape and then the little, stalk of flowers, which are very edible. So it can dress the salad up. It can make, you know, plain green salad.
It looks so beautiful with those white delicious flowers. It's become quite gourmet. I remember on the West Coast when Tim Blakely, who was a gardener at the California School of Liberal Studies, he started supplying some of the fancy restaurants in San Francisco with all these wild greens, the common greens like this and miner's lettuce is one of the most popular. Oh.
So Yeah. You go to salad mixes. I've gone to salad mixes in fancy markets and stuff, and you look in there and it's lots of chickweed in it.
So Yeah. That's great. And then just a couple more. You know, I wanted to mention that all throughout the country, whether you're from the south or the north or the west or in between, there's a version of wild ramps or wild onions. There's the nodding wild onion that's prolific. I don't know, on the West Coast, a beautiful, delicious smelling onion. There's two things I just want to say about that family is one is that there are some toxic members in that family when you're digging those little bulbs, you need to be careful that you're really getting a wild onion or wild garlic.
It's pretty easy to tell because they'll smell really strongly. If you're picking something that has a little white bulb and has those long blade like onion leaves or allium leaves, and it doesn't smell really like an onion or garlic, you want to avoid that for certain. And then also and of course that goes in the bigger contest of saying that you never want to pick anything unless you really know what you're picking because there's definitely a few toxic plants and a few that are deadly. So that needs to be said. But on with that said, there's also amazing amounts of people who do herb blocks and great books. So the other thing I just want to say with the wild ramps and onions and stuff is they grow from bulbs and if you harvest the bulbs, you're actually taking the life of the plant.
Where you live, it might be abundant. I mean, who would ever consider that nodding wild onion on the California coast would ever become extinct because it grows so prolifically.
But we have spurned generations of herbalists and plant lovers and also in the food industry there's this return to the wild, you go to any restaurant and there is all these wild foods that are being presented.
And actually sometimes you even go into supermarkets and health food stores and you'll see big bins of ramps and fiddlehead ferns. And I really want to question that because there really definitely is not enough growing out there in the wild to supply the public without some major restoration going on.
So every time that we dig the root of a perennial, we take its life force. So in the springtime, the seeds are not developed. You're picking it when it's in flower. So when you're taking the root, you're not receding it. So it's just a consideration. This isn't by any means a scolding and for us not to pick them.
Usually with the nodding wild onions, you're picking the top parts, not the root. But out here on the West and in Extremity and the East Coast and in the South where ramps are so prevalent the wild garlic, they've actually had to ban the harvesting in several of the southern states because Really? Yeah, like in the south where they used to have the ramp festivals and stuff, they're putting a stop to them because the wild ramp populations are in terrible demise. And it's not because so much of the native people, the local people going out and having a ramp festival.
It's because they are supplying supermarkets. Up here, I can go into my regular a regular supermarket, we are not even talking about the health food store and there will be ramps for sale. And I used to go in and I buy them and I take them and replant them because they belong in the woods, they don't belong in the supermarket. But that's not a good practice either because when people think they're selling, right, they think they're selling so then they bring more in.
They buy more, right.
Yes. And it's the same I think it's just something we need to consider like it's the same with the fiddleheads.
They're the big ostrich ferns.
It's definitely it's not the root, but it's the spawn bearing farm.
And every supermarket that you go into in the springtime is loaded with big boxes of these that are all coming, I think from wild sources. Now I want to be quite honest, I haven't done the research on this, but I don't know anybody is growing ostrich ferns for commercial purposes.
I know in our area it's coming from the wilds and there's just not enough to supply that amount of markets and health food stores and fancy restaurants. So it's just something that we need to be considered about.
Right. Because because sometimes you you you or say you're, wanna get into wildcrafting or learning some things and someone will tell you a certain rule like, gather this many in a certain area or something. But but really but really it's, this awareness of your where you live and what's there, the population, your ecology. So it's important to really learn about your environment and your bioregion and the populations before, you know, right, regular harvesting and stuff.
Well, I think it's actually as critical as learning about what's safe and not safe to use, you know, learning, you know, like, we place a lot of emphasis when we teach or when we're learning about herbs, about safety, about counter indications, about how much to use. But as important is knowing the health of the plant community.
And my basic guideline is this, that if it's a weedy species, weedy meaning that it grows in many habitats, it has a very prolific way of propagation.
It's propagated by lots of different kinds of insects and that it has a wide range.
It goes beyond whether or not it's prolific in my area because right now we have to have a bigger picture than just our bio regions. We have to really think about in this bigger picture.
So those weedy species actually as I said they're designed to be used by humans and at this point in our lifetime and probably in our children's lifetime as well, they'll still be in abundance. But the native species that are very habitat specific have a very select way of propagation, and there's still a big demand for them because there's not a lot of people growing them, Those plants we need to be very sensitive. And if I could put a little plug in for United Plant Salas, which is kind of I believe my own personal feeling is that it's sort of the heart and soul of the American herbal consciousness.
It's an organization that's only about the plants. It's really watching out for them.
And I just encourage everybody to be a member of that organization to help it grow.
And really it's just so that we have these plans for future generations of plant lovers, but more importantly for the earth and the animals and the plant communities themselves.
That's really important.
Absolutely.
So and then just a few others and I won't go into them because there was a few other things I wanted to mention besides just the plants themselves. But in the East Coast, anybody who lives on the East Coast, the Marsh Marigold is coming up. It's one of the very first plants that pokes up after the snowsmelt.
When it first comes up, it's very tasty and very delicious. It's a succulent green that was used by all the indigenous people and the native people here. And when I first moved to this area and I didn't know anything about it, it was my neighbors that showed me how to go out and pick it. It does have some toxicity in it.
It belongs to the, the buttercup family. And so it's toxic. So you have to, you have to like, you know, do that old, you kind of boil it a little bit, and throw off the water and boil it again. People always question and say like is there anything left after that?
I think you do boil off. We know that vitamins are very water soluble and heat soluble, but there's some stuff left and it's better than getting the toxins in them. So at least to boil it a couple of times is good.
And then of course in the South, the Poke Greens are coming up. And again, those are fabulous greens. I was just down in the Ozarks last weekend and everybody was getting ready to harvest their poke.
And so and pokeweed also comes with the same warning that it's a wonderful spring green, but it has to be picked at, you know, under six inches.
And, you know, and oftentimes the people there will steam it or boil it a couple of times.
And then my two favorite, Amaranth and Lamb's Quarters, of course, those will be poking up and those are just delicious greens for people who are cooking for families and their children or partners who aren't really interested in wild food, though who wouldn't be I wonder.
Those herbs taste so much like cultivated vegetables that you can hardly tell the difference and they are abundant and weedy. And there are many, many other plants, but those are some of the early spring greens that we are going to be seeing right now. And they will continue to grow all through the season.
A lot of times they get a little tough as the season goes on, but I still I found ways like I can take those old dandelion greens. I've done this so many times for my classes. You know, you find the really big tough ones that they tell you to avoid, and then I steam them. And you can do this with any older greens like the chicory, even the amaranth when it gets a little older.
And, and then marinate it. Make a really nice, like, Italian vinaigrette with olive oil and vinegar or lemon if you prefer. And put in some of your favorite culinary herbs like sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, and a big dollop of honey. I would say go heavy on the honey so it's sweet and kind of tart and oily.
And then marinate your greens in that. Marinate it for a few hours or overnight, and that marinate will take a big bunch of the bitterness out. It will still be bitter, but it's very edible and very delicious.
So we'll talk a little bit maybe what do you think John? Should I talk about preparation and then talk a little bit about remedies? What would you rather do?
That sounds wonderful.
Yes, maybe I'll just talk about I'll just talk a little bit about the various ways that we use these wild greens.
Basically, you want to work with wild greens in much the same way that you do with your garden vegetables.
You prepare them the same way you clean them well. If they are woody or tough or the stems are stringy, like if you collect your nettle for instance and the stems are really stringy, they are not going to cook down. They are going to be stringy even when you steam them, just like the ends of an asparagus will be stringy no matter how much you steam it. So the preparation is really the same, the same kind of thoughtfulness that you look when you're looking for quality that you do when you're going into your grocery store.
You're looking for that same kind of quality in the plants that you're harvesting, the same methods of preparation. If you have a stem that's very harsh or, you know, pickery or whatever, that's not gonna usually change in the cooking.
And then many, many of the recipes, you know, basically all most of my wild food recipes, I just kind of adapt it from regular cookbooks. Right? I remember one of my favorites which is a wild herb casserole that I kind of designed when my kids were young because they love the wild greens, but they also they didn't want to just sit down and eat a big pot of nettle like I would with feta and olive oil and lemon. They wanted it to be look kinda normal and taste normal.
Right? Mhmm. So I saw this recipe on the front of Sunset Magazine. It was kinda like this giant pancake that was filled with peaches or something.
And I I read the recipe, and I thought, I could do this with my wild greens. And so that's the wild herb casserole that is so often seen in my books and stuff and it comes out like a big fluffy souffle.
And so I just adapted the recipe and occasionally it will have a flop, but so long as it's good enough to eat you can make it better the next time.
But I did want to mention a new book that is coming out. My good friend Dina Falcone has just written a book and it will be out in June. And it's called, To Forge and Deceit.
And I swear, she asked me to do the review for it and it's like, Oh my God, I started salivating. It has the best plant pictures in it. They are actually drawings but they are so incredibly botanically correct and beautiful.
And then Dina is a master at wild food cooking so we want to encourage people to keep an eye on that book, To Forage and to Feed, The Celebration of Life, by Dina Falcone.
And I'll surely interview her when that comes out. Too.
Oh yeah, it's really good. It's so good. I just want to mention this for all those young writers out there who are thinking of writing their first year book.
Dana did a startup on what's that what is that startup, when Oh, Kickstarter.
Kickstarter. And she sold over a hundred thousand dollars worth.
Yeah. I donated. Or not girl, or invested rather. Yeah.
I mean, it was just that we were all so thrilled for her. You know, it's a great book and that's partly why she did so well. But it's just great to know that everybody is out there helping one another to succeed.
So anyway, she is going to be feeding as well with the Forage and Defeat. So how I do this wild food casserole, I'm just going to quickly share it because it is very simple, and also because you can do any of the wild greens that we talked about with this. So I take a fourth of a cup of butter or olive oil and I put it in a six by ten baking pan, like one of those nice glass baking dishes.
And you turn your oven on to four twenty five.
And you put your pan with the butter in just to melt the butter. And then while that's melting, you are going to saute an onion. It can be a wild onion, cultivated onion. Saute until it's nice and brown, and then you take, you know, like four or five cups or more, if you're like me, you put more in, of your wild greens and you saute those all.
You want to clean them and make sure they're all chopped and nice. And it can be combinations. It can be just amaranth or lamb's quarter, mallow, nettle. Just saute it all nicely.
And then you're going to put that in the pan with the butter. And then in your blender, you would take a cup of milk or water if you don't like to use milk, or goat's milk, or soy milk, or whatever kind of milk you like.
And then four eggs.
And then I use about three fourths cup of a whole wheat pancake mix. You can use flour, but I usually use a pancake mix, an all natural one, because it has that natural leavening in it. It makes it really fluffy. And I just put that in the blender and I buzz it all together just for a couple minutes.
You can also be creative and add all kinds of seasonings to that. You can add just salt and pepper if you want, but you can add curry and Italian. And then you pour that over your steamed greens, and then put some grated cheese. The type of cheese you use will make a big difference.
So you can see this is really not for people who have cheese and milk allergies or bone and dairy. But that's what I said. It was designed for my kids and my family members for people in their first introduction to wild food foraging because you gave them a lot of herbs, but it was camouflaged.
And then and then you just bake it for thirty to forty five minutes like a souffle. You just put at that four twenty five degrees. And like a souffle, you put your knife in the center when it comes out clean. It's really a really delicious and beautiful dish with lots of creative possibilities.
And then the other method that you can use for making using lots of wild greens are the herb paste, pestos.
When we think of pesto, we usually think of that wonderful traditional pesto mix, you know, with basil. But pesto just basically means herb paste. And you can make medicinal blends. I mean, what a wonderful way to give medicine to somebody who has liver congestion or skin problems or even hormonal problems. You could formulate your herbs so long as you're using fresh green herbs and you can put them right in this paste. And then instead of having to take tablets or peas, you just eat this stuff. It's so good.
So usually, again, there's about for every person who makes a pesto, there is a recipe. It's one of those very creative things that I don't even think our grandmothers really even had a recipe. They just put olive oil, and they put garlic, and they blended that up to taste, and then they packed in their basil or whatever herbs they wanted. And they added some nuts, usually pine nuts and then parmesan. And that was the basic recipe. But people can get so creative with this. But my basic recipe is to use one to two cups of olive oil and around three cloves of garlic.
And then I like pine nuts, but I just want to put a warning out about pine nuts. Pine nuts are delicious. The one of the warnings is they're very expensive, So you have to I don't use pine nuts a lot in my pesto as much as I'd like. The other is that there is a cheaper pine nut that's on the market that's from China and it's actually very toxic. It's a non edible pine nut that should be highly avoided.
Anyway, you can use walnuts, or cashews, or almonds.
So then you just put about a half a cup of your nuts in there, and they can be combinations of nuts, and you blend till creamy. And then you add your paste, your herbs and you can use as I said just any of those herbal combinations. You can use mallow and you can use nettle amaranth and lamb's quarter, chickweed. Of course, each herb that you use is going to give a different flavor. But I forgot to mention the mustard, the garlic mustard, oh, how can I Any of the foods that we are speaking about, but specifically in the pesto they add a wonderful flavor?
And then you can make it even taste better by adding roughly a half a cup of grated Parmesan. And then you taste and you go, oh, it needs a little more garlic, it needs a little Greggs' Aminos. It needs a little maybe I need to blend some rosemary and thyme and sage and oregano. I love to use those herbs in there.
So so much creativity. And then of course, you could freeze it. I froze this is hard to believe I froze so much pesto last year that it's like I wish I could just give it away.
Robert and I have been eating pesto almost every day now, but it's just not You better watch it.
You're gonna have, droves of people driving up your driveway.
They can come. I want them to come. I'm so hungry to see I'm hungry for green plants, and I'm hungry for people.
Put my pesto on the people and invite them in.
Come on. Yeah.
Soups like you were saying, you've been eating lots of soups and the stir fries. But I just will say this last thing about bringing those wild foods into the kitchen is that this is the best medicine. It's what we eat and it's the way that people have eaten for literally generations.
Even when you introduce just a few of the wild greens into your daily foods, your body gets happy, you know, and it's a great thing to do if you have children to go out on an herb walk with them and to collect, you know, the dandelions and make sure that the gardens that you're collecting from of course aren't sprayed.
There's a little bit of things that you have to be mindful of. As I said, if you're not used to plant ID and you're not familiar with these plants, even these common wild plants, excuse me, these common weedy plants, then find an herb walk in your area or join us at one of these conferences. They're happening all over the country and you can learn so much.
So, John, do I have time to speak a little bit about remedies, or should I please?
Certainly, please.
Yeah. You know, every season, as you know, brings with it its own gifts and its own challenges. And, of course, bring the greatest gift as we feel alive again. You know, the long the long sun, the sunlight, you know, in the winter times here, the sun will set about four o'clock in the winter And we have long, long evenings. And so when spring comes and that sun is starting to brighten up the day and you can actually feel the tap rising in your in the trees around you and in your own blood even. So there's a vitality of spring for certain and just the very fact that winter is broken and we've like passed and we've like survived it. There's kind of the survival sense when winter passes.
And like many of you, I love winter with all my heart, but usually about a month ago I'm ready for it to be gone. I'm never ready for spring to be gone. It's always such a joyful time.
But it also brings with it its challenges. Often times people as they come into spring they are worn out and tired. The system feels sluggish, slowed down. There's often a lot of skin problems that happen and allergies. That's another thing we see. It's also the season when people often get sunburned because they've been out of the sun for so long, so there's a sensitivity with the skin.
Sometimes, usually we don't see so much depression and stuff in the spring as we do in the wintertime, because again with that return of the light people's cycles are being reset and it's almost like the sun brings joy with it. But there still is a residual depression that you still see that people sometimes will carry into the spring. So, and also because it's, again, it's a season of change. So the weather begins to really change, and it can be very fickle. So we can have one day here that we consider warm that might be sixty five and then the next day we have an ice storm again. And that kind of change is very challenging for people.
So there's a lot of immune issues that come up. So those are some of the things that we see happening in the springtime that are common, what I call kind of common spring and cyclic problems. And many of the plants that we talked about are those plants that we would use. So for instance, with any of the skin issues or the liver congestion, that would be seen with digestion.
If you're not digesting well, you get a lot of gas when you're eating or what they call the bowel transit, if you eat what goes through, it takes a long time. The joke is always you can eat your corn or eat your beets and you should see it the next morning. And if you don't, that means you have slow bowel transit. It's actually a really great way to tell, if you can't tell any other way.
But many of the herbs that we've been talking about are specific. They are the medicines that have been used, not surprisingly.
So making a good burdock or dandelion tea, the roots is what I would suggest, burdock root, a young fresh either second year roots that would be very well formed this time of year, it's a great time to dig it.
Your fresh dandelion roots, you can make a great tincture with that just chopping up those roots, cleaning them, processing them, chopping them up well, putting them in a quart jar, filling them up about halfway with the roots and the rest of the way with a good alcohol like a brandy, vodka or gin.
That's a really great way. If people have really sluggish digestion, you might want to add yellow dock root, a nice fresh young yellow dock that's coming up. It's again a perennial, that will be showing up right about now. And that root is really good for sluggish digestion and slow bowel transit.
Tonics, this is just a great time without thinking of medicine, but what they do is they help with the immune system, they help with that kind of worn out tired feeling that people often have as spring comes upon us. Those would again be some of the herbs that we mentioned, the nettle, the self heal, the plantain, definitely red clover. That's one of my favorite teas by the way, nettle, red clover, plantain and self heal. You mix that with a little mint. You can add a little fresh lemon juice and honey if you want to make it really delicious and drink several cups of that a day.
How long would you steep that for Rosemary?
Well, there are different thoughts on that.
If you want to make a really good strong tea, it's best to let it steep for at least an hour. I like to let my tea steep overnight actually whenever I can. I just usually use like an ounce, maybe a little bit more of that. I put it in a quart jar and pour boiling water over it, put a lid on tightly and let it sit overnight.
Just because you want to do when you make your infusions is you really want to draw out the vitamins and minerals and all that nice potency that's in the plant. But all of the plants that I just mentioned there are very, very highly water soluble. So even an hour you're going to get a good tea. For those people who are new to this, I would just suggest, you know, take the same plant, let one sit overnight in a court jar just the way I just described.
Make another one and then fuse it for an hour and see what you can see is the difference. That's the best way to learn. Try and experiment and really base and you'll you know depending on who you study and listen with you can get lots of opinions of how other people think things should be done. But one of the beautiful things about herbalism is that far more than a science, it's an art, or it's a living science is what I like to say.
It's not really defined so much by rules as it is by guidelines.
I I I see that a lot. A lot of people will wonder exactly how much of this should I use, exactly how much of this should I use, and and it's just like, well, you know, just to experiment and learn, and it takes time. You can't you can't mess up and, you know, if you stick to certain, you know, guidelines as you said, and and, that's the fun of it. Yeah.
It is fun. You know, there's just different minds just learn things differently. Like, my husband is very Virgo and he likes to have exactly nice things. He likes to know, you know. And I've learned that with my students, you know, like my very general way of saying, we just take a pinch of that you know, and use the parts method and they're looking at me and I can see their eyes kind of starting to spin in their heads and it's like, oh, that's when I asked like my friend Donna or Nancy who are much more, good with figures than I am and they just stepped in and they they can do that, you know. So that's the thing. There's just so many beautiful ways of working with plants.
That's what was so amazing when I was when we were filming Rosemary's Remedies last summer because, from from from you having books and having things labeled out, I thought you were more of an exact person.
But then here you are in the kitchen just throwing this together, throwing that together. And what was beautiful about it is you have these books that have these exactness, you know, for those folks. But in in those videos, you're also teaching people how to get in touch with their with their, you know, explorer inner explorer and and experimenter to, you know, kind of move from the books to just experimenting, and that was beautiful.
Well, you know, Joan, when I I had to learn to do that both as a teacher and also because of the formulators because early on in the days when I did my traditional blend, you know, I just get them by I knew just how much to put in there. I just knew it in myself and I was almost always right with it Like if I would take something and put it on the scale, I mean, I would be so close to being exactly at one ounce. It was almost magical. But when when I had to pass when I pass those formulas on, I had to put down the right formulas and working with numbers and figures is so hard for me.
I just don't have a mind for that at all. And so I had to have a scale and it was like, oh my God. But you know, so it's again, I just love the different ways that we can work with the plants and I honor all the ways it's fun. But definitely for me, I just go some place inside of me that knows those measurements and knows how to do it, without the figures and the numbers which I'm a little dyslexic so that dyslexia really shows up in numbers.
In fact, Robert is always correcting me. Something might be one hundred dollars and I go, look, it's ten dollars And he goes, we'll try adding a couple of zeroes Rosemary.
It's like, oh.
So yeah, yeah.
I did want to mention one other remedy that comes up a lot for people that's for us very seasonal thing is with allergies and hay fever. It really hits people pretty big time. We all have our favorite remedies.
For me I want to say that when I work with people who have allergies and hay fever, I try to work around the seasons with them, not just when the hay fever or allergy season is coming up because it's really has much more to do with how the whole system is working rather than just odors and allergen and my body is now overreacting. So if you can really pay attention to the immune system and balancing the body, strengthening the body through the seasons when the allergies aren't activated, you're going to have much better results. But I have seen a lot of people respond well to Reishi and Rhodiola.
There's very specific urge for the lungs and the bronchioles. Nettle is another one that people have a really good response to. But I've just seen over and over again when people are having they'll come to the mountain for classes, they'll start to get an allergy because there's a plant they're not familiar with, it's a new region for them. And I just give them a reishi and or rhodiola sometimes and it really just will knock it out within a few minutes. I won't say that works one hundred percent, but it's one of those eighty percent remedies that almost always works, enough to pass it on anyway.
Great.
Yeah.
So, so we've talked all about, various plants of spring, some recipe ideas, how simple it is to incorporate in diets.
We have talked about a few remedies to kind of transition people from winter to spring, and now I was wondering maybe getting in a little bit of into, maybe a little bit of, how people can kind of make that segue to their backyard and backyard herbalism and how that connects to a bigger picture.
Well, that's a great question because we were talking about all the backyard herbs. We didn't wander off the common path of backyard.
We didn't go into the more specific habitats and stuff where we have those native species.
And we tend to think of most of those that we were speaking of as our backyard as our backyard or as our native plants here. But in fact most of those plants were brought over here by the early settlers and some of them by not so much the early settlers, they're more recent introductions. Many of the plants that we've commonly used in our Materia Medica were introduced here, were introduced to us. So I always like to start off by saying that I'm definitely a backyard herbalist. I love and believe that what we have around us is our medicine and we need to know it because if we can't get off the hill, if we can't get into town, if there comes a time when we have to really depend on our own community for our health and well-being, we can. So there is so much truth in that. But I'd also like to point out that we are a global community and that ever since the very beginning, hundreds of years ago, plant lovers traveled around trading herbs, learning from one another, it was never isolated.
Even the bush people, they traded where our native people in this country, they would travel to different parts of the country and trade the herbs and trade their shells and trade their knowledge. So that has been going on since forever. So it's a limit what we know and our ability to reach out is kind of silly I think actually. And even in American Herbalism, one of the things I love about it the most is it's very eclectic.
It borrows from the best of the traditions around the world. Our Western tradition is based on the North American plants, but also European plants, Ayurvedic plants from India, plants from China. There is a very eclectic body of information that American Western herbalists embrace. It's unique in the world and it's actually one of the things that I think is one of the best things about our medicine.
And that's one of the things that I've really tried to foster is that we've created a very strong community, a regional, bioregional community. It started back in the 1960s by small classes that happened around the country by the small gatherings that started happening in our backyards, and that spread out and grew. And to this point in this country, like all across this country now, we can find these amazing green events. They're miraculous actually.
Because not even forty years ago, you could not have a conference and expect anybody to show up. They would have just looked at you like you're nuts.
Right.
You know, herbalism was so completely underground, like in the mid nineteen 60s, even up until the late nineteen 60s when it slowly started to emerge and blossom.
So we really fostered a beautiful community here, and we fostered some very amazing concepts about backyard herbalism and bioregional herbalism, pardon me, and also even about plant conservation and plant awareness, that's new. We've really helped to plant a global seed with our awareness of these plants and you know and their health and their demise.
But one of the things that we haven't, it's not that we haven't done it because we're in the process of doing it, It's reaching out and really learning and spreading and creating a global family. And partly why we want to do that and partly why we've created this event to do that, the International Earth Symposium, is because it fosters awareness. You know, it's how we learn. We learn by exchanging ideas with people who have different ideas than we do.
Like Like one of the things I get worried about is when I talk today, mostly I'm talking to people who I've talked to before, they know what I'm talking about or they believe what I'm talking about. It's their roots too mostly.
And so there's not a lot of exchange of ideas. But when I'm talking to people who have a very different belief system than I do or also very different set of plants that they use, or they are coming from a whole different mindset like they are very scientific or they are very politically different than I might be. I learn so much. I love and engage in those kinds of conversations. It's where we spark and where ideas kind of fly. And so in part, that's what we tried to do at this event at the International Earth Symposium. And it's brilliant because it brings herbalists together from all different walks from the shaman, the folklore, the community herbalists, the bioregional herbalists, the community practitioner to the scientist, to the person who speaks in, you know, the chemical terms.
So this whole gamut and it does it in a very honoring way and also bringing people from around the world. Now we are still very strong in our North American presence there because it's held here. But there's usually about thirteen other countries that are represented and every year our international participants get more. So, our hope is at some point we can every year have people from all around the world represented in the classes, but a lot of it is the funding that cost a lot of money.
You know something I realized Rosemary was, my first time I went to a conference and, I was kind of blown away because I, there was all these teachers, all these people who knew so much about herbs and I was just kind of a beginner starting out. But whatever happens, whenever one of these I've been to and so many of them, they're always so welcoming and inclusive.
Even beginners, you you like, even my first time I went when I do just trying to figure out how to make a tincture, I felt like I was part of that community. Like, I felt like I was welcomed.
And something like the International Herb Symposium can sound big, can sound can sound like it's, maybe not for everyone, even listening, even someone who's who's just like, oh, you know, I do what's the right way to make a tea or whatever? But the thing is, the reality is for all experience levels and you're gonna just feel this like, oh, wow, these people are like me and just knowing that strengthens you inside and strengthens your path and you know and and and I think it's just wonderful for that.
Thank you, Joe. Well, I think that's the thing I love the most about going to these events and I would say that that very warm welcoming positive embracing feeling that you were thinking that I've had every event I've ever gone to. I've never been to an urban event where I just didn't feel the sincerity and warmth and kindness of the people and it's one of the things I love about my work so much. I mean obviously I'm impassioned by plants.
I'm impassioned by this opportunity to be, preserve the plants in my lifetime this time. But as much I love the plants, I love people who love plants. I mean to me they're like kind of the cream of the crop. They're one of those groups of human beings that are I mean, there's just cranky ones, there's mean ones, there's all of that.
But mostly, there's these wonderful people who are, you know, sincere about wanting to bring goodness to this earth again, you know, to really feed the goodness to, to feed that light that life on this earth, you know, so it's, I think coming to them even just for the fun. I mean, they're all so much fun. There's surf walks and dancing and henna and, you know, and there's all kinds of hands on activities, mask making and, you know, it's joyful. I mean, so it's fun for that and then you go and you learn all this great stuff and then and then you're dancing, like, you know, till one in the morning at this big fall.
And then and Rosemary will share her special brew that night. I'm not gonna say any more than that.
I'm not saying any more than that.
Yeah. We make up twenty five gallons of, cottage high tea. It's pretty amazing.
You know? And, you know, it's brewed. We cook it actually in the Central Vermont Hospital. It's actually it's actually, it's just so amazing, the whole thing. It's pretty awesome.
Now now for this for the eleventh, who are, just off top of your head, some of the, speakers you're having from?
Well, we have a bunch of new ones this time. One of the things I really am trying to do is to, which I try to do all the time but I'm making a conscious effort, is trying to bring in new teachers. Some of our old favorites of course, because you just got to see David Hoffman or Rocia Alcorn for Ecuador, and Ann McIntyre from England, Matthew Wood and David Winston, those are some of our and Susan Weed and Deb Sol and the list goes on, Pam Montgomery. Those are some of our fabulous favorites. But I also again, it's exposure to new. And so, some of the new ones that we have coming in are Doctor. Dalla Rydeck, he's a Tibetan doctor and healer and Patrice de Bonbell, who is one of France's most well known herbalists and Michelle Lyons is extremely well known in Ireland as a practitioner.
Julia Graves, who is from Germany, she taught at the last one.
Some of our young herbalists, some of our shining stars like Guido Massey who I must say who I've actually, he is from Italy and has taught here in the United States for many years. I've actually highlighted him a number of years because he's just so brilliant and young. I'm trying to bring some of these young herbalists, they're also really like I consider the old masters. Phyllis Light who is the Appalachian herbalist who represents that Appalachian tradition and a woman from Iceland, I can't really say her name, because it's Anna Rosendorfstein from Ireland.
That's good.
Yeah. Doctor Vee Jen from China. The other thing that's really exciting is we also have a veterinary holistic veterinarian track for veterinarians and animal lovers that's all taught by holistic veterinarians who want to bring the green energy to the larger, to the larger veterinarian community. So there's a whole list of wonderful, wonderful veterinarian practitioners who will be there.
It's pretty amazing. It really definitely is a grand event. It's, you know, like I know sometimes it's overwhelming for people, but it's it's there are people who have come back every single year.
I I I was amazed, my the first time I went through that and, how approachable everyone is. Like, you think, like, oh, because because, you know you have these books of these people that are like your herbal rock stars.
They're so funny.
And then for you know and then just like it's kind of hanging out you know and it's it's so you know it's so easy to to approach and talk to people and you know ask some questions or just introduce yourself and I I was you know, and in a way that openness in the herbal community really led the way to, you know, what we've been able to do at Learning Herbs and and, because everyone's so, you know, been so welcoming and open. So Rosemary Gladstar, thank you so much for joining us tonight. That was an incredible honor. Incredible honor. I just the love I I had such a good time last summer at Sage Mountain. It's great to reconnect here.
It's so fun, really. And thank you for all the listeners.
It's really lovely. I wish you could all come up and we could go for an herb walk and then have some fresh nettle pesto and then red clover and nettle and plantain tea, but you're always welcome.
I forgot to mention too for Rosemary at sagemountain dot com, correct?
Yes.
And and, to check out Rosemary's site and all the things she's got going on.
Absolutely.
So thank you. And, again, the International Herbs Symposium, June twenty eighth through the thirtieth two thousand thirteen at international herbs symposium dot com.
See you next time.
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